Tag Archives: writing

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The room where it happened

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A green sofa is pressed against the wall.
The ottoman is where it should be.
And the phone is damp and cold.
Fingers of the dark play in the corner.
Pale empty roses are in a clear vase.
A dictionary is open on the desk.
A word is highlighted: ‘singularity’.
Those who make the journey wince.
A fool takes a donut from a yellow box.
He studies the hole. Time won’t fill it.
The computer hums. A lady from
Chicago has dropped her bags in
  the front room. She plans to stay.
No amount of death and taxes will
  stop us now. Off to the next race.
Pretend you hedged your bet.
The walls were once painted green.
Now, nothing matters but the
  window.
It looks north—toward Minnesota.

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Nelson

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Last night we named time;
we called him ‘Nelson’,
after your great uncle.
“—So much for Nelson, now”,
It’s nearly half past two, and
he’s nearly dead; we can’t
revive him, he wouldn’t
want that. Nelson can stand
only so much decay and
decadence. Let’s play checkers
you say, ‘in the dark’. Just
move the pieces, and
let Nelson make the moves.
That will fix him! The old
curmudgeon
waits for no one.
Occasionally, he was given to
strong drink – gin, primarily.
Damn that Nelson you say
as your liver fails.
He should have died a peaceful
death twenty years ago. In the
horse barn. Surrounded by
straw, timothy hay and
Appaloosas.

And we should have
invited the old goat to
Thanksgiving dinner,
instead of sending him a postcard
from Maui…
we should have been more
cautious.
Hindsight is unimportant.
Nelson never
turns around.

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Inner poem

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I am listening to my inner poem today,
The one that is deep in the core of my
aging body where I keep the cleansers
and the cleaners and the emotional
vacuum cleaner that I use to suck
the cobwebs off the ceiling and to blow
the ants from their nests near the potato bin.

Sometime before noon I find myself
calling out to the inner poem
for some inspiration. Sing to me you
Old Inner Poem. Whisper a sonnet
in my ear. Come close and explain
the nuances of your latest villanelle.
Don’t become caught up with the
details and the meanderings of the
old poets – you are on your own
now – you need none of them.
Inspiration comes from the clouds
and the damned moon – REALLY
can anyone bear another poem about the moon??
Can we beat another one out of the
Clouds? Give me a Picasso or a
Rembrandt today – with a hint of
Jackson Pollack. That’s the kind of
poem I need from you.

Don’t make me
come down there and look for you
Old Fool Inner Poem:
If I must do that, you’ll be sorry
for the experience. But there is
silence down there and soon I know
Inner Poem will need to be prodded
and maybe coaxed with a good glass
of port wine.

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My Boots Have Gone to Fresno: thoughts on the value of silly poetry

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In today’s world, with so much tragedy and disfunction going on around us, I think that sometimes we need a bit more frivolity in our lives. Sometimes instead of trying to write the Great American Novel, or write the world’s best poem, simply sitting back and writing something totally silly and worthless can be of value.

Hence the topic of today’s blog. I’d like to mention the value of ‘silly’ poetry. Silly poetry can be a great stress reliever. I discovered the value of silly poetry years ago. My paying job as a technical writer can be stressful, to say the least. Tight delivery schedules, unresponsive management, endless meetings, and long hours can all take their toll on a writer. One time, many years ago, very late at night, while working on a particularly challenging project, I became frustrated and, on a whim, I simply opened a blank Word document and began writing the most nonsensical poem that I could think of. I don’t remember much about the poem. I don’t even remember if I saved it. But I do know that the poem totally removed me from the technical document that I was working on, and when I returned to the technical material, I was mentally refreshed. After that time, I continued to write silly poetry now and then.

So, are there any ‘rules’ to writing ‘silly’ poetry. No. It wouldn’t be silly if there were rules. But generally, a silly poem should:

  1. Make some attempt at rhyming. No stress about that though. Lame rhymes are OK.
  2. Be totally spontaneous – if it doesn’t come easy, forget it. And NO rewrites!!! This poem isn’t going anywhere.
  3. Be relatively short – nobody needs a rhyming spontaneous poem that goes on forever.

