Mad Lib Poetry

Today I offer an interactive activity!  One of the things that continues to amaze me about the poems I admire most is the precision of word choice.  As I child I loved playing Mad Libs during every road trip, so I decided to replicate the fun game with some of Robert Frost's most well-known poems.

The point of this word game is not to mock or parody Frost's poetry, but rather to demonstrate how easily the poem's entire meaning can be changed by replacing his nouns for others.  

I chose, "Mending Wall" and "The Road Not Taken". 

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost from The Norton Anthology of American Literature (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2003.  Sixth edition), p. 1880-1881 and p. 1887.

I identified parts of speech in the first 11 lines of "Mending Wall" and the first stanza of "The Road Not Taken", and I asked friends and family to give me the first word that came to mind for the following parts of speech without telling them what poem their choices would become a part of. 

Mending Wall:

Noun:
Verb in the third person present tense:
Group of people (ex: hunters, Americans, etc...):
Object pronoun (him, her, them):
Animal:
Time of year (season, month, time around a particular holiday, etc...):

The Road Not Taken:

Plural noun:
Infinitive verb:
Singular person (hunter, doctor, etc):
Adverb:
Preposition:
Location:

Please feel free to add your own in the comments section!

Pronouns

Today I want to share Dunya Mikhail's poem, "Pronouns" from The War Works Hard (p. 75, A New Directions Book, 2005.  Translated by: Elizabeth Winslow).

Pronouns

by Dunya Mikhail

He plays a train.

She plays a whistle.

They move away.

He plays a rope.

She plays a tree.

They swing.

He plays a dream.

She plays a feather.

They fly.

He plays a general.

She plays people.

They declare war.

The progression of each strophe is dialectical.  While the first two lines of each strophe are not in opposition to each other (as would be a thesis/antithesis), there is a tension or incompatibility evident in their relationship that is ultimately resolved by the final line of each strophe (synthesis).  The last line of each stanza depends upon the first two: e.g., without a rope and a tree they could not swing, without a feather and a dream they could not fly.  

I love the formula of this poem: 

He plays ________.

She plays _______. 

They ___________.

The synthesis occurs not only in the material that fills in the blanks, but also most explicitly in the pronouns.  The pronouns follow a much more conventional dialectic: "he" and "she" are in opposition, and "they" appropriately synthesizes the two preserving the plurality while negating the gender and individuality of "he" and "she".  

Four strophes is convincing without being overly repetitive.  If the poem were to continue with this pattern for much longer, its point would become belabored and less compelling.  As is, the poem progresses in its verbs from "move away" to "swing" to "fly" to "declare war".  The poem itself moves from the whimsical and lighthearted world of whistles, trains, and swings to the resolute declaration of war.  The quick progression mirrors the haste that often dictates war. 

The repetitive pronoun/verb construction demonstrates the routinization of warfare and the ease of warfare to exist simultaneously against banal, innocent activities of play.

Finally, the choice of the verb "play" as the consistent verb throughout is a distinct determinant of the poem's meaning.  The OED lists thirty two distinct (with subpointed variants) definitions of the verb play.  It is defined by everything from movement ("move away") to fly, and is definitionally interpreted in a way that warrants each of the poems' unique uses.  

Evoking the imagery of "play" in relation to warfare, makes an interesting argument about war as a game or a simulation.  The relationship between a general and the people demonstrates the capacity of one man to mobilize an entire people toward warfare on a whim.  This poem expresses the injustice that war is instigated under seemingly capricious, playful behavior yet exacts consequences incompatible with "play" -- death, destruction, etc.  

A couple of posts ago I wrote about my own relationship to poetry.  Now that I'm home and memories are canvassed around me, I decided my next couple of posts would be an appropriate forum to reflect upon how I arrived at my current fascination with poetry.  

First semester of my sophomore year in high school, I stumbled clumsily around the dark room trying to create something meaningful in black and white. Photography was fun. I enjoyed composing photos, but I felt an extreme disconnect between myself, my camera, and the ultimate image these wonder chemicals produced. I hesitate to say I quit, but I temporarily retired my Nikon and adopted pen and paper as I enrolled in creative writing, which I quickly became immersed in for the rest of high school.

My school’s creative writing curriculum rotated thematically every year, moving in cycles from play writing/screenwriting, to nonfiction, to fiction, to poetry. As I dove in second semester, day one I was assigned to write a poem. I came home eager to write, but immediately grew frustrated by the cursor aggressively flashing against the stark white of my word processor. Writing had always flowed from my fingertips, but suddenly with the challenge of poetry I was obsessively self-editing. No more than twelve characters made it onto the page before they were quickly erased with the staccato press of rapid backspacing. This was my first serious attempt at art that required no materials I did not already innately possess. Simultaneous feelings of horror and exhilaration arose knowing my finished product would not depend on film, paintbrushes, or popsicle sticks. My creativity was my only instrument, and I felt like mine was out of tune and missing some strings.

