Can you say p – p – p – p – poetry?

Alright . . . it’s not Elle or Guns & Ammo or The Atlantic. But it’s a real magazine and it’s out of San Antonio, Texas. A POETRY MAGAZINE!

Let’s face it. You won’t find the big bucks in poetry. So you can’t expect a four-color cover and glossy 80# photo stock, printed in one of the world-class print houses in Italy. Or ads for it during the half-time show at the Superbowl.

Lone Stars Magazine. Texas is the “Lone Star State”. Get it? And notice this is Issue #97. Meaning they’ve been at this for a while. This is not some impulse dreamed up between a rodeo and a local paint ball war games tournament.

So . . . why am I bringing any of this up?

Well . . . I’m darn proud to say that a recent poem of mine got published in this particular issue. A miracle if there ever was one!

I’ve made it clear in the past — if anyone was paying attention — I’m not a poet, I’ve never wanted to be a poet, any resemblance between my attempts at poetry and actual poetry is purely coincidental. But for some reason, these poetry magazines seem to think I’m the real deal. Who am I to argue?

I even wrote a satirical piece, making fun of poetry and the whole process of writing it:

CREATIVITY: WRITING POETRY

There’s at least one person who thinks it’s hilarious. (That would be me.)

Let me cut with the false humility, stop being such an arrogant butt plug, and attempt to painlessly explain the situation.

Lone Stars published three of my other poems over the past couple years but this was a particularly juicy assignment and I couldn’t resist.

Contributors to Issue #97 were supposed to write a poem about what a poet is. So I did!

There you have it. Clever? Interesting? Probably not.

Maybe I should light fires in the forest?

Juggle tofu with my tongue?

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Can you say p – p – p – p – poetry? | John Rachel

John Rachel poet? Is this a joke?

 

I've made no secret of my lack of understanding of poetry, nor my thus to be expected zero talent for writing poetry. 

I'm not sure why I write poems.  I guess a poem has some vague resemblance to a song at a very superficial level -- meaning the way it looks on a page -- and I haven't been writing songs lately.  Let's call it reverse sublimation, a clumsy surrogation.  My writing poems is like a ping pong player playing tennis blindfolded on a quicksand court.

I even did a tongue-in-cheek piece about the process of creating a poem, one which I've tastelessly shared with some serious poets, and made even more enemies than I thought one human could make, with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Now, really strange things are happening.  I just got four poems published!

Apparently I've submitted some poems lately.  I say "apparently" because I frankly don't remember submitting two of them.  But one called Messenger Deranged just appeared in a poetry magazine called Lone Stars, based in San Antonio, Texas.  They even requested more and I submitted two more, One Life and Light and Dark, which my lovely wife then translated into Japanese.  Lone Star will publish both English and Japanese versions in their December issue, the English under my name, the Japanese as poetic works by Masumi Nishida.

Then just today, I got a congratulatory letter from VerbalArt, A Global Journal Devoted to Poets and Poetry.  They are including my poem Tapioca Cyber Trails in their upcoming issue, appropriately splattered across all seven continents like a Cardassian tanker of jellied starch blasted out of the sky by a orbiting rail gun.

Mind you, I barely remember writing this poem, so it was quite a surprise when I read it. They sent me a proof of the coming issue for my approval.  There it was, right on page 17. 

What a pleasant surprise!  It's actually pretty darn good, i.e. not terribly terrible.  Not to inflate expectations, I actually think this almost qualifies as a credible work.

I'll let you be the judge.

TAPIOCA CYBER TRAILS

A sweet jest broke water
Birthing artificial intelligence
As if the clusters of CPUs
Marked the non-event event
We reeled and rollicked
In childish mirth-driven panic
Salivating porn-addicted cherubs
Lost in the heavy-breathing fog
Flying the vaporous trails
Of evaporating illusion
We wept but didn’t

You are no more
I’ve remade you
In my image
In your image
I fear meeting you again
I fear disappointment
Shattered expectations
Revulsion and despair
A binary epitaph
Suicide is in our DNA
Zero one zero one

[ DO NOT ask me what it means . . . I haven't got a clue. ]

They always say when warning against getting too excited or overly optimistic:

"Don't quit your day job."

Since I don't have a day job, night job, weekend job, or any job, I think this is advice I can follow without any risk of failure.

Moreover, I certainly don't want to let any opportunities for fabulous riches and universal renown slip through my gnarly, hangnail afflicted fingers.  And the poetry track has proven to be a straight shot to the top.  Maybe I should finally call that number on the ad I posted in that article on writing poetry I mentioned.




If all works out as I expect, instead of signing all my letters . . .

John Rachel, Bipolar Humanist

. . . very soon I can proudly -- and profitably -- stake my claim to untold wealth, fame and adulation as . . .

John Rachel, Poet




[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]




John Rachel poet? Is this a joke?

Creativity: Writing Poetry

"Such torment and bitter 

       angst is my lot!"

