Tuesday, September 25, 2007

pearls they is

scratching the
itch. afterburner
bugaboo,
stereo
pandas in the chapel of
love. go for the chis-

me
. I am
doffed, put off, aspi-
rated. I have
no doom to
share. I wouldn’t anyway,
in this Nestle’s Crunch

of avi-
ary brotherhood.
sisters, you
say? sisters
be jammin’: Marley, Tosh, Itz-
hak on the box. pearls

they is, pearls
they was, increments
of Toto.
we are all
taco dogs, rodent brothers
of the sisterfish,

sisterlings,
sister pooch, sister
moons. we weave,
we loom, we
dream in lunar color, we
so down with the fish.

[The assignment for the urchins was a shadorma, a syllabic poem, six lines per stanza, with this stanzaic pattern: 3/5/3/3/7/5.]

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2 Comments:

Blogger San said...

You've got a nice rhythm going here, Murat11. (What's the origin of that moniker, may I ask?) Working within the form seems to have made you make connections between unexpected images. It's nice that certain of those images recur--what's going on with the fish/bird/dog thing, for example.

The passage that's the strongest for me, what I wanted to read a few times over:
"...me. I am
doffed, put off, aspi-
rated. I have
no doom to
share. I wouldn't anyway..."
At first I was bothered by splitting "chis-me" into two lines, but I realize you probably wanted that "me" beside the "I." That passage in particular makes me think of John Berryman's Dream Songs.

And who are the urchins in question?

1:40 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

San: Thanks much for the visit and your read on the poem. Murat11: my middle name, my birth month. The urchins are my middle and upper school English students.

As anarchistic as my poetic impulses seem to be, I'm also fairly addicted to certain forms: I once wrote a chapbook of 25 poems that all followed the left margin acrostic of "sticky dark wildflower honey." The shadorma was a new discovery: I had a lot of fun playing with it.

This may be a total misrepresentation of the man, but the "making" of my poems parallels my sense of Pollock's action paintings. Most of the poems come out in about 5 minutes time (heresy, I know, to many "real" poets), with very little revision. I like your call on the "chis-me" line break, but in truth, I was breaking willfully in line with the shadorma pattern. These damn things come fast and furious, with very little forethought, though I love (am addicted to) the rhythm of repetitions.

I LOVE (did I say love? I LOVE) Berryman's Dream Songs. I use them all the time in my classes: they blow my students away.

5:24 PM  

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