Poetry Problem No. Three

An Artistic Work of Writing that Usually is Rhythmic and has Stanzas

As a child, I was curious about our world

I was curious about dinosaurs and royalty and how to apply blush without turning into a clown (an important skill which is still unknown)

Why do kings don crowns?

Why do snow rabbits and caribou think a tundra is a good crash pad, whilst woodlands swarm with ladybugs and frogs?

My longing for wisdom was not bound by things I could touch, nor things that could actually occur

I thought about archaic myths and dark night sky

Hydras that spit liquid rock

UFO’s

If I would allow, my imagination had no limits

Floating for hours among cosmic junk I would swim though a burning galaxy and run around Saturn’s rings. I would find a shooting star and fly straight on ‘till morning to a land I’d only known from books and films, with lost boys and villains with hooks for hands.

And mountains

Lots and lots of mountains

Obviously, living in Illinois, land of Lincoln and flat ground, climbing a mountain was a fantasy.

I’d switch out corn and soy for a mountain any day.

In my mind I could climb a mountain, no, triumph against a mountain as if it was nothing. I probably thought that if I stood atop a mountain I could watch stars spring into sight and light dim into ground and tiny cars winding around roads far away.

I probably thought I would find a goblin and a pot of gold on a mountain’s top

But I didn’t. I found books about topography. And Italian royal court, and astronomy, and frogs

And that was just as good.

 An Explanation:

I found that writing a poem without the letter “e” to be a real challenge. I had to pick each word carefully and make it really count in order to make the poem convey what I wanted it to. When I edited my poem, a lot of the time I found I had put in a really elaborate word when I didn’t need to. I edited it a lot, but even now it can come off (in my opinion) kind of weird and/or too flowery and elaborate. I quickly realized that talking about what will happen now can be more complicated, and can demand the letter “e” more, than talking about time gone by. In addition to leaving out “e” I would periodically leave out another letter, like “u” or an “a” when I could have totally left it in. I did write the word “the” a lot out of habit, and then have to go back and edit my poem. I found that a writing a good poem without the letter “e” took much more time than I had thought it would. I knew that the letter “e” and the other banned letter are critical, but I hadn’t realized quite how widely utilized they are. Writing the poem can be likened to putting together a puzzle, and it reminded me a lot of a cryptogram (http://www.cryptograms.org) . In a cryptogram, you have to figure out every letter in a word, only from knowing how often each letter will occur and it can really highlight how often a letter can appear in a word or chunk of text.

** The following text has no letter restrictions **

I also made an art project to go with my poem. I liked the idea of it opening like a book and the inside of the “book” having pictures of a few of the things I talk about in the poem.

~ Ally