Folks, I am deeply saddened __  perhaps a bit shocked.

I received several thousand complaints about my previous two "creativity" 
blogs, all objecting that they were rather light on actual technique.

I've gotten the message loud and clear. This time I will be very specific about 
the process of creating a poem.

Before we get started, I confess I'm having difficulty recalling why I started writing poetry.

Frankly, I hate poetry. I find it tedious and incomprehensible.

Aah! Now I remember.

It was an ad I saw a few years ago.





That sure didn't pan out.

But I did manage to crank out a few poems and at least got the hang of it. So here we go.

Writing a poem . . .

Rhythm is very important in poetry. So when I write poems I always wear headphones
with either Eminem or Lil John blasting away at 125 db. That tunes me
in to the naturally occurring "beats" of the English language.

I wait for a word or phrase to pop into my head. 

Tabula rasa. 

Cool.

Now I think of pop singers and movie stars.

Crystal Gayle . . . The Artist Formerly Known As Prince . . . Tom Cruise . . . Brooke Shields.

Excellent! A veritable goldmine.

I chop them up and throw them together, trying to sound deep and intellectual.

A gale reels topsy turvy / Unknown be the blind enigma / Who shield the
arrogant prince / Art shan't brook the prayers / Cruise lightly the
tabula rasa / Crystal now keens the water goddess / Hear the rumbling
tom tom / Why dost thou feed the feral beast?

Admittedly this makes no sense. So we're on the right track.

Now we find rhyming words for the first, third, fifth and seventh lines.

nervy / rinse / pasta / condom

Next we create lines ending in these words.

Conscience writhes a hollow nervy / Invisible angels fear the rinse /
Yet twirl the Hades voidal pasta / Time warps he who pricks the condom

Notice that I made up a word. This is an excellent technique for putting your
readers on the defensive, playing on the fear that their vocabulary is
embarrassingly wanting.

Recognizing that rhyming, perhaps once the delight of
long dead poets, is now among the heady and hyper-cerebral denizens of
modern literary excellence laughably passé __ more the tinker toys of
vapid pop songsters __ it's time to dig out our good old Thesaurus,
either analog or digital will do just fine, and make some tasteful
substitutions.

Conscience writhe a hollow pluck / Invisible angels fear the cleanse / Yet twirl
the Hades voidal spaghetti / Time warps he who pricks the sheath

Insert these in the initial set of lines.

Okay. Almost done. Now we need a title. 

Tabula Rasa #??? 

Always choose a prime number. Let's see. '11' is such a cliche. '13' was ruined
by horror flicks. Bob Dylan screwed up '12' and '35'. They're not prime
numbers anyway.

How about? . . . 

Tabula Rasa #23 

Perfect! 

Okay, now formatting is of paramount importance. Modern poetry really
shows its inherent rebellious character here. Total non-conformity! Left
alignment is boorishly 17th and 18th Century, right alignment hackneyed
20th Century, and centering is for symmetry fetishists with terminal OCD.

Same goes for punctuation. Not that poets know how to punctuate in the first
place. But the point is why waste such a terrific opportunity for
abstruseness? Randomly scattering punctuation throughout the poem is the
perfect method for adding a tasteful dose of sheer madness and
syntactic chaos!

Alright! Let's put it all together. Behold our new masterpiece . . .

 

Notice how I slipped a near-rhyme in at the end. That should stir up some controversy!

Okay. That was easy, eh?

If you feel the need to verify my credentials, just click here and look at the several poems I've had published over the past few years. 

Scribo ergo sum.



[ This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com ]

The ‘P’ Word

 

P ... as in popular? This is the most popular video on YouTube as of this writing, with 1,676,424,490 views. That's billion, folks!

P ... as in poetry? Hmm. You mean like Eminem? No! You know. Like poetry slams. Cage fighting culture. I slam, therefore I am. Sounds familiar. Isn't that Dr. Seuss?

P ... as in pornography? Apparently, porn __ at least porn on the web __ is becoming less pervasive. Maybe that's because there's so damn much pornography everywhere you look nowadays. Isn't drone assassination porn? How about whole communities going bankrupt from fraud by the major banks. Rape porn. Read all about it here! Or watch it on everyone's favorite porn channel, Fox News.

P ... as in polygamy? We had our chance to put a polygamist in the White House. Well, not a polygamist per se. But one belonging to a religion which institutionally peddles polygamy. It could have been an interesting chapter in the whole DOMA thing, eh?

P ... as in pedophile? Probably we have more on our hands than we realize, some in very high places. But what can we expect? We have runway models who are thirteen, beauty contests for pre-schoolers, more hypocrisy about sex and sexuality than the Catholic Church __ speaking of pedophilia! __ a population pumped up on steamy ads, hot bods, prurient celebrity gossip, and a panoply of pharmaceuticals which despite their pervasive abuse can't keep all this libidinous heavy-breathing in check. Lovely. Simply lovely.

