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Neopoet Monthly: July 2011

 

Contents:
 
1) Interview with Paul
2) Workshops
Winner of Olympic Workshop: Cliches
4) Members Forum: Newsletter Ideas
5) Poetry Corner: Limerick and Analysis
Iconic Poet
Featured Poet
6) World Of Poetry: News
New Books
Reviews
7) Fun Corner: Jokes 'N' Quotes
Contest
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1) Interview with Paul (a Neopoet trustee)
 
1. Tell me a little something about yourself?
 
My name is Paul, I'm 27, my parents are both from Greece, however I was born here in the US. I visit Greece almost every year to visit my family, although I haven't been back in the last couple of years. I have a learning disability and suffer from epilepsy. I work in real estate.
 
2. Other than poetry what other hobbies do you have?
 
My passion is freestyle rapping. I write my own raps, although being a freestyler, I tend to simply rap straight off and make it up as I go along. I am hoping to record some rap in the near future in order to create an album. I am in discussions with various people regarding this.
 
I also enjoy debating politics and of course my main hobby is Neopoet.
 
3. Who are your favourite poets?
 
My favourite poet is William Blake because of the ways he portrayed the industrial revolution
 
4. When did you first realise you had a passion for poetry?
 
When I was in the 8th Grade, while failing English badly, I was told by my tutor to write 3 poems. I wrote all three in about 20 minutes and they were considered to be good enough that I salvaged my English failure and passed. These poems were published in the school newspaper. That was the moment I realised that poetry was for me.
 
5. How did you become involved in Neopoet?
 
My dream was always to have a website where poets could come to together and share poems and have discussions. With the help of Andrew. the site was built and launched. Neopoet launched January 1, 2007
 
6. What is your vision for Neopoet?
 
My vision for Neopoet is to make a home for all types of poets, with a balance of workshops and chat all supporting the stream. I want Neopoet to be the leading poetry site for workshops and give poets the freedom to express their emotions and evoke emotions in the readers.
 
7. What new features have you got planned for Neopoet?
 
Obviously the main goal is to officially launch Neopoet, but before we can do that, it is vital that the workshops are fully established, the chat program is up and running and the advocates program is launched.
 
I have ideas about having a section for published poets who are Neopoet members, where they can promote their books and have a facility to sell those books. I would also like to see a section where members can write reviews on those books. I would like to include a section where published poets can share their ideas and experience on how to become published.
 
I am also considering a way of rewarding members with some kind of points system, but that is in its early discussions, so any ideas on that would be helpful.
 
8. What are you favourite authors and books?
 
Vince Flynn, the political thriller writer
 
9. What are your favorite films?
 
The Godfather trilogy
 
10. What are you favourite bands?
 
Eminem, Immortal Technique, 3 Doors Down, Sting & Red Hot Chili Peppers
 
11. Do you find you get less responses due to you being Trustee/Owner?
 
Yes - I think some people are worried about critiquing my work, assuming if I am not happy with it I can remove them from the site!... That is so not true. I enjoy receiving critique, positive or negative. I may be a trustee, but when I post my work, I have no official title.
 
12. How many books have you written and which ones are published?
 
Against All Odds (coming soon)
Through These Lenses
 
13. Is there anything else you want to add?
 
I would like to say that I am often available in chat, so if anybody wants to ask me anything that hasn't been covered in this interview, please ask me.
 
If you wish to purchase my books, please let me know.
 
Interviewed by Hooded Stranger (Dan)
 
2) Workshops
 
Workshop Round Two:
 
And so we began round two of the workshop programme.
 
First off, I read every feedback form received after the first set of workshops to see what went well, what didn’t and what changes you needed. I am still working on those but did make sure we had less technical issues this time around. I would like to thank everybody for taking the time to complete and return the feedback forms. Without your feedback, we can’t evolve the workshops, so I really appreciated your views.
 
The Shark Pool has not started yet this time around, but it is getting close to launch. Pamela will be heading up the Shark Pool and the syllabus is ready to go, just give us a little longer.
 
The Olympic Pool, took off at high speed. The topic of clichés was the syllabus subject and the first job of the day was for all participants to come up with 3 clichés. Then they wrote a poem using all of the 25+ clichés, then after that a re-write was undertaken but without the clichés. This was a tough assignment, but again humour, banter and hard work pulled everybody through. The offer of a prize for the best re-write increased the already fast pace into a frenzy. I will be announcing the winner of the prize below. The winning prize is having their poem published in the newsletter. Once the re-write and critiques were done, they embarked on a new write, but using just one cliché. The workshop was run at electric pace and the motivation and eagerness never faltered.
 
The Splash Pool went for a Writing Forms theme, with participants asked to post a poem for critique, and then asked to re-write the poem in a different form. Not as easy as I first thought! This workshop is still on-going, and will continue a little longer to give all the participants a chance of posting and re-writing.
 