My first written, artistic attempt was okay – perhaps better in idea than execution. I wrote what I then thought to be an edgy list poem, “23 Last Suppers” chronicling the imaginary last suppers of the twenty-three prisoners executed the previous year under the Texas death penalty. My relationship to poetry had evolved past my three cherished volumes of Shel Silverstein, but still read like a greatest works anthology filled with William Carlos Williams’ apologies for eaten plums and Rupert Brooke’s nationalist fervor. Writing poetry taught me the tools I needed to be a more critical reader. At first, I seldom looked to professional examples, but I learned valuable lessons from the work of my peers. Familiar with a whole new vocabulary of techniques and styles – pantoum, slant rhyme, anaphora – my first significant opportunity to engage poetry came in my Spanish literature class. Reading Bécquer and Neruda, I realized the extent to which poems lend themselves to intellectual play in interpretation.  This tale is to be continued, but in the interim, I'll share the aforementioned poem:

Twenty-Three Last Suppers

God is good, God is great, and we thank
Him for this food we eat.
Food characterizes life…

A gallon of pistachio ice cream,
Plump and juicy hot dogs,
A deliciously roasted turkey leg,
Four greasy fried empanadas,
A savory sirloin steak,
Twelve jumbo Big Macs,
Thirty-two sticky vegetable dumplings,
A decadent chocolate cake,
Helpings of handmade spinach ravioli,
Rich cheese enchiladas and refried beans,
One box of Hostess Ding Dongs,
A pint of creamy New England clam chowder,
A scrumptious serving of chicken cordon bleu,
Eleven slices of pumpkin pie,
Exquisite prime rib,
Half a dozen freshly baked sesame bagels,
Sixty-four ounces of wiggly blueberry Jello,
Three bowls of sweet Lucky Charms,
Lamb chops with mashed potatoes,
A short stack of gingerbread pancakes,
An enormous Cesar salad,
One quiche Loraine,
Chicken nuggets and French fries.

…The glorified final meal characterizes death.
And now you lay me down to sleep. If I should die
before I wake, I pray to you my soul to keep.


Texas catered to the dining wishes of its twenty-three
citizens executed in 2004.
The Lone Star State single-handedly prepared an
overwhelming forty percent of all Last Suppers
for the entire country. 

Homeward Bound!

After a long four months of school, tomorrow afternoon I am headed home and could not be happier. For your listening enjoyment I recommend Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound", and for your poetry enjoyment I share Es'kia Mphahlele's "Homeward Bound".

Mphahlele was born in South Africa in 1919 and applied for a permit to leave his country permanently in the mid 1950s before entering into exile in 1957. He lived all over the world before deciding to return to South Africa in 1978.

While its perhaps insensitive to compare my own excitement about going home for Thanksgiving with the much more complicated emotions of a patriot in exile returning to his homeland, I think both create an opportunity to interrogate our own relationships with "home" and the relationship we perceive others to hold with their own homes.

Also, as the holidays approach I invite you to keep all those who for whatever reason cannot return home: remember refuges, soldiers, alienated families.  I hope everyone finds peace in a feeling of "home" that brings the same comfort and happiness as would a physical presence.  

I read Mphahlele's poem as a profound gesture of acceptance; he distinguishes between expectations and reality and accepts the imperfections of his homeland.  His emphasis on topography (mountains) seems to reveal a preoccupation with the surface compared to what lies below and behind the surface (e.g., the sky as a permanent yet changing background for the mountainscapes and the emphasis on imagery of light).  The speaker seems to have reached a peace with his "home" by the poem's resolution, "you need not look just the way I want".

Homeward Bound

by Es'kia Mphahlele

The mountains that I like

and do not fear

don't stoop over me

like giant apes marooned

on a patch of Time;

they are the forms beyond,

holding down

the edge of blue

and etching with a light

of ever-changing tints;

--they can look the way I want them.

I do not like the lights

that come at me

and stab and flail

and blind the eyes of night

that bounce and cling on tarmac;

those shimmering faraway bodies

softly throbbing

tell me and love

that coffee's on the boil,

she's listening to my footsteps;

--they can look the way I want them.

But you beside me here--

the contours of

your mountainscape

lead me to sniff at the corners

of your passion and sprawl

in the light and shade of your valleys

reminding me clearly

distant sights

can easily become

explosions of a mood;

so let us ride along 

through dewy midnights

dewy dawns

and tumble gently into

disemboweled noontides;

--you need not look just the way I want.

