Getting out there and a haiku

Hiya everybody,

http://www.Google.com is being a bit slow on the uptake in even accepting my site exists. Very annoying. So far, in searching for myself, I've found my twitter account and one post that I made on twitter.What bothers me is that it was the jokey bestiality poem I posted. Ah well, I suppose these things take time.

As such, I humbly request your assistance in the only way I can. I want to get my work out there and read. I want to do this, not because I think I'll ever be rich from it but because I want to be known for doing the thing I love. I'm putting myself out there to the poetry magazines and working on being recognised. If you could see it in your hearts to make a small effort and post a link to my website through facebook, twitter or myspace or on the links page of your website or really anywhere that people might see it that will be relevant, I would be eternally grateful.

I'd also be happy to return the favour. Why? Because the search engines find and rank your website principally on how many links there are back to your site

 Anyways, here is a haiku

Peanut butter toast
The mother of invention
Without you, I'm zip.

True story.

Udulo's Rise 1.1 - The Drop

By way of example here is a 16 line draft of the start of my long narrative poem. You'll notice I've abandoned rhyme in favour of rhythm but like I said, it's a draft. I'm looking for a good style. Tell me what you think.

The wind rushed. The alarms blasted. Falling. Falling
And flushed! For now was the time to jump! Endlessness!
The endless sky beckoned Udulo to drive on
And down. Down, down with his battle brothers in arms.
Young Aaron, Lycus "the lazy" and Acheron...
Acheron the dirty, Acheron the dancer,
Acheron the delicate, Acheron the dead.
Only minutes before, the mist of his blood thick
And sticky, drying darkly on Udulo's face
After a stray bolt knocked him to the copter's floor.
A good man. The best and brightest, kindest of kin,
Dead. Gone to God's graces for all the good they are.
They equal no good for Udulo. There's no time.
No time for God or thought as the earth approaches
And, at speed, he kicks out jets of bright, vibrant flame,
Draws his gun in readiness of death for the dead.

Udulo's Wars

Hey there guys and gals,

So today, I was struck with an idea. This happens every once in a while and when it does it is usually a bit of a doozy. In this case, I'm not yet sure. Over my poetry writing life I've been struck with similar ideas at times but none as big as this.

I'm going to write a long-form narrative poem.

I would say epic poem, but I don't plan on invoking any of Zeus' 9 lovely daughters or really being constrained to any of those ideas. Suffice to say that it will go by the name Udulo's Wars, Udulo is the hero and it will be long. Really long. And steampunk inspired!

I have a bit of a process when it comes to these things and first step is to form the image of my principles, which means drawing them : / I'll post the pictures if I think they're good enough.

Anybody that's ever read one of my long narratives will tell you it's the area I feel most comfortable. You may get snippets of the story that I particularly like popping up on here but this is going to be my book project I think. The idea is just blossoming but, like I said in the first place, it's a doozy.

Limerence Audio Dial

Limerence Audio Dial

How do I explain this limerence?
Sabrina, furry object of my need.
I find it hard to dial this back to whence
It came and refrain from showing in deed
Those things we can not say in audio
Those things we can not yet hope to express
And knowing the truth fills me with such woe,
As man and cat, we can't lie in congress...

Burns

Look.
Deeper.
Charcoal smolders.
Twists and turns.
Something old.
Older.
Look.
It burns.
Drowning the cold.
Gets bolder
And learns.
Look.
To hold
Like a soldier.
Stomach churns
My soul.
Look
My soul
It twists and burns
Growing older
Feeling cold.
My soul
Churns and smolders
Look.
My soul, it burns.

The Hammers of the Night

It's that time of night where the clocks taunt worst,
Clicking laughter as minutes chase those gone
And walking the slow path, by choice at first,
I find my heart thumping and beating wrong.

It practically hammers at my ribcage
In sickness and such familiar anguish
Anxious to escape and in it's freedom rage
Against it's prison, the guard who held him within

But exhaustion, like a busker who's eyes mourn,
Comes to take what it can from my deep pockets.
My love's panic fails to later be reborn
And I journey beyond this veil of broken wits
For dreams to catch me and prepare to ride
As black night mares trampling through my injured mind

I Need a Win

Disappointment
I've scraped my arms on too many jagged edges
Fallen from too many precarious ledges
Collapsed and burned out, I stand here before,
Begging and pleading. I weep. I implore,
Give me today
Or give me a day like today sooner than soon
That I can claim as my own and give to this room
So you'll all understand the mess that I'm in
And confirm to me how unfair my life's been.
It really has,
As my six weeks of suffering extend to twelve
While they rifle and rummage and dip, dive and delve,
Pulling at seams I've so lovingly sewn,
Exposing the stuffing I kept as my own
In my prison
As things get increasingly weirder and wronger
I find myself acting like I am much stronger
In truth, I've scraped my arms on too many edges.
The fact of the matter and my case in point is
I need a win.

My top five poets in descending order. And why.

5. Seamus Heaney - A poet of clear meaning, he was my introduction to this craziness and  I still read him now.

4. Oscar Wilde - Just brilliant with words.

3. Edgar Allan Poe - The chilling "The Raven" and "The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour" are just two examples of a body of work more impressive than most could stand.