Any suggestions for workshop themes and topics, please PM me.
 
Regards,
 
Dan (Hooded Stranger)
 
Olympic Pool: Cliches Poem Winner
The winner of the Olympic Pool “Clichés” prize is Candlewitch (Cat) with her original cliché filled poem and winner of the re-write competition. Congratulations Cat, your prize is having both poems published in the Newsletter:
 
All Hands To The Pump
 
You keep me on the down low
Telling me that it's all good
And all is fair in love and war
But it ain't nothing but a chicken wing
Because too many cooks spoil the broth
Of your nasty little acid test
Your love is blind to my needs
And your rolling stone gathers no moss
You're free as a bird as you roam
Like a seven year itch
Taking only the icing on the cake
You think that love is as scarce as hen's teeth
But you're hot to trot a mile a minute
Saying "I'm game"
You don't know that silence is golden
Because you're rotten to the core
You think I'm a necessary evil
As the lesser of two evils
When you could keep your nose to the grindstone
And hit that ball and knock it out of the park
Knock the cover off the ball
With you it is age before beauty
You Can't see that my love is
Fresh as a Summer's rain
And deeper than the deepest ocean
 
C.M. Mattison
 
----------------------------------
 
Come Running
 
You take my affections for granted
Thinking that I will always be there for you
Making a mockery of our relationship
What once we had is almost gone
Because of your light handling
Showing me a lack of respect at best
I can see why your other lovers left you behind
As you treat us all the same
Wearing your blinders on love's trail
You assume if you keep dancing
You can't be pinned down
Your feigning like a boxer
Wears me out to watch your show
Sometimes you resemble a bitch in heat
Our bed still warm while you jump into the next
You skim the best from the top
But are nowhere to be found
When harsh times find my door
You give yourself away
When you don't stop to think before you speak
This is acquired behavior
Not the product of deep reflection
Showing up at my door
When the world is too much reality
And your nights have become too cold
I feel sorry for you
In all your shallow short sightedness
Love is something you play at
You will never know the patient heart
Or the fruits of loves labor
So regrettably I turn you loose
 
C.M. Mattison
 
3) Members Forum
 
If you have any ideas on how to improve the newsletter or the site, or you have poetry related questions, or tidbits you would like to include, please pm Lou and they will be considered for inclusion in the August issue.
 
4) Poetry Corner
 
Two short forms
 
Poetry for me has always been best summed up in three words as “compression of meaning”. Hence I have developed a particular interest in very short forms, particularly the limerick, usually humorous and the haiku, usually more serious.
Interestingly, of the two, limerick has, arguably, far the more rigid structure, constructed of five lines with an anapestic beat and an AABBA rhyme scheme.
The anapest contains three syllables, the first two of which are unaccented and the last of which is accented-
(da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM) A
(da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM) A
(da da DUM da da DUM) B
(da da DUM da da DUM) B
(da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM) A
 
Usually the last word of the first line is a person’s name or the location a person is from.
 
The point of writing limericks, apart from the fun, is that the form is so clear it is very good practice in learning metric structure. It also demonstrates the way form affects content. Rhyme and rhythm won’t always contribute to what you want to express. Here is a challenge. Write something very serious and emotional in strict limerick form. Post them at
One of my favourites, and illustrating my point about form-
 
There is a young man in Japan
Whose poems just never will scan
He sits up all night
But try as he might
He always ends up putting as many words in the last line as he possibly can.
 
The haiku in comparison, is pretty much freeform, the only real point is brevity. Traditionally, of course, they are 3 lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables (which doesn’t actually exactly correspond to the Japanese moras) and use the seasons or others aspect of nature to make a philosophical or emotional point. However even the master, Basho, consistently broke these rules.
 
It might be difficult to get a limerick taken seriously, but it’s not so hard to make a haiku funny.
 
By Jess (Weirdelf)
 
Iconic Poet
 
Rainer Maria Rilke
 
Considered one of the most important German poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was born on December 4th, 1875 in Prague. His father was an unsuccessful military officer, and his mother came from a well-off Prague family. Rilke entered military school in 1886, where he remained until leaving in 1891 due to illness.
 
He then studied in university at Prague and Munich. After 1896 he travelled extensively, meeting many artists and poets. Living in Paris from 1902 until 1911, Rilke was heavily influenced by such artists as Rodin and Paul Cézanne. It was during this time that he began to develop deep interests in objective observation and modernist thought, driving forces behind his poetry for the rest of his life.
 
Rilke is considered a founder of modernist poetry, and the freeform style of poetry.
His poems are filled with intense, sometimes haunting imagery. Gods and Goddesses from Greek mythology often appear in his work, dealing with the difficulties of divine communion in an age of doubt, isolation and fear.
 