Which brings me to my latest silly poem. It all started about ten years ago when I listed a pair of cowboy boots for sale on eBay. I purchased the boots in the mid-90s before my wife and I left the North Country and moved to South Florida. They were a great pair of boots, but South Florida is not ‘boots’ country. This is flip-flops and sandals country. Therefore, my boots remained in our closet taking up space for years before finally, at my wife’s urging, I decided to part with them. I listed the boots on eBay for $100, about a third the amount I paid for them, thinking they would be gone in a week. But that didn’t happen. Nobody wanted my boots. A year passed, then another year – until I forgot about the boots. My boots languished on eBay and in my closet. Then one day, I remembered them and lowered the price to $50. That should do it, right? Naw – the boots wouldn’t sell. Nobody wanted them. Finally, before dropping the boots off at Goodwill, I lowered the price a little. Again, nobody wanted the boots…until last week…

Driving home from an evening out on Saturday, the familiar eBay cash register went off on my phone: ca-ching! You’ve made a sale. When I got home and checked my account, I was shocked to find it was the boots that sold…after all these years.

“They’re going to Fresno, California,” I told my wife.

“Good,” she said. “I think they will be happy there.”

And so, if you are a reader in Fresno, and you have just ordered a pair of cowboy boots from an eBayer in Florida, this silly poem is for you. Enjoy the poem and the boots:

My boots have gone to Fresno.

My boots have gone to Fresno
But in F L A I’ll stay
UPS picked them up today
they’re on a westbound highway.

Thru rain and hail, and twisters and sleet
they’ll be a whole lot happier
now on
someone else’s feet.

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Beach read

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I’m scribbling stanzas of
wild eyed poetry,
hasty words jotted
across the page of a
spiral bound
notebook.
April damned near
faded into May,
a young girl
stretched face down on
an orange blanket,
waves
rumbling in
from Wast Africa
tumbling over and over
words
of distant explorers still pressed
against the hot breath
of the distant Sahara..
to end here,
in late spring in Ft. Lauderdale.


A lady of middle years squeezed
into a lavender bikini
reads romance,
digs her toes into
the wet sand,
hot breath of
melanoma muttering
Sun gods
frighten her
for a moment
but she hastens
back to the beach read…

I write another stanza but it is
so hard. What about
an easy beach read for a change.
What about a simple clean exit.
Include the best of the best,
don’t miss anything.
A book
missing its last
chapter
is
failure.

Louis L’Amour rides again
at the Cat 5 Bar, a shirtless overweight
local sips a Mai Tai as he reads
oblivious to the churning
the humming the hot beach beat
pounding surf.
Hot iron on the high plains,
hot sand
more
hot, hot. hot.

It’s cool inside now says the
last smoker in North America as
she exhales a white/blue plume
of 1950s Americana into the
lifeless afternoon air, and she’s
waving the only newspaper
in the western hemisphere.
She says she’s despondent
because of the rental market.
Screw the investors she says.
And screw the politicians and
the Russian oil
oligarchs.
Read the papers,
they’re taking over.
They’re coming in now
like daylight
through the blinds
of a cheap motel —
and they’re driving up the
insurance rates.

A man of the cloth
passes by like a
grey ghost of the Apocalypse.
A worn King James Version
under his arm,
pamphlets
in his hand,
hot in a dark jacket
and dark pants
and white Sam Smith sneakers.
Have faith he says, to no one
in particular.

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National Day of Encouragement

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It is hard to let something as important as the National Day of Encouragement go by unnoticed, so I won’t. If you are not aware, September 12th , is the National Day of Encouragement. It wasn’t on my radar, but when I saw it on my desk calendar, I investigated it and found that this day has been designated such since 2007. The date is the product of the Encouragement Foundation at Harding University in Seary, Arkansas.

The date was first recognized by a proclamation issued by Seary Mayor Belinda LaForce. The day was further promoted by Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe who designated the day a state holiday. Sometime after that, President George W. Bush then declared the day to be nationally recognized, and the rest is history.

