Poem Challenges

My name is Ivy Grimes. I ask people for topics they think would make awful/difficult poems, write the awful/difficult poem anyway, and allow the person to review it. Email me a challenge at [email protected]

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Dear Tumblr

Tumblr, I'm breaking up with you because you make poem-posting hard!  Trouble with line breaks. Weird spacing. I still think highly of you, but I'm returning to Blogger.

Future posts at poemchallenges.blogspot.com

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Skyrim

My next challenge is from a colleague who chooses to remain anonymous.  Why anonymous?  Because he doesn't want anyone in his professional life (the guys who belong to the nice country clubs in town) to know he is into a game called Skyrim: Elder Scrolls. 

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Skyrim

As always, the Elder Scrolls Wiki was quite useful in my poem composition. 

Here it is:

The Game of Quests

A dragon's always poised to wreck everything, and as I speak into your hagiography, I choose to describe you finagling a spear into the monster's wing like a fork into dry meat.

When you begin your quest, you choose what kind of creature to be, for the sake of redeeming those like and unlike you.

But you don't choose your soul. You are finite, a seabird who can't eat all the fish in the ocean.

Whatever language you learn, the devil learned it first. Every game has an author.

Don't bruise your tongue with spells. The dragon will terrorize itself. The world it haunts can only rob you of your hero's hat. Let the snow eat your enemies. Give the snow your meat.

My anonymous pal's review is:

Interestingly, there is some gameplay truth to this poem. Sometimes you don't have to fight the dragons but wait for them to be killed by others. Also, the dragon shouts you learn are really just a process of rediscovering an old dragon language. There does always seem to be a dragon about to wreck everything -- in life and otherwise.

Though, of course, there aren't any spears in Skyrim. 

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Rent-Seeking

This challenge involves an unwieldy economic theory!  It's a challenge from my friend Harry David, who is not to be confused with Harry & David, a gourmet fruit basket company. 

Harry has studied economics extensively and written much on the subject (he blogs at lombardstreet.tumblr.com), and he also does an excellent job of making writing publish-able, as you can see here: http://www.harrydavid.net/.  He also recently accepted a challenge from me to write from an economic perspective about the 613 mitzvoth in Jewish law, and the result was informative and deep:  http://lombardstreet.tumblr.com/post/92808015488/613-ways-to-break-the-law His challenge to me was to write about rent-seeking.  As he explained to me briefly and quickly: "Rent-seeking is the pursuit of income in excess of that which is necessary to induce a factor of production to put itself on the market (a "rent" in the technical meaning), where the means by which this income is created destroys social value. It erodes the rule of law, it wastes resources as producers compete to gain the rents, it contributes to the ossification of the political economy." I Wikipediaed it of course, but even Wikipedia failed to explain the concept simply to me, and in short, the poem was in fact a good challenge for me.  I thought about a variety of potential (surreal) situations involving using resources to eliminate barriers to profit (such as spending money to lobby for tariffs or restrictions on your competitors).  But of course, I brought it around to the mythic and didn't deal with the concept as it exists in the world of fact and logic it was invented in.  Is this cheating?  I don't know!  Probably!  Let's find out.

Honey Baron Let's conspire, buy armies to depose the king, and impose a leader who is friendly to monopolies so I can be a honey baron. I’ll sell zebra-flavored honey to lions, seed-flavored honey to birds. For women, amber and orange, for men, sour and smoke, for the heartbroken, honey with hints of persimmon, meringue, tulip. I’d sell everything to have one kingdom. To succeed, I only need tariffs on sweets, and on invisible forests that house wild bees whose honey in this world is fire. When all the bees know my heartbeat and their bodies move like waves to my words, they’ll make honey from anything— past and future, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Protection for my business will mean profit for everyone When I’m queen of my own kingdom, the honey will be free.

Harry's review:

  This is beautiful, Ivy. Magical. 

  First, the criticism: I don't see why a self-interested honey baron would want to provide honey for free. After all, the point of the tariff was to increase her profits. 

