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List of Member Poems

Premium Member The Price of Loans

Her suffering was her currency as she would trade in sympathies among a band of devils driven wild by their needs to be possessed and to possess in a world seldom fair being built in complications simple heads never seem to ever understand and.

She was Magnificent.

They way she tore me down. Only one other thing had ever hurt me more.

Premium Member Review Sep 18

Jack Kerouac, the 50's Beat poet with this English language style 'haiku' form does just to the western world classic features of the tercet form ..no title ..free syllabics..but the last line keeps to the 'happening' moment that identifies it as 'hiku"

Canadian born Jack Kerouac
a poet of the 50's 'Beat gen' pack
Known for his western  'hiku'
keeping to its features then so new

 stream of consciousness spontaneous prose
how his famous 'on the road' novel flows

A Bundle Of Nerves

A bundle of nerves tied in a knot as tight and as tangled as eldredge, around my neck, while the fuss of the life around me drowns me to chaos still. I go into waters so deep it gets hard to swim back up. The minuscule parts of my muscle throb and fight my being in a different kind of pain, wanting to be freed. Wanting to run a direction so divergent we may never find our way back home. And yet the longing for a explicit homestead stays. 
The head of mine is participation to an all-time war, that only and only asks for my sanity as its reward. Every bone in my body gets the signal through every other fiber, to shut it up!...and yet I can't. 
I think about jumping off of very tall somethings, but a voice in my head laughs at my own visions of a certain indiscretion. Like a breed of my own monsters calling out my cowardice. While a soft, warm being hides behind the door forcibly closed with locks too hard for her to open. She knows something I don't. 
The volume, pressure, expansion, contraction- nothing works through the cavity. Nothing bleeds for lucidity, only for the curse I cage myself with.


The artist is absent, I guess I killed her off

The artist is absent, i guess i killed her off. Built her, just to break her- like a ceramic cup in the decor. A sway and the pieces fall, broken down in chunks of her pain. In the story of everything, the art suffers- tight ship, bad weather- nothing helps. There's no shore to go to. You stay with the wind, flock with the waves like a clueless bird, hoping someday you'll reach a comfort of a place you get to call home. I didn't feed her soul- with words full of love, hate, sad, happy- all she can feel is a hole, in her life where the content used to be. Where the quill-and-ink rested along with a page, ready to be scribbled, ready to be filled with her mind's rage. The ink bleeds once or not at all. It's tiring, having to walk in the spring season, fresh air, new hopes different dreams and yet feeling like the fall. 
Every step she takes, every mistake she makes, all the roadblocks that make her feel nothing at all. Carnations over her gazettes, no scriptures, no memories to recall. It has faded into nothing yet she bleeds it somehow. The writer is absent, I think I've killed her off. Clueless in her own world somehow.

Premium Member Review Sep 17

Leigh Hunt's double quatrain -linked centres around 'Time you thief' ,a bio romantic memory of youth from the nostalgia of old age...a typical recurring happening I can confirm as someone very aged myself

Premium Member STRAND POETIC REVIEW sep 16

Eclipse Concrete poems of Alan Riddell 
With 50 word pictures( this short book of concrete poems  was in 1972) truly innovative using a typewriter keyboard to create concrete poetry

.The current expanded digital keyboard of the modern era facilitates 

greater pictorial shape poetry

( as illustrated for example by the 'emagi' reverse

 ekphrasis poetic form) which owes much to the

 concepts displayed half a century earlier .


Concrete poet Alan Riddell

with the typewriter  did excel

Picture poems were his (u) (s) (p)

created with a simple tab-key


Premium Member STRAND REVIEW Sep 15


WHY AMERICAN  COLONIES WERE LOST  a lyrical local guide by US PoetrySoup poet is

Massey's outstanding sonnet poetry piece (second of the series) penned in the cross genre  'literary poetics ' follows in the footsteps of ground - breakingauthor Martin Gray,but extending it structurally ,beyond iambic trimeter ,thus bringing into play both rhyme&sonnet syllabics.
A 160 page poem with15 chapters ,each with a historic background intro) The poem has the dual bonus of being for loversof the combination of both poetry&history .

Hier

Yesterday, who knows where I was, lost in my thoughts.
Yesterday, a morning when you wake up in Moscow or Budapest.
Yesterday, a day when the light caresses other horizons.
Yesterday, a night when the darkness of a sky resembles yours.

Yesterday, I am already far away, my body carries my melancholy.
Yesterday is the memory of a living breath that left me.
Yesterday, I whirl in the four winds and drift away from tomorrow.
Yesterday, images build the memory of small moments.

