Villanelle

I don't think I've ever spent so much time writing a poem and debating where it's going. Villanelles are time-consuming as is and even more so when you have no idea what to do with it. So this became what I'd like to call "elicited cynicism," since I've found I have a pattern of writing some pretty cynical things when I don't have a theme in mind.


Innate is not Genius

You glide across this rough terrain
An afternoon, an afterthought.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

A simple star lighting the rain,
Recycling what a day had brought,
You glide across this rough terrain.

Caprices that we all maintain
Have been, by you, ventures unbought.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

So can your innocence explain—
With a lost meaning of “distraught”—
“You glide across this rough terrain?”

Simplicity has little gain
Without cognizance. That says not
“Nothing could ever give you pain.”

What sensory must be in wane,
And what a war must you have fought!
You glide across this rough terrain.
Nothing could ever give you pain.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

List Poem Exercise

This was an exercise due in class for today. I wasn't a huge fan of it, but I've been so busy that I decided to post it. We were supposed to use repetition effectively. I decided I liked to write about fall.


The leaves sleeping on the pine branches,
The leaves resting their ardent oranges and reds,
The leaves reaching their fingers to one another,
The leaves tumbling when the wind tickles them.

The breezes meandering through the thicket, like
A creek suspended by needles. The breezes picking up
The fire from the grass, joyfully, to celebrate the end
Of an epoch only captured by green. The breezes
Interlocking, changing course with
The breezes that never caress the ground.

This matted earth, partially wrangled from wear,
This matted earth, nearly soiled from the stale,
This matted earth, completely close to the past seasons.

What was August? Could anyone remember?
What was the heat like? Is the lawn still bleached?
What was of the solstice storm? What architecture was lost?

This deconstruction is natural. Time for us to observe
This deconstruction and acknowledge the skeletons
This deconstruction makes of everything. Forever,
This deconstruction will be prompt, it will be needed.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

EXCITING NEWS!

I've yet to share this with you all, but I got into English 80 at my school, which is the intro creative writing course. What does this mean? POETRY IS MY HOMEWORK! It's wonderful, it's actually multitasking to upkeep this blog! What I'll be doing is posting all the poems I write for that class up here to share with you guys, starting with the one today. Our first assignment was to write a poem that "meanders" a bit before it gets to its meaning (I write a lot of these poems, but they all have to be fresh. So no recycling allowed). This poem I wrote today on the subject of tea. I'm an avid tea drinker and probably drink more of it than any of your European grandmothers. I've never utilized tea as a metaphor in my poetry, let alone think about the symbolism that it can convey. And I like it. You will definitely see more poems about tea in the future.

Side note: the teas I describe in the end of the first stanza are white tea (made from baby tea leaves, I like to think of it as young tea), rooibos (not really tea but an herbal variety, full flavored and very energetic, for lack of a better word), Gunpowder tea (usually a green tea, which is mature leaves, named so because of how they're packaged to look like bullets and often stored in metal containers), and Pu-erh (oolong tea fermented in caves, most oxidized, "oldest" tea leaf I suppose). They are in some ways different stages in the tea's life, as well as humans (birth, adolescence, war, death).

You now know more about tea than you probably ever cared about.

DepraviTea

In under three minutes, a teakettle
Produces a raspy postlude.
The leaves bloom in the heat,
Their diffusion, their perfumes
Caress the clarity, suggest a mood:
Simple white, clean and sincere,
Rooibos from Bourbon Street.
A musket green with notes of metal,
Oolong stored in tombs.
But the actual tea is one to fear.

Harmful if swallowed. Do not ingest.

Once it is tossed, no one grieves.
The essence is the sole value.
We drink our tea with little haste,
Unaware of travesties,
Incognizant of our profanity,
The sin we never knew.
Are we steeped tealeaves?
Are we the this kind of humanity,
Exploited of our victories,
And then left to waste?

Cheesy Poem with a Cheesy Nautical Metaphor

So tomorrow begins the start of a new term, and so of course I needed to write a poem. The weirdest thing about this year is that I know what to expect, but then I have no idea what it's going to be like. Naturally, what came to mind was the sea. A sailor may think he knows the waters that he frequents, but they are different every day, every voyage, and so the best he can do is assume that anything will be partially familiar and partially chance. Thus I came up with this.

It's nice writing poems again. I usually balk at first, but once I realize that I really should be writing, I let it all flow out. Yay, powers of inertia!

I have been here before,
But in the second time around,
Differences abound.
A wave breaching a familiar shore
And yet aware of little more.

So what can I expect, or brace?
As if the certainty dried out
When the sail came about
And I returned to a place
That thrives in morphing space.

So I close my eyes, let the rope slip,
For I must conserve when needed,
When adversity is greeted,
The weather may be fair this trip,
But many forces damage a ship.

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Posting more often?

I'm trying to ease my way back into this blog after writing so much so often in Norway (I SWEAR I'll finish the project, or maybe restart it. It failed the day that I decided not to post, since you have to post EVERY DAY. This is a long parenthetical). Anyway, I traveled back to college today, and so I felt like the occasion was momentous enough to REQUIRE me to go back to writing a poem, even though I wasn't all crazy about it. Be that as it may, I'm still satisfied with the results.
Also I'm not gonna sleep well tonight because I'm so excited for moving in tomorrow.

When any other figure is wrong,
When any other weather is a storm,
When any other joy is amiss.

I may be one to stand alone,
Yet this puts me in a perfect tone.

But is this home?
Is that what I call this?

Was I without it for so long,
Or does it assume a form
Of whatever I need, like foam?

Unpublished Material, ©2011 Cali Digre

Uhh... hi?

I'm terrible with starting things in the beginning. I write my poems backwards, write my intro paragraphs last, and hate hate hate coming up with titles. If you ever wanna see the nexus of my poems, read the last two lines.

Except this one. This one just started at the beginning and kept going. This is about a month's worth of poemlessness in my system fighting its way out in this pretty cynical piece. Anyway, as per usual I've been writing about the weather and the landscape, and how I cannot stand Minnesota summers. For me, they're just a humid incubus and do nothing more than make me sick and feel perpetually overheated. I also dislike it because many days in the summer are just endlessly the same. Winter can have surprises, good or bad, and it is a much more divisive season. People love it or hate it, deal with the snow or relish it. Most people uniformly think "yeah, summer's nice."

What an introduction. Here's the poem.

Rotten August

The trees are just an imprint
Fading in the humid light
At the end of August. The birds,
They look at migration as a glint
Of hope, of salvation through flight.
And what do I feel? I cannot say.
The summer exhales, and her words
Crumble in the flooded grass, decay.
Is this what the end of creation looked like?
Is this what the creation of our end conveys?
I cannot be sad or admire these matted days,
Not when death hasn’t made a strike.