welcome to camp telophase

A while back I posted asking for suggestions on poetry to read and OF COURSE I ended up taking exactly none of those suggestions. What I ended up doing instead was intending to take the suggestions for weeks (months?) until last week I was listening to a podcast that funded itself with one of those internet deals where you sign up to something using their link and they get something kicked back to them.

So I'm now subscribed to Poetry magazine. Which I did because I realized their URL (poetryfoundation.org) was the same URL I always ended up at and poking through when looking for title for artwork. The subscription gets me a paper copy and a digital version (I'd have preferred digital only, but that wasn't included in the deal and would have been ten dollars more).

All this is to say, here's two poems I found I liked quite well, much to my surprise, because I don't usually like poems that look like they're meant to be performed, for whatever reason.

Sea Holly by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Tony Lopez. What I really like is the 5th section, in which the visual arrangement and the meaning of the words combine to form a picture of a cross-section of the sea, from life above the surface drifting down through the shoals of fish to the ocean floor. There's probably more meanings to be teased out of the first four parts, but they mostly served to me as pattern and rhythm.

The other was Scheherazade which is, I think, sort of rough (the author is a college freshman, so it fits), but I like the tumbling tumult of words that come to an abrupt stop before the end, as thematically appropriate. :)

I can envision either of them performed aloud.

...and in its honor, I give you what is, pobbily*, ( the worst poem ever written in the English language )

* like "possibly," only more so.