It is the same song, second verse — I am always whinging how each challenge we set ourselves as Poetry Sisters (plus Sara’s brother JC, who is our collective plus one poet) during this 12 Months, 12 Poems thing is challenging in a different way than the last. I fully expected the three classified ad haiku to be easy-peasy; after all, I do a daily haiku or senryu every National Poetry Month… however, after my learned sisters talked about the form – its purpose and meaning, and the lazy people who just worry about syllable count and not the punch of the final line nor the precise wording nor beautiful language — I started feeling like this was a little beyond me.
Granted, I have been in the U.S. now for a solid week, and am still slightly travel-fuzzed, so I kind of have an excuse. My brain hasn’t caught up; I seem to want to have lunch in the UK, so am waking up between 2-3 a.m. for my usual 1 p.m. repast — it’s doing my sleep no favors. Despite the shortness of the form, the classified theme seemed really overwhelming. I don’t remember ever placing an ad in a paper in my life, and even the simple language – which pay by the word, right? – seemed to elude me. Fortunately, when we opened the group document where we share our work, other people admitted to struggling, and “threw” haiku at the group wall, to see what stuck.
One of the goals of this 12 Months, 12 Poems exercise, for me, at least, is to make friends with failure — to be best mates with mediocrity and intimate with imperfection, — and to move on. I am just going to do that, okay? I don’t really love any of these, except a little, in the way one loves a lost tooth, or a gallstone one has passed. (Not that I’ve ever done that, but when I was in college, my boss… had hers put… in a baby food jar. And brought it to show her student workers. I’ve often thought she probably needed… hobbies…) My feeling on these is that they’re mine – I did them – but it’s still not quite… what I’d call a great job. But, the point is to DO it, right? *sigh* Meh. Whatever.
CLASSIFIEDS
$.05 per word
Caveat emptor, people.
BUY/SELL/TRADE
for sale: one wardrobe
once owned by True Believer
oak. no secret door.
LOST AND FOUND
Missing: narrative
arc, plot, characters: Greatest
story never told
PERSONALS, MISSED CONNECTIONS
hard-backed bookie seeks
shelf-conscious thriller for close
reading pot-boilers
Local papers in the Poetry Sister Cities are making a killing on ads this week.
The Sara Quarterly has some great ads this month.
The Kelly Traveler has wildlife, and cabana boys – can’t beat that.
The Tricia Courier offers optional head-losing for any boys in the area,
The Liz Intelligencer has an offer on stolen hours,
The Daily Laura offers wrecking balls, and buzzes about personal ads.
And finally, Andromeda Planet is in search of everything, in cheese sauce.
It was so funny how such short snippets of poetry – when we finally managed to get them on paper – revealed so much. That’s the beauty of a shorter form. So much is packed down into succinctness.
More poetry can be found this Poetry Friday at The Opposite of Indifference, which is always an intriguing name for a blog. Cheers! May your garage sales and classified scouring go well this week.
Happy Weekend!