Mphahlele, Es'kia. "Homeward Bound." Against Forgetting : Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Ed. Carolyn Forche. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1993. 718-19.

Poetry and the Self

I am growingly attracted to autobiographical poetry.  Poems like Nazim Hikmet's "Autobiography" and Adam Zagajewski's "Self-Portrait" are so richly personalized, the specificity of their accounts conveys a creative ownership over experience that inspires me greatly.  I have reached an impasse in my own writing: I am eager to create poetry, yet can't get past a few lines that I self-edit incessantly.  My insecurity stems from questions of entitlement and experience.  I have always been told to write what I know, but find I know a few verses (occasionally a stanza) for a poem about any experience or observation and am unable to reach closure with any attempt.

This creative muzzle is entirely self-imposed, and I know it is entirely up to me to remove.  My desire to create something meaningful is paralyzed by my own feelings of inadequate content, but reading poems like the two mentioned above encourage me that the sum of experiences that are wholly and fully mine can yield poems that are extremely instructive for broader audiences. 

While my creative standstill leaves me in no place to instruct the creative process of others, I find "Autobiography" and "Self-Portrait" extremely encouraging that we ALL have the content and material to create, share, and recreate our own experiences in forms that are not purely self-indulgent.  

Autobiography

by Nazim Hikmet

I was born in 1902

I never once went back to my birthplace

I don't like to turn back

at three I served as a pasha's grandson in Aleppo

at nineteen as a student at Moscow Communist University

at forty-nine I was back in Moscow as a guest of the Tcheka

       Party

and I've been a poet since I was fourteen

some people know all about plants some about fish

        I know separation

some people know the names of the stars by heart

I recite absences

I've slept in prisons and in grand hotels

I've known hunger even a hunger strike and there's almost no

food I haven't tasted

at thirty they wanted to hang me

at forty-eight to give me the Peace Medal

which they did

at thirty-six I covered four square meters of concrete in

half a year

at fifty-nine I flew from Prague to Havana in eighteen hours

I never saw Lenin I stood watch at his coffin in '24

in '61 the tomb that I visit in his books

they tried to tear me away from my party

it didn't work

nor was I crushed under falling idols

in '51 I sailed with a young friend into the teeth of death

in '52 I spent four months flat on my back with a broken 

heart waiting for death

I was jealous of the women I loved

I didn't envy Charlie Chaplin one bit

I deceived my women

I never talked behind my friends' backs

I drank but not every day

I earned my bread money honestly what happiness

out of embarrassment for another I lied

I lied so as not to hurt someone else

but I also lied for no reason at all

I've ridden in trains planes and cars

most people don't get the chance

I went to the opera

most people can't go they haven't even heard of

the opera

and since '21 I haven't been tot he places that most people

visit

mosques churches temples synagogues sorcerers

but I've had my coffee ground read

my writings are published in thirty forty languages

in my Turkey in my Turkish they're banned

cancer hasn't caught up with me yet

and nothings ays that it has to

I'll never e a prime minister or anything like that

and I'm not interested in such a life

nor did I go to war

or burrow in bomb shelters in the bottom of the night

and I never had to take to the roads under driving planes

but I fell in love at close to sixty

in short comrades

even if today in Berlin I'm croaking of grief

I can say that I've lived like a human being

and who knows

how much longer I'll live

what else will happen to me.

This autobiography was written in East Berlin 

on September 11th in the year 1961.

Self-Portrait

by Adam Zagajewski

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter

half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers--but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife's face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don't know.
I'm truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that--so far--
belongs to me.

“Self-Portrait” from Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski, translated from Polish by Claire Cavanaugh. Translation copyright © 1997 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15866

American History

The National Museum of American History reopens tomorrow (21 November) as Americans hopefully anticipate the conclusion of a dark chapter of American history.  President Bush spoke at the dedication of the new and improved museum yesterday, praising the patriotism and educational value of the institution.  Soon, his administration will be a series of artifacts chronicled on the walls of museums and in the pages of history books.  

How would you curate an exhibit documenting the last eight years of America?  How and what should we remember?  Which details need be incorporated into our national biography?

How will our recent history be retold internationally?  With wide-spread international support for our President-Elect, how will this narrative change?

As we continue to process these and other questions of national identity, I offer international insight in Pablo Neruda's constructively critical poem on America's foreign conduct and responsibilities.

America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope

America, I do not cal your name without hope.

When I hold the sword against the heart,

when I live with the faulty roof in the soul,

when one of your new days

pierces me coming through the windows,

I am and I stand in the light that produces me,

I live in the darkness which makes me what I am,

I sleep and awake in your fundamental sunrise:

as mild as the grapes, and as terrible,

carrier of sugar and the whip,

soaked in the sperm of your species,

nursed on the blood of your inheritance. 