2. William Shakespeare - A genius in his day, my love for his work comes from hearing it rather than reading it. Nothing better that a bit of Shakespeare in the hands of a great performer.

1. Homer - Obviously.

Red & Green (for the junkie on the bus)

How is it that you grow flowers with your touch?
Winding vines of red and green, tipped with roses
And barbed with bitter thorns.

Doesn't matter that we know what lies beneath.
The visage of temptation blinds us to it
And we bleed from the wounds you cause

Gladly! The bleeding's slow and better for it!
We restlessly dream of this sad addiction
And tired, we want for more.

So we meander, high on our greater knowledge.
Living for that next, blessed, sweet ingestion,
Having nothing else to live for.

Inspiration

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
        Robert Frost

Those who've known me long enough know that I used to run a community of (mostly) young poets on msn who (for some mad reason) looked to me as their guide in the world of poetry. I used to get frequent emails asking me what they should do about their lack of inspiration and where it is I get my ideas from.

My inspiration can come from anything. I have an odd poetic process I think. I'll go through periods of intense writing where I'll write, say, 30 poems and then I'll abandon a solid 25 of those as "something I may look back on one day." The precious 5 survivors will then get tweaked and modified a few times as I try to make them as good as I possibly can, mostly just for practice.

It's important to note that these poems, the ones I come back to and fiddle with so endlessly, aren't necessarily the best ones. Even once they're done, they probably aren't. I've written some great stuff that I just relegate to non-existence because I find them too introspective, personal, irrelevant or referential to see the light of day in any public forum. They've served their purpose in that I felt I needed to write them and now they're done, they can stay that way. My dirty little secrets.

Which leads me nicely to the reason I write and, ultimately, where it all comes from. For me, Robert Frost was dead on with his statement. I write because, often, I find I have no other way to express my joy, anger, hurt, loneliness or craziness. At least not in any meaningful or sensible way. That's why I started. I bottled too much up and it was destroying my mind. Every word I write comes from those genuine feelings of love, pain, happiness or regret that we all feel every day. I think those feelings and finding the right way to express them are the making of an artist, be that through words, brushstrokes, photographs, sculptures, music or any of the other wonderful ways people choose to express themselves.

If you're looking for inspiration, try thinking about something you've lost or something you have that you couldn't bear to lose. Something you've seen or experienced that has brought you joy or sorrow. Those feelings will be much easier to express than writing about a generic poetic topic and the honesty that you express through those feelings will be so much more appealing to those that you choose to allow access to your work.

I used three words in a row that ended with -ic there. This pleases me more than the whole of the rest of this blog.

Byeeeeee

Rondeau #1 - The Sky Will Call - a poem

Once again a bit of an experiment with the older poetic forms. This one is the Rondeau, most famously used in the poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae (One of my very favourites.) The content of mine here is a little morbid for which I apologise but I was struggling for inspiration tonight and as this was just an exercise, I went for one of the old poetic staples. Mortality. How depressing.

The sky will call and we'll all go
Into the heaven's heaving glow.
It's gaping maw an oozing scar
Wanting to devour all we are
And all it sees that lives below.

Your life goes on although you know
The well known truths of long ago
And chief among these sad truths are
The sky will call,

Your flesh will fail, your children grow
To fail themselves and then follow
In fear towards the sickly star
That waits and whispers from so far
So all your life you panic so.
The sky will call.

The Rondeau is a French form of poetry (as you can probably tell from the name) and has a very simple structure. The poem consists of 15 lines total over 3 stanzas, 13 of those lines containing 8 syllables each and 2 of which are 4 syllables. These 4 syllable lines are made up of the first four syllables of the first stanza (so make those first syllables a doozy.) The thyme scheme and stanza structure is thus.

AABBA
AAB*
AABBA*

The star here represents the four syllable line (which in my poem is The sky will call.)

Give it a go!

Sestina #1 (And Probably Only) -

Here is the wonderful Sestina structure poem I wrote the other night. I hope you enjoy reading it a lot more than I enjoyed writing it because, if I'm utterly honest, I hate writing in this form.

Sestina #1
My blood burns for you, melting winter's ice
That had found it's way to encase my heart,
Dulling the music that plays through the world
To it's ears. It's clouded mind drowning, cold
'Til you stepped in to my dripping dim cave,
Making dark retreat like a dying wave.

How you wash over like a misting wave
So the wind tickles me like blades of ice
Drawing wakefulness from it's drowzy cave
Raising happy beatskips in my tired heart
Which, satisfied, doesn't mind morning's cold
And finds it now simpler to face the world.

Did you know that you are my whole wide world
And my love grows wave after crashing wave?
That to protect you from night's bitter cold
As it covers the windows with thin ice
Is the only thing I want in my heart
As we hug in a make-shift blanket cave?

But sometimes life's pressure could make me cave.
We live in a sometimes cruel, fickle world
Made crueler by some other's rotting heart
That proves to be just misfortune's first wave.
Who knew August could be so filled with ice?
So hazardous, so lonely and so cold.

