Mindful Writing Challenge: Day 23

I feel tears coming as Lady in Red plays on the car stereo

I've heard this song played many times while I'm driving

but today it has touched me more deeply than ever before

I've become the words, the music, the singer, the lady in red

A Fool's Paradise of Free Holiday Reading

electric blue

beds are burning

like a virgin

“Electric Blue” by Icehouse

“Beds Are Burning” by Midnight Oil

“Like A Virgin” by Madonna

Above is my short found poem from song titles that was published in Aubrie Cox's latest Yay Words! project, Fool's Paradise. You can find out all about it and download your free copy here. Enjoy!

Fool's Paradise cover by editor Aubrie Cox

Band Names + Song Titles + Poetry =

. . . Aubrie Cox's new challenge, of course! Over at her blog Yay Words! she's looking for short found poems using song titles, band names and the like. See all the guidelines here. Deadline is Thursday, 20th December, after which she'll put out one of her brilliant pdf books for us all to gush over. :)

Here's one of her examples:

dante’s prayer
lost in the echo
wild mountain thyme

“Dante’s Prayer” – Loreena McKennitt
“Lost in the Echo” – Linkin Park
“Wild Mountain Thyme” by Sarah Calderwood

Summertime childhood memory

August 25th NaHaiWriMo prompt is "summertime childhood memory", provided by Cara Holman. 

midnight frog song from the swimming pool

Find out more about the 31 Different NaHaiWriMo Prompters for August 2012 here.

The Longest Title I've Ever Used For A Poem

...Is on this found poem I wrote in 2008. It was the first found poem I'd ever written and I really enjoyed playing with the words from the book On Writing Hits Songs, which I never would have otherwise picked up. (The challenge set by my former poetry group was to choose a book on something you didn't know about to write your found poem). I'm very pleased to say that this piece of found poetry has finally found its home within the pages of Takahe 75 (Issue 1, 2012). 

One place a good song doesn’t come from is the brain

By Kirsten Cliff

Your hit song needs a tune:

geek rock, pure pop, short-back-and-sides

teenage craze, cocaine cool, extra firepower

primitive blues, cultural cringe, glam-rock chic

scurried around the stage like nervous kittens

It needs a rhythm:

spiky, rock and roll, one-man jukebox

piss-take, half-baked, shoe-gazing outsider

irony, heavy-handed, half send-up, half celebration

echoing a police siren going past his house

It needs a verse:

moptops, British skiffle riff, too-clever-by-half songs

straightforward popsmith, stream-of-consciousness

tap into the hoon in us all

And a chorus:

repetition, repetition, repetition

short, hit-filled, sound from another planet

wordplays involving spooning under the moon

It needs a title:

shrewd musical operator

dislocate all the styles, bundle them together

big fat hit songs that the whole world wants to sing

And it needs to sound as if it’s about something:

whatever works, perfection isn’t the point

Notes: A found poem based on On Writing Hit Songs by Simon Morris (Wellington: Four Winds Press, 2003), from the Montana Estates Essay Series edited by Lloyd Jones. 

You can read another of my found poems here called "Receive Dreams as Messengers from Another Realm", which is the second longest title I've ever used for a poem! :)

 

In Memoriam, Svetlana Marisova

Haiku written for friend and fellow haiku poet Svetlana Marisova,

during her illness, and on her passing 7/9/2011

winter sun...
my thoughts again
turn to you

winter breeze...

your haiku song in

these wind chimes

                 winter's end...

                         the world through this

                         blackbird's song

Please do take the time to read some of Svetlana's haiku on her website here and as Featured Poet in Simply Haiku here.