In the words of Andrew Baker, today’s organizer of the National Day of Encouragement:

“Our goal is to challenge people not to just think about the idea of encouragement, but to do something that will encourage someone else … even if it’s simply speaking a kind word…”

At first, I thought why do we need a special day set aside to promote encouragement? But upon further reflection, I decided it isn’t such a bad idea. With so much negativity in the world right now, we need all the encouragement we can get, toward any endeavor we are trying to complete. And since everything that I write about here at EEOTPB is related to creativity, who needs a word of encouragement more that aspiring writers, novelists, poets, songwriters, painters, and anyone trying to create art for art’s sake or who are creating art for a living?

So, I am truly behind this Day of Encouragement, and I am going to encourage someone today.

+++

Now, in a matter totally unrelated to the National Day of Encouragement, I want to pass along a link to a poem that I very much liked. I came across this poem when I was doing some research on my last post about composing poems on phones, and I had intended to link to it then, but I didn’t, so I will now. The poem is titled “Texting” and it is by the great British poet, Carol Ann Duffy. I am not sure if Carol Ann Duffy composed this poem on her phone or not, but since it relates to this theme, I am linking to the poem here:

Carol Ann Duffy: Text
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Phoning it in – wonderment and dismay in the age of the small screen

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A few years ago, I was eating lunch at an outdoor café. Halfway through my club sandwich, a thought darted across my mental palate – not just any thought but a terrific first line for a poem. I needed to jot it down fast, but I had no pen and paper. Who carries a pen and paper these days. I repeated the words over and over thinking I would note it when I got back to the office. Of course, by the time I returned to my desk, the words to the epic poem I had hoped to remember were long gone. I tried to compose the line, and I came close, but it wasn’t the line that I had thought of an hour earlier. When I told my wife about this later, she said, “Why didn’t you just make a note on your phone?” Embarrassed for overlooking something so obvious, I muttered that I hadn’t thought of it.

A few days later, I had not only an idea for a poem, but the first half dozen lines for one, ready to be set to paper. This time, I opened the Notes app on my Samsung Galaxy phone. After tapping a few keys, my Pulitzer Prize winning poem was committed to the cloud for eternal safekeeping.

At the time, I intended to use my Android Notes app to only store a few raw poem ‘materials’ and not to be used to complete a piece of work. Soon, however, I discovered just how easy writing a poem can be when using only the simple Notes app on my phone.

The first poem that I wrote was not nearly as good as I had originally thought. In fact, I was disappointed in my product (yes, I consider poems a ‘product’). But I had mastered a new technique for capturing my ideas on-the-go. Over the next few months, I would find my Android phone a most convenient tool for writing poetry. I found myself composing poems in restaurants, motel rooms, on airplanes and just about anywhere else that inspiration found me.

Of course, I came to the game far too late for this to be real news. After doing some internet research, I found out that poets are composing on their phones every day and there are now a number of poetry apps for both Android and iPhone that are quite popular. These apps allow you to share your poems with other users. I have installed two of these more popular apps, Poetizer and Miraquill. I’ll let you know how it goes as I familiarize myself with them.

In the meantime, what would a blog about telephone poetry be without a poem that I wrote on a phone? This poem I wrote while sitting on a Florida beach one afternoon. When considering a topic for a new poem, sand came immediately to mind:

Sand
Crushed quartz –
metamorphosized granite
muscovite and feldspar
washed
across half a continent,
remnants of runoff from
a West Virginia
coal company wash plant,
still
catch lazy afternoon sun.
Distant visions of a hard glacial
tide slowly rising for the
first time in ten millenniums,
swept clean in a thousand
Rivers; down The Kanawa,
down the Potomac, force fed into
the Ohio and the Savanna
and the ambling blackwater Edisto.
A million years before Sherman
and Sumter,
and the white washed porches
that face The Swanee.
Crushing, rushing
to the great Atlantic;
pulsing pulverized
pieces of the
Great Sassafras Mountain
and Mount Pinnacle
now churned beneath the toes
of a hundred fifty thousand toes
(on any given day)..
oh the great continental grind
pepper of the eons.

Like the poem, or hate it, you must admit it’s not every day you see the word ‘metamorphosized’ used in a poem. Thanks for reading. Mahalo – Ed.

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My latest poetry book now available on Amazon

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Few creative endeavors are as unlikely to bear fruit as publishing a poetry book. Paint a painting and you can at least hang it somewhere, and someone will look at it and say, “well, that’s a fine painting” or they will say “I wouldn’t hang that in my garage”. But in the end, they will look at the painting and it will receive the reviews that it deserves. Songs are much the same. Write a song and push it to YouTube and you will get plenty of input, good and bad.

