Category: Poetry

Beneath snow,
ice — an invisible
layer of danger

Tread carefully
where nature is known
to harden in form

We wander this world
always on the edge
of collapse

This poem was written in response to a prompt at Open Write, with encouragement to observe something and write about it. We are in the aftermath of a winter storm here, and just walking is rather dangerous right now. A layer of thick ice is beneath everything.

Peace (go slow),
Kevin

Worse than silence,
the saxophone sounds
wounded, like an old cat
in the corner of a room –
out of tune and out of
sorts – my breath, of course,
out of sync with its notes:
it’s broke but can be fixed;
it’s this I think about
in the days it lays open
on the workshop table,
the technician like surgeon
taking my Martin apart –
reduced to pads and keys
and levers and springs –
things just scattered about –
piece by piece by piece,
until that moment
of re-connection,
when repairs
have been complete

This was a poem inspired by a theme of healing and hurt over at Open Write this morning. I recently had to get my Martin tenor sax repaired, so I used that incident for inspiration here.

Peace (sounds like loss),
Kevin

This is an etheree/mirror poem, via Open Write. I used the prose poem “Vintage Vanity” by Terrance Hayes for the text on which I built the poem.

Inks
of rain;
Life, described,
then realigned –
fits between lines in
unanimous silence;
Choose a word, then a moment,
to edit, design, distribute,
as nothing burns outside our bodies:
poetry as broken intimacy

Peace (and ink),
Kevin

This is a true poem, inspired by my friend, who always tunes to the Beatles’ classic song. The poem was inspired, too, by a one-word prompt off Mastodon: Blackbird.

Peace (at the edge of night),
Kevin

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

A collection of short morning haiku poems.

Peace (in three lines),
Kevin

Shards that, however carefully arranged,
Are indistinguishable from random
Scatters of letters and spaces on the page

— page 164, Context Collapse (A Poem Containing A History Of Poetry)
by Ryan Ruby

Poem is loop
is poem is
loop is
poem

---

This is another in my making poems as I am reading sections of Ryan Ruby’s poem/book, and my poems are never a direct response to his book/poem but more a wondering or a wandering off his some of his words and passages, at times taken out of context from his book (but in doing so, remains in line with the theme of the book).

Peace (on itself),
Kevin

I’m not sure what I am doing here but I am in full play mode with the poems I am writing in response to lines and passages from Context Collapse (see here and here and here, for all my poems). In this latest iteration, I was trying to strip all of the words from my poem, written under the theme/reference to paratext (all the writing that happens around a given piece of writing, explaining context, publication information and writer intent, etc.)

Here, then, all words are lost from context.

Peace (like words lost in a cloud),
Kevin

I was thinking about the poems I am writing as response to different lines from Context Collapse (a book-long poem by Ryan Ruby that explores the history of poetry) and how I could “collapse” the poems further with an app that I use from time to time for visual wordplay. I suppose I could also argue that by taking some of the lines out of Ryan Ruby’s book, an using only pieces of the larger poem for inspiration, I am also collapsing the larger meaning of his intent (sorry, Ryan!) and changing the context.

In terms of context collapse, what happens here with these particular video poems is that all line breaks, all pauses, all spacial indicators in the original poems I wrote are now gone, and a somewhat randomized element of the app breaks the poem apart at different times as well as stitches parts of the poem together at other times.

I composed the short piece of music with the idea of capturing the slight feel of falling apart.

Peace (under the rubble),
Kevin