Category Archives: Poetry

As the last days of February’s Poetry Port project for CLMOOC were winding down, I saw my friend Greg sharing a poem in which he echoed his own daily poems throughout the month. That inspired me to go into the spreadsheet where people were requesting poems from CLMOOC poets and work on a found poem of phrases and words and ideas from their submissions.

You can read the found poem here. But I also turned it into a video …

Peace (flowing through),
Kevin

 

All month, I’ve been writing poems each morning to a theme via CLMOOC’s Poetry Port — a project designed to spread collaboration and support through various networks. Along with the daily writing, a number of us were writing poems for others — sometimes as unexpected gifts and sometimes for the recipient’s request. The Thinglink above is my curation of my own poems, some via audio and some via text.

Today, the last day, the daily poem theme was not Farewell, but instead, Welcome.

My poem:

Every Exit
infers an Enter

it all depends
upon your frame
of mind

Welcome, then,
to the poem’s
end

Peace (pass it along),
Kevin

 

I had this idea of going back to a poem that I wrote, rather quickly, for the theme of Memories for CLMOOC’s month of poetry, and think a bit deeper on why I wrote what I wrote. To be honest, the comment annotations are small — you can get a closer look here, if you want.

My hope was to uncover some of my intentions with the small poem, to surface some of my moves. I would not call this poem anything extraordinary or special or even one of my best poems this month, but there are elements of personal story and intentional rhyming, as well as regrets about the ending, that made this poem worth a second look. For me, anyway.

Read more about what we’re up to this month with CLMOOC’s Poetry Port.

Peace (dig in),
Kevin

I spent some time yesterday, writing poems for friends. They were unexpected, I should think — for me, who wrote them on a spur of moment as part of our work this month via CLMOOC, and for my friends, who were probably surprised by the poems. (Learn more about what we’re up to and how you can submit words and get a free poem in return)

First, above, is a small poem that is less me than Greg. I grabbed a few lines from a poem that Greg had posted yesterday on the daily theme of “simplicity,” and the only thing I added was a comma, after moments. In doing so, though, his lines became its own separate poem, a sort of koan.

Second, this poem is for Ron, whose work as an artist is always interesting to me. He makes picture books and does daily artwork and sketches, and is always up for another connected adventure.

Ron and I know each other through CLMOOC and DS106 and other adventures. His poem began in digital format, but then I wanted a more static version, too.

Finally, this poem is for Raymond.

Our paths crossed years ago in CLMOOC, and I bought his small book of poems, a book that inspired the poem. We still interact now and then, and although I think our political views are quite different, I enjoy understanding Raymond’s perspective and reading his poetry.

Peace (gift it forward),
Kevin

Each morning in February, I have been turning to the above calendar of prompts for poetry as part of a month-long CLMOOC connected writing project. (See more about what we’re up to here, and add a few words to a Poem Request form and get yourself a poem.)

Not every day’s poem is a keeper, although I do have a site where I write the poems every morning, and I post them over at Mastodon and on Twitter, this month. Here are five recent poems that I think are worth a second look.

Theme: Negotiate

A writer
always negotiates
the correct word
the right phrase
the perfect order
of story, set into motion,
though such terms
never fully placates
the mind, which demands
devotion to craft,
an unending ocean
of revision and draft

Theme: Kindness

Sometimes
it is a bit like
flying blind;
this being kind

Theme: Love

For, despite
the commercial
value of such an
over-sold,
red-hearted,
designated day
of purchase power,
remember, too,
that

love becomes us

Long after
the shelves clear,
we’ll still be
holding hands
and whispering
secrets together

Theme: Friendship

The bracelet snaps
my attention; she points
and explains that she’s
the purple, and her companion,
the pink, the two of them
twined forever on her wrist,
twisted forever together
with fingers, in friendship;
all while she’s reminding me
of this in her quiet voice,
as if I had forgotten, but
I had not

Theme:  Peace

Meet me where
the river releases
eddies, small clusters
of currents over
roots and rocks,
where we’ll race our
fingers over water
of mountain glacial melt
and time’s perpetual tears,
where we’ll glide our fingers
over the swirling surface,
until the tension becomes
calm; the circles, smooth;
the place where
we practice peace

I hope you find time to write some poems, too.

Peace (left all around us),
Kevin

I saw a post from my CLMOOC friend, Greg, about the writing of a poem for our month of writing poems. The poem is called Inertia of Art (Create) and in his reflection at his blog, he talks about his process of writing poetry — which is very different from mine. His process involves a lot of internal wrestling and frustration. Mine, just sort of flows. I can’t explain or understand it, most of the time. Often, I don’t even know what I have until I’m done (and it may be that what I have when I am done is badly-written poem).

As I was reading Greg’s reflection, and then his poem (somehow, I did this in revere), some of his phrases began to jump out at me, and I began a new poem – braided with the threads of his, so that his lines — now removed and isolated from his writing — began to inform my own new poem, braided within his. See the image above for how it turned out.

This morning, I thought about Greg’s regular recording of him, reading his poems in his voice, which he does for both accessibility of text and to connect with the poet’s voice. I decided that the poetic braid needed another dimension — audio  — his voice and mine, reading this new poem together.

I had to go deep into the Source Code of Greg’s blog to find his embedded audio file. I then downloaded it and spliced his words apart in Soundtrap (but any audio editor would have sufficed), then recorded my lines, in-between his. The result is a two-speaker poem, braided together.

Peace (in poems and partnerships),
Kevin