P ... as in patriarchy? A strong contender. We men have made a complete mess of the world, not satisfied with occasional penile penetration, we have to launch our phallic analogs in every shape and size of projectile, missile, bullet and bomb into every nookie and cranny of the world __ so much soft succulent flesh, so little time __  jumping up and down with ecstatic glee at the ultimate ejaculation, the nuclear bomb. What can I say? Everyone knows this. It's an old story with the latest trimmings.

P ... as in patriotism? A noble, if much abused concept. But don't get all patriotic as in standing up for the Constitution. Edward Snowden will tell you how that works out.

P ... as in power? Hmm. We're getting close. That's one musical chair that stays in the game, especially unchecked by any moral restraint or sense of public duty. As we say: Power corrupts? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely!

P ... as in politics? A dirty business to be sure. Not that it has to be that way. What is it? The kind of people it attracts? Or the people they become?

P ... as in politicians. Somewhere it's written that these guys are supposed to serve us, the people who elected them. But they've become a bunch of traitorous lapdogs to corporate elites who openly thumb their noses at you and I. It sucks, eh?

P ... as in plutocracy. Getting very warm. These are the scoundrels who don't even bother to give lip service anymore to the idea of egalitarianism. They view the rest of us as pigs. Nothing new. Hitler. Stalin. King Henry VIII. Blah blah blah. It's exhausting. Let's all sing Hail To The Chief. Of course, he won't have time to listen. He's poring over today's kill list.

P ... P ... P ...

I think I'm going to go with . . .

P ... as in plunder.

America is both plunderer and plundered. You would think it would be enough for the self-proclaimed entitlement class to use America's economic and military power to strip mine the rest of the world. But no. Now the ruling elite has its eyes on the ultimate prize. America itself! How much is enough? They don't even understand the question.

So we watch in wonder and awe as our resources, natural and human, are sucked dry to bolster a bottom line that is the top priority __ the only priority __ in a system that assigns no value to anything but what can be monitized, i. e. price-tagged.

Is this really the only way we can measure progress?

I think not. And probably many agree with this. But it's so hard. We don't ever see ads for sunsets or generational respect or love between parent and child. Sure, we see those thing in ads. But to sell more cars, cosmetics, wonder drugs, smart phones, digital sausage makers, stuff we don't need and soon won't be able to afford.

Ever look around the room when the TV's on? 



What do you see? People completely ignoring one another. People who will die as others regret those lost moments of sharing, companionship, communication, just basic human contact. At least they'll regret them until their favorite sitcom, reality show or the E! Channel comes on. Whew . . .

What a depressing thought.

Am I being too pessimistic? I don't think so.

Actually, I'm still optimistic.

Marginally optimistic anyway.

There are other 'P' words.

How about P ... as in people? There is the potential for greatness in everyone. There is the promise of better-than-yesterday. There are propositions we embrace: All men are created equal. Love thy neighbor. Do unto others. Principles we hold dear: Government by the people, of the people, for the people. All are equal before the law. Let no man be judged by the color of his skin.

When we are not driven by greed, frenzied by fear, blinded by hate, crippled by despair, possessed by prejudice, misled and misinformed, most people are good to one another. Humans are social animals, curious and able to adapt. When we are not artificially divided, we remain naturally united. This is almost impossible to see now, much less celebrate, in a world whose political engines are powered by disunity and discontent.

How about P ... as in praise? How about giving praise where it's due? Not Pavlovian praise. But praise based on the values we hold dearest and nearest to the center of our souls. Not iconic fan worship. Praise offered for ennobling acts of courage and generosity.

How about P ... as in pray?

I'm not a religious person. But praying in some form or another is universal. I've seen it on every continent, in countries rich and poor. What is praying but visualizing something positive for those around you and the community you live in? Or the whole planet? Or the entire family of man?

How about P ... as in participate? Even the most rugged individualists overcome pride, prejudice, and apathy to work in consort with others. Alone things can be difficult. But joined together in group action, individual but equal, the impossible becomes possible.

Finally, there's P ... as in perfection? We've sure got a ways to get there. But we reach for the stars, because even if we fall far short, we only risk ending up on the highest peaks here on Earth. Maybe we'll find room at the top for everyone this time.

I have to confess, though. There was a time when I truly believed in the perfectibility of humankind. That was when I was young and naive.
Now I believe in the improvability of humankind.

Maybe now I'm just old and naive . . . I sure hope not.

Okay . . . enough with the 'P' words.

My lips are tired from all the puckering.

And I've blown out my candle.

 

This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com

[ If you are really a masochist, be sure and stay tuned my upcoming "Dachau World" blog posting. It's certain to cause a stir. ]

Fiscal Cliff Poem

(It's all a game, eh?)  

 

White takes pawn
Black takes rook
Drone hits building   

Everyone is dead

[ This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com ]