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| Photo by Wilda Morris |
Books, books, books. Books play an important role in our lives. And they make good topics for poems.
Here is one of my poems:
It was the age of innocence
he was the stranger, enticing, exciting
with great
expectations, I entered
his brave new
world
joined him on the
road
until we were
hungry enough
to kill a
mockingbird
I wanted a room
with a view
but discovered I
was not beloved
no more hugging,
caressing
I said a farewell
to arms
my Ulysses had
become Dracula
the very heart of
darkness
I was just the fly on the wall
I became an
American tragedy
shut up in a bleak
house
as I lay dying,
I could see that
everything
I cared about
was gone with the
wind
~ Wilda Morris
First published in Encore: Prize Poems 2021(National Federation of State Poetry Societies).
As you have undoubtedly figured out, although the poem could be said to be a lament, it is playful. I filled the poems with the names of books—counting the title, at least seventeen book titles appear in the poem.
In Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s prize-winning poem, “Two Views of the Plaza,” she takes a very different approach to the subject of book. Her poem is a social commentary, where the tragedy referred to in the first stanza is real. The poem can be read as a comment on history and also as a warning for the future.
Two Views of the Plaza
May 1935
He’s a proud young Berliner, a university student
marching past cheering crowds as large as a city
along the triumphant torch-lit parade route
to the Opera Plaza. There, some 20,000 books,
piled high in waiting trucks, will be passed
hand to hand toward a massive log pyre, and
he will be among the first to heave black-listed
volumes into the flames—the paper roar
rising with passionate speech and song.
April 1995
On Yom HaShoah, a student from Tel Aviv
kneels at the plaza’s new thick glass square,
set flush into the stone pavement where once
crowds applauded as banned pages fueled
an infamous book-burning. He stares down into
bare white shelves of the below-ground memorial,
Berlin’s blank library for 20,000 ghosted tomes.
Century-old words on a plaque sting his eyes—
the bronzed quote of a banned Jewish poet:
That was only a prelude,
there where they burn books,
they burn in the end people.
–Heinrich
Heine, 1820
~ Kathy Lohrum Cotton
This poem is published in Kathy’s 2020 poetry collection, Common Ground. It can be purchased at https://www.amazon.com/Common-Ground-Kathy-Lohrum-Cotton/dp/B085DTFTM7.
Another approach to poetry about books can be seen in the following poem, which relates to one particular volume:
Phantom at Arrowhead
. . . one grand hooded phantom, like a snow
hill in the air.
~
Herman Melville (Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick)
I peered out the
porthole of Melville’s office
at Arrowhead and
saw Mount Greylock
pale blue in
summer light. Whale-shaped,
seeming to swim,
calm in tranquil green waters
along the horizon.
Nothing haunting
or horrific.
Nothing malevolent.
But when winter
wraps the Berkshires
in frigid air and
snow sweeps in from the west,
that creature
turns phantasmagoric,
a great white
poltergeist. Mist rises
from the specter like
the spouting
of a sperm whale,
mesmerizing, menacing.
That apparition
disturbed Melville’s sleep,
pursued him in
dreams through the dead of night
as he pursued it.
Obsessed as Ahab,
he rose each day
to write again about gods,
cultures, and
people as changeable as the mountain,
as unpredictable
and malicious as Moby Dick.
~ Wilda Morris
From Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (Kelsay Books, 2019). Available for purchase at https://kelsaybooks.com/products/pequod-poems-gamming-with-moby-dick, or through amazon.com
The October Challenge:
The challenge for this month is a poem related to books (or a book). Your poem may be serious or humorous. The poem may be metaphoric, or literal. It could be about a book you loved as a child or one you read last week. A book read aloud by or to you. Prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction. A book you disliked. A book report assignment for school. A library. Use your imagination! Note that the blog format does not accommodate long lines; if they are used, they have to be broken in two, with the second part indented (as in the poem “Lilith,” one of the May 2018 winners), or the post has to use small print.
1-Title your poem unless it is in a form that discourages titles.
2-Single-space.
3-Put your name, a brief third-person bio, and your email address in that order under your poem. If the poem has been previously published, please put the publication data under the poem also.
4-Please keep the poem on the left margin (standard 1” margin). Do not put any part of your submission on a colored background. Do not use a fancy font and do not use a header or footer.
5-You may submit a published poem if you retain copyright, but please include publication data. This applies to poems published in books, journals, newspapers, or on the Internet. Poems already used on this blog are not eligible to win, but the poets may submit a different poem, unless the poet has been a winner the last three months.
6-The deadline is October 15. Poems submitted after the deadline will not be considered. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards; however, winners are published on this blog. Please don’t stray too far from “family-friendly” language (some children and teens read this blog).
7- No simultaneous submissions of previously unpublished poems, please. You should know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published.
8-The poet retains copyright on each poem. If a previously unpublished poem wins and is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog. I do not register copyright with the US copyright office, but by US law, the copyright belongs to the writer unless the writer assigns it to someone else.
9-Decision of the judge or judges is final.
10-If the same poet wins three months in a row (which has not happened thus far), he or she will be asked not to submit the following two months.
How to Submit Your Poem:
1-Send one poem only to wildamorris4[at]gmail[dot]com (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”). The poem must respond in some way to the specific challenge for the month.
2-Put “October Poetry Challenge Submission” FOLLOWED BY YOUR NAME in the subject line of your email. Include a brief bio that can be printed with your poem if you are a winner this month.
3-Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, so be sure that you put your name (exactly as you would like it to appear if you do win) at the end of the poem.
4-Poems may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment or both (Doc, Docx, rich text or plain text; no pdf files, please). Please do not indent the poem or center it on the page. It helps if you submit the poem in the format used on the blog (Title and poem left-justified; title in bold (not all capital letters); your name at the bottom of the poem). 6-Also, please do not use multiple spaces instead of commas in the middle of lines. I have no problem with poets using that technique (I sometimes do it myself). However, I have difficulty getting the blog to accept and maintain extra spaces.
Poems shorter than 40 lines are generally preferred but longer poems will be considered.
Bios:
Kathy Lohrum Cotton is a southern Illinois poet and editor whose work appears in literary journals, magazines and anthologies and also as exhibits of poetry combined with her digital collage artwork. Cotton is the author of two chapbooks: the illustrated poetry book, Deluxe Box of Crayons, and the 2020 collection, Common Ground. She supports the art of poetry as a board member of the Illinois State Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and has served as annual editor for three of the Federation’s books of prize-winning poetry.
Wilda Morris , Workshop Chair of Poets and Patrons of Chicago and a past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, has published numerous poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications, including The Ocotillo Review, Rockford Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Modern Haiku, and Journal of Modern Poetry. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku, including the 2019 Founders’ Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She has published two books of poetry, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant (RWG Press) and Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (Kelsay Books).
© Wilda Morris