But I guess that's the thing about the cold.
No mind how frigid it gets in your cave,
Wear extra jumpers to stave off the ice.
One day the warmth will return to the world
And we'll relax beneath the sunshine's wave
Of glory as it warms my weary heart.

No harsh lie will stop the beat of my heart.
Feral bear rampaging through arctic cold,
Nor wild horses or violent tidal wave,
Will halt my march through deepest, darkest cave
Or over highest mountains of the world
'Til I'm back to her who melts my heart's ice.

It is you who drew this wave in my heart
Who breaks the ice when all is drab and cold.
Tara changed my cave to a vibrant world.

Fin.

If you want to give it a try, it works like this.


There is no formal rhyme scheme so feel free to choose whatever 6 words appeal to you most. I picked a couple of rhymes or half rhymes because I wanted to see how it worked out. Try to make these words things you can apply in a variety of ways because things like the names of animals and the such aren't so great when you use them 6 times.


These poems are formed of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each and one stanza of 3 lines for a total of 39 lines. Each line has 10 syllables and is typically written in the form of Iambic Pentameter (You'll notice I dropped that but still went with the 10 syllables.) Each of the first six stanza lines MUST end with the same 6 words as the 6 lines from the first stanza. Not only this but there is typically a specific structure to how these words must be places in each stanza. For instance Stanza 1 includes the final words in this order (123456.) Stanza 2 MUST then include them in this order (615243) this continues in the following way
3. (364125)
4. (532614)
5. (451362)
6. (246531)
Your final stanza of 3 lines must then include all 6 words, 2 per line only in a specific order.
1. (6,2)
2. (1,4)

3. (5,3)
These lines also must end with the second listed word of the two (so line one must end with word 2, line two must end with word 4 and line three must end with word 3.)


Give it a try and good luck!

What I think poetry should be

Hello.

This is the first in a series of blogs on how I think poetry has lost alot of it's potential readership and the reasons why. There are the obvious reasons (such as "Nah blud, poetry is ghey!#) and the more complicated (Nah blud, I'm illitarut!##) Today, I'm going to write an article that lies firmly in the middle ground.

Anybody who has studied poetry during their education has come across poetry that is inaccessible, meaningless, layered so thickly, it's like an onion or so pretencious that it makes you want to physically shake the poet until his arms and legs fall off. I am the strongest advocate of poetry as an art form that I personally know and even I feel this way. The reason for this is because poetry, to some extent and in some circles, has become about elitism. This is by no means a new problem (read some of John Milton's work to see what I mean) but in a modern sense, elitism doesn't bring you an audience and it doesn't garner interest.

Take William Shakespeare. Sure, now when we read William Shakespeare, his work seems complex and hard to understand but the reason for this is that language has changed. His work was written to appeal to the common man and, once you learn how to read and understand that kind of English (which is not that hard once you put your mind to it) it is still thought provoking, funny, interesting and chaotic all at the same time. His main contemporary, John Milton, isn't.

People will disagree with that. Those people don't really matter to me. Beyond Paradise Lost, it is my opinion that John Milton was an elitist asshat who wrote all of his work in an exclusive manner and tried to make out that he was a genius with special powers given to him by God. No joke. Seriously.

I could write that kind of poetry. Nowadays, many poets do. They take the modern art approach to poetry and write a load of referential drivel that the average adult human would look at and instantly ignore as bollocks (pardon my language.) I don't think that this is wrong particularly. I think it takes all kinds of people to form a community of artists and that no art would develop without this kind of input. I just don't think it's fair to present this work to school children as an example of poetry and then point and laugh as their brains explode trying to get their heads around the phrase "I ploughed the field like a crosseyed tumour.###"

My poetry is (I believe) accessible to everyone. At least that's my goal. I do write more melancholy, internalised and referential nonsense, but I won't present that to you unless you ask really nicely. My goal is to show that poetry is for everyone and it can be thought provoking, funny, interesting and chaotic all at the same time. I am in no way comparing myself to Shakespeare.

A.

# Poetry is not ghey. Neither is it gay. It, in fact, as an artform, has nothing to do with homosexuality. Homosexuality has, at many times had plenty to do with it and, being utterly harmless as a personal practice, has done no harm to poetry at all. Oscar Wilde was gay and that dude was awesome and there are many students of Shakespeare's work who swear blind that he was bisexual. In conclusion, ignore morons who tell you poetry is gay. They're morons.

## I'm once again aware of the mispelling of illiterate here. This is a simple lampoon to demonstrate the idiocy of the aforementioned homophobic morons.

### I don't know if this line has ever been used in an actual poem. Though I'd like to say I hope not, it would demonstrate my point brilliantly if it had. As such I may put a poem up somewhere with this line here in a (probably vain) attempt to pretend to prove my point.

Introductions

Hello and welcome!

My name is Adam C. White and I'm a poet. I will be posting my poetry up here for now because I like to have a public forum to say what it is I feel I need to say. Also, I'll be writing essays and talking about my process (which isn't complicated.)

Hope that you enjoy my work.

A