KateMcCarrollMoore

EPITHALAMIUM: Visit the engagement or wedding announcements section of your newspaper and select a couple. Today’s paper yielded none, but there was a lovely story of a nearly 60 year union of Rudy and Lily Tenes. I chose them. Their story was much happier than the resulting poem.

Destiny?

Trust tested, turned dull

Unrest endured

Listened, stunned

Un-nested

Trust turns rusty,

Deny, deny, denied

Tired, tense, unruly

Resisted

Resented

Relentless

Suddenly silent inside

Tender is Untenderness

True is sullied, untrue

Less results in less ‘n less

True test resisted entry

Turn, turn, turn

Rudderless

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 13, 2014. (The Lady and the Bullfighter: A Love Story, Rudy and Lily Tenes)

Write a sonnet sourced from lines found in newspaper articles. (I took liberties with the form – 12 lines for day 12, ababb, ababb, cc)

Life Design

Smoky-mirror, fleeting pretty, humbling sensation

Spaces, ugly, ill-defined, build boring boundaries

Glimpsing perhaps smugness, perhaps solution

Turn, then and focus on the what of what could be

Different angles open artful possibilities.

Odd landings, obstacles, declare the situation

Narrow life becomes no vision, no inspired entry

Gear up, console, project, design mosaic renovation

Ride vast change right along, reverberating to be, to be

Wasted spaces, closed spaces, must become opportunities.

Bury unfamiliar darker years, add a new interior

Cover dreary ugly view, paint today’s new now in color.

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 12, 2014. (From Lemons to Lemonade, Marni Jameson)

Univocalism: A univocalic text is one written with a single vowel. 

YET

When we see where

These extreme events be kept

There’s few between them,

Few been there yet

Severe trends be key

Whether wet be wetter,

Here, ten degrees west

Even the end, see we

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 11, 2014 (‘Great wet hope’ could pull state out of drought, Paul Rogers)

Snowball: This procedure requires the first word of a text to have only one letter, the second two, the third three, and so on as far as resourcefulness and inspiration allow.

Bombardier

9

On

One

Wild

Train

Public

Transit

Stations

Scheduled

Accessible,

Constructed,

Conditioning,

Manufacturing…

Transportation

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 10, 2014 (BART’s model for new train cars going on a Bay Area tour, Dennis Cuff)

Beautiful In-law (Beau Present) Select a name from one of your newspaper articles, famous or not. Compose a poem using only words that can be made from the letters in that person’s name. Lorenzo Alexander, philanthropic footballer, inspired me!

Lone Daze

Now, a new dawn

Read

Redo

Read

Redo

Alone, a new dawn –

Relax

No dread

Doze on

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 8, 2014

N + 7: Select a passage from one of your newspaper articles. Replace each noun the passage with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary.After I substituted the nouns I moved the words around until I was satisfied – it’s pretty nonsensical, but at least it seems syntactically correct. (Plus I learned some new vocabulary!)

Pearl Grissaille

He was the inchoation of the showdown

a shameless hamlet and hooligan

big and constant

singing, dancing, and wisecracking

in his blond hairdressing…

Liftoff,

his onlooker could imagine

a motorboat, a cricket at the millstream

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 7, 2014 (Mickey Rooney, legend of the screen, dies at 93.)

Blank Verse Among the Prose: Compose a poem using unintentional lines of iambic pentameter found in your newspaper.

BROKEN STORYLINES LITTER SPORTS PAGES

You can’t simulate the actual game

I was completely obsessed as a kid

The Huskies proved they could do it again

A top four-seed was the presumed next step

Graceful in flight, but clumsy on the ground

They watched the ball rattle in for the lead

He’s strong enough; he’s not overswinging

It’s hard enough to score runs in this game

The trio took first place in the contest

Jiu jitsu has a lot of strategy

The golfers went off both tees in threesomes

A format they’ll use again Sunday

She said it’s not like any other sport

When she is shooting the ball well, you can’t

You can’t simulate the actual game

I was completely obsessed as a kid

Sourced from The Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 6, 2014

Tautogram: Compose a poem whose words — or at least the principal ones — all begin with the same letter. The words must be sourced from your newspaper.

Posing

Private people pinpoint proof:

pathways posing as public prospects

plead for participation

personal prison

Is pass- protected

Planting proper pain

Sourced from Contra Costa Times, Bay Area New Group, April 5, 2014

In a Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two terms immediately preceding it; typically with 1 as the first term: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on.

Select an article from your newspaper and create a poem using the words that correspond with the numbers in the sequence. Your poem will take the form of first word, first word, second word, third word, fifth word, eighth word, thirteenth word, etc. You can continue until you’ve run out of words in your article or until you’re happy with the poem’s conclusion.

I was mourning all the lovely words I was passing over in order to comply with the rules. Nothing satisfied, so I chose 2 articles,  arranged my Fibonacci sequences side -by-side and let them harmonize.

A                                             close, close look at

oppression

a decade before

colossal                                night

buried

officials                                 be, with, for

protect                                 elsewhere

remove                               premier sounds

miles                                     into her

Sourced from Contra Costa Times, Bay Area News Group, April 4, 2014

Two articles harmonizing: Close Look at Soviet Oppression, Ann Murphy

County Considered Buying Homes in Slide Area, Phuong Lee