Yesterday, awaited messages that warm our hearts.
Yesterday, sufferings that broke you and left you like an orphan.
Yesterday, a flight of swallows leaving an electric wire.
Yesterday, the warmth of your gaze lost in mine.

Yesterday, my words that play, trying to find yours again.
Yesterday, the beginning of an end, or at least a road fading away.
Yesterday, I wish you had never existed so I wouldn’t have to mourn you.
Yesterday, I beg you, stay today or become the day before yesterday.


Joel Charvillat .

Premium Member Review Sept 14

a cummings apt free verse personification presented LOWER CASE style as two quatrains... atypical short&to the point

Edward Estlin Cummings so inventive
penned poetry so sensitive
He loved to write in lower case style
interspersed by CAPITALS once in a while

 initialled as Edward Eselm
originality known throughout the poetic realm
In the vertical not horizontal
whose lower case was so unusual

e e cummings a poet, i be
 this is how i found my u s p
in verse to be so 'original'
lower case & in the vertical

Premium Member STRAND REVIEW Sep 13

Sarumino -BASHO MONKEYS RAINCOAT is unique in Renku ,the ancient collaborative form(36 stanza linked verse poems)with examples from Basho(and his disciples...)namely Winters First shower/Summer moon/Katydid/and Plum young herbs, considered to the most typical of Basho's mature style conveying his attitude to life & compiled during his 1689 'Back Roads' pilgrimage ,the translator/editor adds both a cultural commentary for each stanza therein and an index of informative notes thereto


A haikuist was Matsuo Basho
his masterwork,Kasen *you know
He practiced this long poetic sequence
a 36 stanza poem recited in length

*www.jstor.org/stable/2718744

Premium Member Review Sep 12

An atypical Carroll comic conversational satire style poesy in three voices in 40/40/28 tercet stanzas in the series of this genre to which he is identified & on which his reputation & epitaph rests

Lewis Carroll famed now for 'Alice'
a wonderland lass with no vice
Also in verse he did persist
Jabberwocky revealed him a linguist

Children's books of worldwide acclaim
Whimsical humour in nonsense rhyme
Of childhood days in summertime-
Its acrostic brought Liddel's fame,
The story ending with Alice's full name

Premium Member Review Sep 11

Emerson ,a 'literary lion ' of his era 1803 -1882, (& of Unitarian sect) in this abab quatrain 'Sacrifice' alludes to Christ's redeeming free gift to confessing sinners ,(those true believers )who then accept


Ralph Waldo Emerson
a minister unitarian
When filled with consuming doubt
prosody poured forth..without

Premium Member Review Sep 10

John Donne* (1572 – March 31, 1631 Jacobean poet, satirist, lawyer and preacher/cleric in the Church of England considered the founding figure of the so-called metaphysical poetry movement dwells in this 6/8/6/8 lined quatrain of  stanzas  on love the other topic on which his well deserved 'master' poet' reputation famously rests.His analytical mind draws out universal truths recognised by we favoured with true love experientially our lives

*English cleric one John Donne
oneday his poetics had just begun
A master of verse so erotic
so divine & metaphysique

Premium Member STRAND REVIEW sep 9

WCW 
'this is just to say' & 'dear Bill' reply ( see above links)
 The now famous three quatrain 'matter of fact' classic free verse of an everyday event.
& reply  a three stanza five-liner thought to be an early example of 'found poetry' from a 'real time ' domestic note

William Carlos Wiliams in his day
noted for his 'This is just to Say'
An example of short pointed prose
guess its how 'Red Wheebarrow' arose

Premium Member STRAND POETIC REVIEW sep 8

GUTTURAL MUSE by SEAMUS HEANEY 


A classic piece of observation from a hotel window ,in just three five liners .A view of universal everyday scenes from a  'detached 'poetic  viewpoint with imaginative ,yet wistful digressions of the older observer 'poet'*

*Ulster poet Seamus Heaney
ever a favourite with me
In which nostalgic childhood shines through
to become a Nobel winner too

Lyrical in beauty,dug from
the depths of the past.
A storyteller, articulate in
elegaic stanza writing words
to last.Of farm life and childhood, 
deep in Irish  terra firma in 
which he and his poetry stood.
A delightful imagist quality 
of 'as is moments' once 
frozen in memory,and now 
released for our delight .His
triplet,quatrain and quintain form 
brings a succinctness of thought
combined with the commonplace

A Tribute to Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

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Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.

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