Day Sixteen Click for full post
Today’s featured participant is Kyle M. Bondo, who penned an ode to his inherited inability to send back poorly-made restaurant food in response to our prompt for Day 15.
Our featured reading for the day is another pre-recorded one … a 2008 reading by the poet Ted Kooser, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Delights and Shadows.
Prompt: … rather silly form called Skeltonic, or tumbling, verse. In this form, there’s no specific number of syllables per line, but each line should be short, and should aim to have two or three stressed syllables. And the lines should rhyme. You just rhyme the same sound until you get tired of it, and then move on to another sound. Here’s a short example I came up with.
A toad beneath a log
Cares not for storm or fog.
He’s not a bee or frog
Or a naïve polliwog.
No! He’s wise and bumpy.
His skin is thick and lumpy.
He doesn’t work for money.
And his disposition’s sunny.
Happy writing!
PROCESS NOTES:
I liked the concept/habit of Kyle’s poem – it is one many of us struggle with and also made me consider non-physical habits my parents had that I may have picked up (which is not a route I had imagined).
She would either eat around the problem,
I would love to have to courage to refuse it,
But I’m a son enslaved by my mother’s habit.
Thanks to an earlier NaPo reading (Donald Hall), I knew who Ted Kooser was. Relieved it is a pre-recorded event as the weekend diary is packed with online events, I watched the 2005 reading.
U.S. Poet Laureate (2004-2006) Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the award-winning author of ten collections of poetry, most recently 2004’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Delights and Shadows. Nebraskan Kooser often draws from his native Great Plains and his poems are acclaimed for their simple, straightforward style. Kooser reads from his poetry before a standing-room only audience in Campbell Hall at UC Santa Barbara. [8/2005] [Humanities] [Arts and Music]
Loved Ted’s Hobbit story, the letters from children comments made me smile. Ted’s humility is clear and it was an entertaining intro. Many of his poems carry his humour. A wonderfully engaging reading and a great meeting of this poet. Student was brilliant. Splitting an Order – his valentine poem (and the 700 women on his list)… other times incredible powerful At the Cancer Clinic. This reading brought me joy!
I enjoyed reading about Ted and read some of the poems collected on the Poetry Foundation website too. I will definitely read more of Ted’s work, watch more videos of his readings.
I have written a Skeltonic poem before (for a previous NaPo), despite the form veering towards comic content I wrote about this Lockdown 13 months on and my practise year of the isolation part. Obviously it is a serious subject, I haven’t written a humorous poem. I don’t enjoy writing in this form so I doubt it will be reworked, but a few lines might find there way into something else. Here are the end-lines:
kept themselves safe and clean
coated in Polytetrafluoroethylene.
awritersfountain 