  And I don't see how in her new kingdom there would be profit for everyone -- not, again, why she might want that. In a sense, though, it makes sense. Tariffs are usually dressed up as being in the public interest, even as they in fact only benefit the lobbying special interest. So that line may reflect a statement for public consumption. 

  The rest of the poem captures the concept nicely. You are right about the effect of a tariff, for instance. And your point about hiring an army to depose the king is quite astute. Spending resources to supplant the king is indeed a form of rent-seeking, and one that is not often written about.  Beautiful, imaginative, astute. You beat the challenge. Good job!

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Continuity

I met Alana Baldwin ten years ago in college at Auburn.  We were on Auburn's student literary magazine together, and we bonded when we realized the same guy had invited each of us over (on different occasions, of course) to hang out at his place, where he spontaneously broke out his guitar to stare into our eyes and play us a song.  He played her a Pixies song, and he played me "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer, solidifying which of us he thought was cooler.  (And yes, I ran the heck out of there as soon as the song was over.)   

Her challenge for me to was to write about continuity.  She was inspired by the documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, a series of interviews with Noam Chomsky by Michel Gondry.  I came very close here to explaining Chomsky's idea of psychic continuity as he relates it in the film, but I was beginning to bore and confuse myself.  Suffice it to say -- he's interested in how we put together our observations (that to him often have no inherent meaning) and see them as whole.  One example he uses is that the Charles River could have many additions (pollution, tributaries), but remain the Charles River to us. Gondry uses the example that when he meets with an old friend he hasn't seen in a while, at first the man is like a stranger, but after he speaks with him for about 20 minutes, the man transforms into his friend again.

I put all this together and related it to something else Chomsky said about how many people have the need to believe that existence continues after this life ends, and that he doesn't need that, but he is sympathetic to people who do. 

A decade of friendship with someone necessarily means reconciling the new self with the old self I remember from ten years ago.  This also reminded me of friendship with God, and how this friendship causes you to change in ways that are difficult to reconcile with who you once were.   

At any rate, Alana is an incredibly creative person, an excellent graphic designer, and a good friend.  You can find some of her work here - http://alanabaldwin.com/, and you can also peruse some accidentally obscene logos she is in the process of collecting here - http://logohno.tumblr.com/.

The Beginning and The End

We were taught scripture, though we misrememebered it-- in the beguilement, mouths corrupted the holy and the born, and the born were without fortunes, and dogwoods shadowed the nightmares of the sea. And the sputter of ghosts marred the first weather. And both of us said - let this be left. When I met you, you collected odd shirts, and as I follow the progression of human history from Adam naming the animals to the moment we became friends, I note the shirt you wore the day we met was covered in animals wearing braces, holding up mirrors for each other, each one enraptured by his own caged smile.  You still have the shirt, ten years later, but don't wear it anymore when making friends. "I know Christians by looking in their eyes at that unearthly kindness," you said, and you weren't sure if you saw it in mine then.  When you graft an odd branch to a tree, when does it begin to belong? A man to the faith of men, a friend to a friend.  It belongs in stages, and even when it rises, seamless its fruit could be a different shape than the fruit of the other branches. We could choose to see this world as whole. As an act of friendship, you entertained my worries, which you said were contagious, that I'd bring with us like smallpox into eternity. I learned slowly that when we worry, we lose hope, and when we lose hope, we lose our friends. After Christ ascended, his friends thought they were living in the end. I think we're living, and I know it ends.

Alana's review:

This is all very touching. I appreciate your thoughtful words + wish I could reciprocate on the same level. Flexing my visual muscles all these years, instead of the verbal ones, has made my thoughts very muddled and strangely pictorial. So, I'll draw you something:

A shallow drawing for a deep + meaningful poem. Tradesies?

