more NaPoWriMo

So, I am having lots of good ideas. It's hard not to sit down and not only hammer out each poem but burnish it to a smooth shine. I can't wait to edit some of these.
Here's today's.

Desire is lithe, and as transient as a phoneme.
Christ, that proud bitch tearing over the yards!
A couple of curs and Ezra’s bluetick fly after her
turning their heads to nip at each other mid-leap.
And there’s my own on the scent. Law would be
on any man’s side to shoot her,
but no man with a dog in the race would.

This is verymuch not what it is supposed to be.
Here's my translation from the other day and the original.

Hälfte des Lebens
By Friedrich Hölderlin

Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.

Half-Life

Yellow pears hang there,
there thick with wild roses
the land [a reflection? a kingdom.] in the sea
in whose holy sobering water,
sweet swans drunk on kisses,
you dip your heads.

Sorrowing. Where can I store up,
for my wintering, flowers
and sunshine and shadows on the earth?
The walls stand speechless and cold
in the wind which makes
weathervanes chatter.


This is a pretty liberal translation. My literal translation was almost perfect for what it was, but I wanted to translate the tone, if not the meaning, more than just the words.
I'm excited about translating, now. And have already picked out a couple of volumes of poetry by living German writers that i want to try to read/translate.

NaPoWriMo update

Day 2's poem came from notes I took in a meditation workshop with the poet Tony Trigilio. It's a small, pretty poem, and I like it. For Day 3, I used wordcounter.com to find the 25 most used (root)words in my poetry (I only used 15 poems though), and then turned variations of those words into a teeny, tiny doesn't make much sense poem.

Over water, body
knowing down through long
lovestill watched day,
hair,feet,
dark seen lights,
river, sun black god
leaving words’
blue hand grown.


I also put that information in wordle.net and got this:




For Day 4, I finished the terzanelle I had started on the theme of the "Family Secret." I started with a free verse poem a week or so ago, and after Tony Trigilio read his villanelle composed of phrases from arguments Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife had in their KGB-tapped apartment, I wanted to see what different forms would do to what i had thought the poem was going to be about/the language/etc. It's not too bad, I might mash up the best lines of the formal versions (I might do a ghazal next) and the free verse original to form a new, better poem.
I started writing about whether or not there is sort of a child-molester gene, but the villanelle became more about women's culpability in social disparity (if that makes sense), in continuing the same patterns, I guess.
I haven't finished Day 5's translation, and haven't even started Day 6. So tomorrow, I'm going to be behind. It's okay, though, the few breakthroughs I've had are, for me, the point of this month-long exercise.

NaPoWriMo 2011

So, a couple of years ago I tried National Novel Writing Month, but my mom got cancer and a gazillion complications with surgeries and stuff. So, I put that on hold. I'll try again this November. I watched my husband back in '08 write a 100,000 word novel in 3 weeks, so it can be done. However, writing a poem a day will be good practice for me to send my inner editor/cop out for dougnuts while my writer/thief gets away with the heist. So, here's a struggling thing. I'm trying to get rid of my super-narration. Most of the time, I wouldn't post any of my own poetry on my blog, but this one doesn't really have anything I'd keep but the idea behind it.

Fumbling with latches
thick with purpose.
But not to open, no.
I am joining
sky halves with repository below.
At least, I’m trying.
Reconsider the mask,
its artificial colorings,
those terrible lips.
Who told this box
it had latches?
Who told this box
it was not of one piece?
Who put the corpse between them,
words I pretend to use
but use me?
Only be offered through
aperture of Geb and Nut
the moment before the strepitus
the moment without prejudice.