An example of his poetry:
 
A Walk
 
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
 
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
 
Rilke died of leukaemia in 1926, in a sanatorium in Switzerland.
 
By Jim (Race_9togo)
 
Featured Poet
Guy Caswell (Geezer) by Lou
 
Guy became a member of Neopoet on February 26, 2009. He was born in Amsterdam New York, the oldest of eight children, two brothers and five sisters.
 
He was introduced to the poetry of Edgar Alan Poe and Emily Dickinson in the fifth grade at school, by his English teacher Mrs. Moore. Guy went on to be influenced by writers such as Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker and Steven King, which explains the darker side of his poetry. He also loves sci fi authors, but he says there are too many to mention.
 
He generally uses rhyme or freeform to create his poems, but has been known to write a Haiku when the mood takes him.
 
Guy feels that Neopoet helps him to convey his emotions, and helps him to explore and expand his writing ability. He would love to publish his poetry one day.
 
Better Days
 
Hot, sweaty night with stagnant air
The smell of stale beer
crowding up against the cracked walls
and peeling paint
 
A black and white Marlon Brando
screaming; Stella.... Stella!
from the little T.V. sitting
next to the window
 
I see the black and rusty fire escape
through tatted lace yellowed with nicotine
His head lying upon forearm
mother's face behind his bleary eyelids
 
The smell of fried dough and hot chocolate
on a "his and her" only morning
Snow outside the frosted panes
Siblings still asleep...
 
5) World Poetry
 
Poetry News
 
Haiku Diem: A Year of Writing Daily Poetry
 
At some point during the day of July 8, 2011, writer Freeman Ng will compose a haiku and post it to his Facebook, Twitter, blog, and email followers. "What's so special about that?" you might ask. The answer is that it will be the 365th consecutive day he's done this. July 9th will be the one year anniversary of Haiku Diem (www.HaikuDiem.com) a website that started as a simple writing exercise but which has grown into a high tech experiment in self-publishing and online community building.
 
Slowly, Alzheimer’s Erases a Poet’s Gifts and Memories
 
The memory of the New York poet Jack Agüeros is capricious nowadays. He remembers the lyrics of certain Puerto Rican folk songs and the name of his petite, growling dog: Nikki. He does not remember collecting the old radios, locks and cast-iron pieces that once decorated his bright Manhattan apartment on West 14th Street. Mr. Agüeros, 76, a community advocate who directed El Museo del Barrio for almost a decade starting in the mid-’70s, has also forgotten that he is the author of four books and a handful of plays. He wrote sonnets and satiric psalms about immigration, poverty and social inequality. He also compiled and translated the complete poems of the renowned Puerto Rican writer Julia de Burgos.
 
Walking Brooklyn Bridge to the Cadence of Poetry
 
On June 13, more than three hundred people assembled on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge for what has become for many people an eagerly awaited annual event — the Poets House fundraising walk across the bridge, which is interspersed with poetry readings and ends with dinner at Bubby’s Brooklyn. The bridge walk was inspired by a Poets House co-founder, Elizabeth Kray, who many years ago chartered a ferry to celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge with a group reading of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Now that poem is read every year by Galway Kinnell at the Fulton Ferry Landing on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. “Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” Kinnell intoned as the sun set over Manhattan. “Clouds of the west — sun there half an hour high — I see you also face to face!”
 
Intersections: Architecture and Poetry
 
On 3rd-4th June, the Courtauld Institute of Art will be transformed. Architects, artists, poets and academics from 12 countries across four continents will come together for a two-day conference on mutual ground between architecture and poetry. Intersections is divided into six sessions: Ritual and Memory; Process and Construction; Dwelling; Scale and Re-Imaging; Urban Experience; and Bodily Experience. Inspired by recent responses to Gaston Bachelard’s milestone The Poetics of Space, this event will feature film, art installations, live poetry, and presentations from historians and architects. Co-convened by Courtauld lecturers Caroline Levitt and Ayla Lepine, Intersections offers new ways of reading, seeing and experiencing poetry and architecture.
 
UK's Largest Ever Poetry Festival Planned for Olympics
 
Poets from all 205 competing countries to join event in 2012
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, poets from the 205 Olympic nations are competing to be part of the UK's largest ever poetry festival next year. Led by the Southbank Centre's artist in residence, Simon Armitage, and artistic director Jude Kelly, Poetry Parnassus will be part of next year'sCultural Olympiad. It will see 205 poets – one from each of the 205 Olympic nations – taking part in readings, workshops and a gala event, touring the UK and contributing a poem in their own language for a poetry collection, The World Record, which will champion poetry in translation.
 