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Homeschool

My friend Sarah (an activist and poet who blogs here: http://bonemanifesto.wordpress.com/) has seen me flip out a time or two (or three) about something ridiculous.  Her poem challenge for me is related to a minor flip-out she once witnessed where a mutual friend of ours told me (out of nowhere) -- "You know, you'd have made a good homeschooler." I turned around slowly, menacingly, and said, - "What is that supposed to mean?" He couldn't give me a good explanation, and I wouldn't let it go.  Unfortunately, in my indignant huff, I forgot that our friend who commented on my homeschool potential had himself once been homeschooled.  Later, he got a little indignant with me about what was offensive about being called a homeschooler. And of course, he should have been indignant.  I was wrong. As I took Sarah up on this challenge of writing a poem about homeschooling, I thought about the stereotype of homeschooled children being sheltered.  Then I thought about stories children often hear from their parents, myths and fairy tales, and how parents use these stories to prepare their children for the awful things in the outside world.  Even within the relative safety of a supportive home with kind parents, kids have to deal with loss, fear, sadness, the past.  No one can be all that sheltered by their parents. Home School Even if a mother won't go to the depths of hell to find her daughter, she'll search for her name in the crossword on the cereal box. When she loses the family's minds, she can shape new ones from dough, drenched in red sprinkles to signify the world's commotion. The world is fearful. Even horror stories are less painful to enter, where drywall can be replaced with gingerbread, and still the house won't shake. You stop teaching kids when you notice they learn alone to find psalms in soda cans and dissect frog songs. In the yard, generations of kin stretch back from solid to spirit to give her what she needs to give the children: a holy coal; apricots for oatmeal; coats. Sarah's review: "As I've generally come to expect from your poems, there is a stream of consciousness that initially seems somewhat unconnected, but begins to fall together as the list of thoughts goes on to form a cohesive impression by the end.  In the case of this poem, just one word is sufficient, "coats."  The single word acts as a capping image for the concept of shelter that has already been explored in the other stanzas, whether positive or negative: the mother who may not go to the depths of hell, but will search for her child's name (possibly read as identity), or the mother who shapes the mind like cookie dough, but always with the inclusion of the "world's commotion."  There is an effective parallel throughout the poem of life within the home and the world without. I  think you've done a good job of communicating shelter.  As far as form goes, your line breaks are also very effective, especially in the last stanza: "from solid to spirit / to give her what she needs / to give the children..."  Thanks for including me in the blog.  You probably would make a good homeschooler." Thanks for this insightful review, Sarah!  You'd make a good homeschooler, too.

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Stereoisomers

My youngest brother, Ben, gave me the word "stereoisomers" to write about while he was studying for a chemistry exam.  At first I thought this would be easy.  Chemistry IS poetry, right?  It involves speaking about things you can't see with the naked eye, and there are a lot of weird names to marvel over.  Unfortunately, I didn't know what stereoisomers were.  I ended up reading about them for a long time, trying to understand them.  The basic idea is that they are two sets of the same atoms in the same order with the same sets of bonded atoms, but arranged differently in space.  One type of stereoisomer is a diasteroisomer, which I misread as "disasteroisomer"...and if I could have written about this, the poem would have just written itself. At any rate, here's what I came up with.  Ben's review is to follow, and it's ambivalent at best. Chemistry

If your eyeballs were placed vertically, I'd tilt my head.

Like molecules, we're made

from distinct parts, oh let me teach you this word:

stereoisomer.

Stereoisomer. Stereoisomers are arrangements of the same atoms in different places. They're different bodies with similar traits.

The carriage to the ball

is not the pumpkin rearranged.

The dentist's mold made of your teeth can't chew your meat.

These relationships aren't like us.

You and I, love, are stereoisomers.

I'm the slightly altered heart unseen

in the tarnished mirror,

the secret body hidden

on the other side of the tree,

the sadder smile on the second carved pumpkin.

What we share is stronger than what separates. Ben's review: "This poem is a fine piece of modern expression. While the writer evidently lacks proficiency in the particulars of organic chemistry, the poem conveys the molecular nuances that are present in stereoisomers. While a few phrases lack conviction, this poem is refreshing." He's right...I often lack conviction, and I also find that to be a refreshing quality.