Read today’s full post here.
Our featured participant for today is Rook Poetry, where a cowboy and samurai circle around each other in response to Day 8’s unlikely connections prompt.
Today’s daily resource is Poem Today.
Prompt:
… takes its inspiration from Pablo Neruda, the Chilean-born poet and Nobel Prize Winner. While he is most famous in the English-speaking world for his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he also wrote more than two hundred odes, and had a penchant for writing sometimes-long poems of appreciation for very common or mundane things. You can read English translations of “Ode to the Dictionary” at the bottom of this page, “Ode to My Socks” here, and “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” here.
… write your own ode celebrating an everyday object.
Happy writing!
I enjoyed reading the featured poem 1866 by Rook. I felt I wanted that tale/comparison to go on forever. I was intrigued by the Cowboy’s secret love, how developed and polar these characters felt within a short poem and the connections explored.
… The cowboy does
not have much except what he carries
with him. He carries a secret love
inside his chest that fills his lungs
day in day out with hope and shame.
The samurai has learned to dwell
in shame and anger and has built
a monument to bitterness but that
is elsewhere. Everything is elsewhere
The Poetry resource only showed a pinned post on X, so I visited the website, where I found a plethora of brief poems and detailed posts. This is definitely an area I will revisit for a read. I read the Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik (the collator of the X account anthologies and website), followed by the Brief Poems of Carol Snow – some of them were so brief.
I have many favourite poets and Pablo Neruda is one of them. Many on my list gained their places whilst I was still a teenager. The first poetry book Mr. G bought me (at the time not knowing what a fan I was), was Twenty Love Poems And A Song Of Despair, signing… You are worth more than 20 poems, but it’s a start. << That was 17 years ago!
PROMPT:
I started by re-visiting and reading Neruda. I read the whole article:
Poetry and Simplicity The Odes of Pablo Neruda. A condensed version of Ilan Stavans’s Introduction to All the Odes.
Dictionary, you are not
tomb, sepulcher, coffin,
tumulus, mausoleum,
but preservation,
hidden fire,
plantation of rubies,
living eternity
of essence,
granary of language.
From: Ode to the Dictionary
Then I read Ode to My Socks.
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
“Ode to My Socks” from Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems, by Pablo Neruda
And finally: Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.
only you
lived through
the sea’s truth, survived
the unknown, the
unfathomable
darkness, the depths
of the sea,
the great
abyss,
Poetry Foundation
I am taking away the prompt like homework… it will be the other end of the night when I set pen to paper. I will return and leave an extract.
The first step was to choose an object. It has also been a while since I wrote an Ode, (probably NaPo 2023). At first I looked for random objects (chocolate chips or scotch tape) and then I thought… it was a better idea to choose a real object I possess and love.
My Ode was to a small vase which belonged to my dearly missed Great Aunty. It was an absolutely absorbing and beautiful experience to write it.
black oak meets angel.
This secret world of insect
and petal being revealed to me
Related Links:
And for those who prefer more classical work this site, Interesting Literature, includes some 18th Century Odes.
awritersfountain 