for Ken
The burn pile is full of branches
You wrested from a neglected arbor.
They will light the November sky
When we find the perfect chilly night. Continue reading “Nuisance”
Author: ROMPoetry
The Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry is an interactive museum where the common person and poetry meld. ROMP is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.
Identification or How To Tell If You are Dead
I enjoy old books about the craft of poetry. My favorite, which I refer to often, is The Winged Horse by Joseph Auslander and Frank Ernest Hill from 1927. I have recently been reading The Order of Poetry, a 1961 text by David Silver.
In these old texts about poetry’s craft, I like the unequivocal language, the arrogance of intent: We are writing about the most important thing in the world, the dedication to specific words within a poem, the love of . . . a pervasive yet maligned art.
Silver just gave me a new way of explaining the difference between metaphor and simile (it seems so trite, so inadequate just to say that one is direct and one uses “like” or “as”—it’s like a kindergarten definition, isn’t it?). First Silver is highfalutin: “The differences between metaphor and simile are in grammatical procedure, in the degree of demand on the reader’s imagination, and in psychological effect, but not in kind.” Hmmmm. But he gets clearer: Continue reading “Identification or How To Tell If You are Dead”
On the Line
I still show up to find out
what happened to me
and the rest of us, to know how a plot
continues without the characters,
how my turn of phrase
feels in someone else’s mouth,
in a different land, in a
country beyond our imagining. Continue reading “On the Line”
Poem for Lewis Black
NOTE: I am going to a Lewis Black concert in Tulsa tonight and will attempt to give him this poem. Wish me luck.
Oklahoma Welcomes Lewis Black
We’re angry, too.
We have teachers judged by the highest standards
Making the lowest pay in the nation.
We embody Labor Omnia Vincit
Because we are cowboys and girls, waitresses,
Truck drivers, teachers and artists, dreamers
And pharmacists, customer service minimum-wage
Fast wood workers and tractor repairmen, beauty
Shop Labor Conquers All Things operators. Continue reading “Poem for Lewis Black”
The List, The Poem, The List
I am not a poet.
I don’t understand poetry.
I can’t write a poem.
I am not poetic.
The mantra of negatives,
Half spoken truthfully,
Half intended to hide
The fact that Continue reading “The List, The Poem, The List”
The Second Isolde
I hired the best musicians to beautify the background
through dinner meals or as we sat at the fire,
and I played the violin, taught by a traveling magician.
I learned the songs of my people and of his also.
I had a voice the animals in the field would stop to hear.
I bathed in herbs the magician gave me and smoothed
my arms and legs with perfumed oils that came Continue reading “The Second Isolde”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 