But poetry books can fall into that proverbial crack of obscurity.

Poetry books are largely a labor of love, so getting reviews can be difficult. While putting together my second poetry book (which I am going to discuss shortly), I found that there are some truly great poets out there doing some impressive work. In upcoming blogs, I would like to talk about them. But today I want to announce that I have published my second poetry collection.

My latest collection of poems is titled “downed lines” and it is available on Amazon.com. You can search for it there, or you can simply click the link at the top of the page under “Books by W.E. Patterson”.  

So, what would a book launch be unless I give something away? That’s why I am giving away copies of my book to the first five or six people who ask. I might even give more away, I don’t know. Poetry is an inexact science, so the give-away will end when it feels right. I will even fork out the dough for the postage.

Thanks to all!

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Horizon line

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we’re in rented
beach chairs on
Pompano Beach,
it’s late November – two days
before Thanksgiving
when she asks me how far it is
to the horizon
and I tell her it is 3 miles
give or take a foot or two…

I further explain:

…that it’s 3 miles from the point
where her lavender painted
toes touch the water
to where the water touches the sky.

I go on:

That’s fifteen thousand
eight hundred forty
feet I say to her —
from your toe tips to
horizon line

then I say…

That’s one foot
for every year that
we’ve known each other…

she laughs

then she tells me that I am not
the world’s most renown

mathematician.

You’re no Euclid, she says
you’re no Blaise Pascal,
no Pythagoras, and
certainly you are no
Archimedes…

then she tells me that
we’ve known each other
much, much longer than that

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On reading great writers

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If he were still alive, June 28th would have been the 122nd birthday of legendary author Eric Ambler. Ambler is considered by many to be the ‘father’ of the spy novel/thriller genre. Graham Greene called Ambler “the greatest living author of the novel of suspense”, and indeed his post World War II novels have withstood the test of time and make for fine reading today. Ambler had an uncanny eye for staring into the future and his great, 1935 prophetic novel “The Dark Frontier” discussed the atomic bomb and the rise of nuclear weaponry nearly a decade before the first atomic weapon was dropped upon Hiroshima.

Since his death in 1998 at age 89 his books remain as popular today as they were a half dozen decades ago. But this blog is not a bio about Mr. Ambler, but rather something that I read about him in a 1998 online obituary.

The obituary noted that in a conversation with Eileen Bigland, herself a well-known, serious author, Ambler told her that he had been reading a lot. When she asked him what he was reading, he said that he was reading Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and James Joyce. Upon hearing this, Bigland offered this advice: “Never read very good writers while you are trying yourself to write good trash. You’ll only get depressed.”

At first, upon reading this, it appears to be a nod to mediocrity. But upon further examination, Ms. Bigland’s words hold some worth. I recall talking with a member of our Ft. Lauderdale writer’s group a number of years ago. She was writing a romance novel set in 1940s New Mexico. But she had been reading a lot of Nicholas Sparks and Nora Roberts and she didn’t feel like her work measured up. She had become so disillusioned with her work that she had walked away from her writing project twice. At the time of our conversation, she had just picked up her novel where she had left off months earlier, and she really wanted to see it through to the end, just for the sake of completion. I told her that it might be wise to resist comparing her work to that of the great writers of the genre. Another member of the group said that she should avoid reading romance novels by anyone until her novel was complete.

So, can reading the work of great writers be detrimental to our writing projects? I think that if we compare our work to theirs it can, and in the case of my friend from the writer’s group, such comparisons had caused her to lose focus and discontinue a project that she really wanted to complete. A painter who compares her work to Rembrandt or Picasso will surely be disappointed if she is trying to paint like Rembrandt or Picasso.

I recall a radio interview with singer songwriter Jimmy Buffett many years ago, Buffett told the interviewer that he was aware of the fact that he was not the best singer in the world, or the best guitar player in the world. But he went on to say that he was the best Jimmy Buffet in the world. Maybe that is the key to it all – being the best that we can be without comparing ourselves to the best of the best.

So, all of that said, I will not be reading Eric Ambler for some time. Not until my project is complete.