"America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope", Pablo Neruda as translated by Robert Bly.  As appears in Carolyn Forché's Against Forgetting (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1993).

Photo via DCist 11/20 post: "National Museum of American History Reopens Tomorrow".

“Whims” and Finding Presence in the Present

Khaled Mattawa’s translation of Saadi Youssef’s “Whims” engages distinct styles of temporal organization that offer diverse readings of the past, present, and future both within and beyond the poem. Multiple interpretations of time are at work at any given locus in the poem, each competing for authority. The interplay of tense, word choice, chronology, and organization constructs time within the boundaries of the past and future, ultimately culminating in a vehement affirmation of the present.

No formal introduction of the measures of time is introduced until the third strophe with “days” (18) and “months” (19) and finally “today” (22) and “tonight” (25) in the fourth; yet, the poem’s tense and progression from numbered chapter to numbered chapter quickly introduces its temporal concerns. The first three chapters are written in the past: preterite and pluperfect. While the content is stuck in the past (“he wanted” (1), “she was told” (16)) its retelling depends upon the future jumps from chapter to chapter. The reader is forced to look ahead into the future of the poem to further understand this past narrative. This anticipation of the past exists most explicitly in the ellipses at the end of the first strophe, as the past will only be understood completely through the progression of the poem.

Two more occult calls to move forward appear in the use of the infinitive and the conditional. The repetition of the infinitives: “to ask her, to slap her, or to offer himself to shield” (2-3) present tense-less possibilities, which demonstrate the necessity to read on to resolve their appropriate tense. Furthermore, the infinitive in and of itself represents a grammatical turn to the infinite, which can only be realized in the future. The use of the conditional in the second strophe—“his world would have rained” (9), “his eyes would have closed” (11)—emphasizes the past is in fact a “condition” of its future retelling.

Aurally, “Whims” is peppered with “d” sounds. The strong “d” sound occurs most frequently in the morpheme, “-ed”, as a suffix of a verb to convey past tense, this familiar aural association with the past is repeated again and again in different parts of speech. In the first three chapters: “wanted”, “middle”, “shield”, “wondrous”, “forehead”, “walked”, “remained”, “word” (four times), “world”, “would” (twice), “rained”, “closed”, “told”, “had”, “arrived”, “passed”, “days”, “waited” (twice), “disappeared” accost the reader with “d” sounds over and over. There is a clever combination of associations here: in addition to the aforementioned association with the past, the emphasis of repetition gestures toward the future as the reader grows to expect the “d” sound.

Finally in the last chapter of the poem, the speaker shifts to the present tense: “I laugh” (22), “I write” (22), “I say” (23). In the entire strophe there is only one “d” sound, and that is in “today” (22). “Today” is important for a number of reasons. First, “today” is entirely present and the meaning of the word overwhelms the association of the “d” sound with the past. Furthermore, “today” terminates “d” sounds for the rest of the poem, which explicitly rejects the repetition that gestures toward the future.

The final chapter represents a duality of time. Its dominant stylistic differences—present tense, first person—differentiate it from the previous three chapters, yet it simultaneously responds to and depends on them. In asking what he writes tonight, the answer inevitably takes the form of the first three chapters. I initially questioned the chronology of the chapters. Why does chapter four not inspire the poem? Why do the first three chapters not follow as a response? I found my answer in the poem’s title: “Whims”. I read the first three chapters as the product of a sudden, unexplained desire to write, to create. I find support for this overwhelming passion for the word in the praise of the second strophe and in the only aberration to the past tense, third person construction. These words ring like a chorus: “O word he loves,/O single word./All my life is a single word./O single hope. (12-15). This celebratory disruption resonates as a tribute to the poetic process, an overwhelming gratitude for the speaker’s ability to write; and the stylistic shift introduces the affirmation of the present confirmed in the poem’s resolution.

The poem concludes immersed in the present, and the speaker’s shift to the personal pronoun “I” evidences an ownership over the present moment. “I laugh” (22) supports the whimsy suggested by the title, while conveying an enthusiastic embrace of the present. While there is a temporary shift to the third person in the spoken text: “I say: ‘Saadi,/my reasonable sir,/what are you writing tonight’” (23-25), I read a self-referential confidence substantiated by his naming and the complimentary description of a “reasonable sir” (24). Coupled together, the two demonstrate a respect that asserts the speaker’s subjectivity in a way that lends legitimacy to his personal affirmation of the present. Appropriately, this is the only poem in the collection that is both dated and time stamped: Basra, 15/3/1961, 1:20 AM.

Youssef, Saadi. Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems. Trans. Khaled Mattawa.
New York: Graywolf P, 2002. 18-19.