World Poetry
 
Starting with a photo that spent four decades in her father's wallet ("Photo of Author In Kangaroo Pajamas"), Judith Baumel shows us new ways of understanding family and history. In this quintessentially modern book, her third, The Kangaroo Girl detects religion at the scene of many crimes: from the great disasters of the past—Edward I's edict of expulsion in 1290, the War Between the States, the catastrophes of twentieth century Europe—to the small calamities of Jewish American life in the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City. The Kangaroo Girl is also a personal book, a meditation on being a daughter and a mother, and, in a series of moving elegies, what it means to survive loss. Judith Baumel's love affairs with the visual—great buildings, great paintings, great art—and with the mysteries of language in great books and great conversations combine in this testament to human inventiveness and resilience.
 
Recent Reviews
 
Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries by Helen Vendler
 
by Greg Gerke
Possibly the only thing as remotely inspiring and awe-inspiring as an Emily Dickinson poem is a commentary on a Dickinson poem by Helen Vendler. Vendler, one of a handful of elite poetry critics in the United States, has written more than thirty books, including commentaries on all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, three hundred pages about the seven odes of John Keats, and two books and parts of two others on Wallace Stevens. Now she has produced a book dedicated to Dickinson, perhaps this country’s most enigmatic writer, which presents 150 poems accompanied by commentaries.
 
“Don’t Be Afraid To Help Sharks”: TFT Review of Sommer Browning’s EITHER WAY I’M CELEBRATING
by Steve Karl
 
One’s first book publication is a deserved occasion to garner adoration and praise. So far the enthusiasm for Sommer Browning has mostly centered around her contributions to the poetry world via her long-standing poetry reading series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, “The Multifarious Array” (now run by Dorothea Lasky), and her current reading series in her new home of Denver, “The Bad Shadow Affair”, as well as the co-editing work she does for Flying Guillotine Press. Oh and she’s a stand-up comedian too. While these contributions are vital and deserve praise, Browning is a poet, first and foremost, and her stunning first book Either Way I’m Celebrating affirms this.
 
Primal Mysteries
by Lorraine Martinuik
 
As the opening poem “Album” suggests, Robin Robertson’s latest collection The Wrecking Light is album-like. Strong visual images throughout the book present and elaborate the story-lines. The story-lines, though, are the focus. The collection is an album of voices, as if recording a pantheon of storytellers who draw on Scottish/Celtic folklore, render tales from Ovid, translate poetry from other languages, and reflect on singular moments in personal worlds. Contemporized Greek myths provide a counterpoint to Robertson’s own myth-like fictions as he probes correspondences between story, place, culture and psyche. These poems pry into our primal qualities, finding ambivalence and isolation, casual and arbitrary violence, vengeance and cruelty. They raise questions that remain unanswered, and that possibly are unanswerable, about the darknesses of human nature.
 
Jokes 'n' Quotes
 
Joke
 
The National Poetry Contest had come down to two, a Yale graduate and a redneck from Texas. They were given a word, then allowed two minutes to study the word and come up with a poem that contained the word. The word they were given was "Timbuktu."
 
First to recite his poem was the Yale graduate.
 
He stepped to the microphone and said:
 
Slowly across the desert sand
Trekked a lonely caravan;
Men on camels, two by two
Destination Timbuktu.
 
The crowd went crazy! No way could the redneck top that, they thought.
 
The redneck calmly made his way to the microphone and recited:
 
Me and Tim a huntin' went.
Met three whores in a pop up tent.
They was three, and we was two,
So I bucked one, and Timbuktu.
 
The redneck won hands down!
 
Quotes
 
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H Auden
 
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S Eliot
 
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Shelly
 
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
 
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T.S Eliot
 
 
Contest
 
Winner!!
 
Congratulations to Eduardo Cruz, our first winner of the new Newsletter contest.
Salt Water Tears
Pounding heart ripped and shredded
Falling, many scattered papers
A letter written in angered haste
A good bye
passed through a grater
The quiet of emptiness
As I pick up the final words
Gluing them back together
While tears wash away the letters
Hands shaking as words
Become again painful phrases
 
Why re-live the pain
When burning them
Seem so much better
The lack of courage
Holding me
As if it were my anchor
 
Let my ship sail
To a new destination
Finding peace
For a heart broken
And tater
 
Mending it in the winds
That dry the salted tears.
 
I welcome
The open air of the sea
Where I can again
Live inside the place
I call me
 
July's Contest
Each month we will supply you with a line, and in return we want you to create a poem, that includes it. You can use it as a sentence, or as separate words , but you must include every one. The most inventive poem will appear in the next month’s issue. You must not post the poem on stream until the contest has been judged. The winning poem should only appear in the newsletter. Deadline: July, 31 2011.
 
Here is this months line: Disection of life's pleasure, lost.
 
Email your poem to [e-mail address removed - you may PM Lou if you would like to enter the contest]
 
 
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