The Hairbag Poet-Extinction

January 26, 2018March 7, 2018jeanjames 8 Comments

Hi and welcome to my Friday series The Hairbag Poet.

You can read about the history of this series here.

In the blogging world Fridays are known as Poetry Friday. You can read about Poetry Friday here. I will plan on posting The Hairbag Poet each Friday.

Today the Hairbag Poet, (that’s me), will be discussing the Soliloquy. I just love the way the word soliloquy rolls off the tongue, like lullaby or happy hour. It’s a great word all by itself, but ironically it defines a great many spoken words. Soliloquy comes from the Latin sōliloquium meaning a talking to oneself.

According to Poetry Foundation (2017), “A soliloquy is a monologue in which a character in a play expresses thoughts and feelings while being alone on stage. Soliloquies allow dramatists to communicate information about a character’s state of mind, hopes, and intentions directly to an audience. Soliloquies became a dramatic convention in the 1590s and 1600s, when playwrights used the technique to allow characters to reveal important plot points.” Of course we all are familiar with the master of the soliloquy, William Shakespeare, and some of his famously written soliloquys from the plays Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello.

Hamlet:
To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them…

A brief 39-word excerpt out of a 278-word soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Brilliant right?

I hope you enjoy these posts. Thanks for stopping by and reading, and please feel free to post your own poetry in the comments if you feel inspired by the photographs. I always love reading other peoples perspective on “art”.

The Hairbag Poet

Photo by Donald titled, “Fog! Desolation! The dinosaur cookie goes extinct.”

Extinction

I’m not extinct…
Yet.
Try as they might, I run for cover.
Neither meteor nor volcano will be my demise.
Hark,
who goes there?
My foggy cloak’s opacity is waning.
Damn these jimmies!
Oh how my gait dulls.
My wilting dough is no match against natures icy tundra.
Hot breath wisps at the nape of my neck,
causing prickly hairs to rise like quills en garde.
My nostrils inhale the hungered anticipation.
The time is near.
I too will disappear without a trace.
A scientific mystery or a confectionary folklore?
Alas, a crumbly remnant in the fossil record.
Indeed
This is the way the cookie crumbles.

The Hairbag Poet-“Nature Calls”

January 19, 2018March 7, 2018jeanjames 5 Comments

Hi and welcome to my Friday series titled The Hairbag Poet.

You can read about the history of this series here.

In the blogging world Fridays are know as Poetry Friday. You can read about Poetry Friday here.

The other day I was reading this beautiful book of poetry Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold, by Joyce Sidman & Rick Allen, and came across the poetic term Pantoum. Being the Hairbag poet that I am, I was unfamiliar with this term. The Poetry Foundation (2017) defines Pantoum as “A Malaysian verse form adapted by French poets and occasionally imitated in English. It comprises a series of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The second and fourth lines of the final stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza.” I thought it would be fun to try my own Pantoum, and it was!

The Hairbag Poet

Photo by Donald. “Nature Calls”

Nature Calls

Four empty, ready porta potties lined up in a row,
Green, cold, and stiff waiting in the fallen snow.
Four empty, ready porta potties poised as cold winds blow,
Waiting for the bipedals who really have to go!

Green, cold, and stiff waiting in the fallen snow,
An outdoor loo, like water closet, human waste chateau.
Waiting for the bipedals who really have to go,
They shiver, shake, and creak, and quake, upon their icy floe.

An outdoor loo, like water closet, human waste chateau,
A sentry at the ready, like an outhouse domino.
They shiver, shake, and creak, and quake, upon their icy floe,
A plastic, floating privy island archipelago.

A sentry at the ready as an outhouse domino,
The porta potty represents a bathroom portmanteau.
A plastic, floating privy island archipelago,
A beacon for the bipedals urgent overflow.

The porta potty represents a bathroom portmanteau,
The john, the head, the can, the throne, a restroom bungalow.
A beacon for the bipedals urgent overflow,
When nature calls, come in, sit down, relax, and let it go.

The john, the head, the can, the throne, a restroom bungalow,
Four empty, ready porta potties lined up in a row.
When nature calls, come in, sit down, relax and let it go,
Four empty, ready porta potties poised as cold winds blow.

The Hairbag Poet-“Can of Hope”

January 12, 2018March 7, 2018jeanjames 2 Comments

Hi and welcome to my Friday series The Hairbag Poet.

You can read about the history of this series here.

In the blogger world Fridays are known as Poetry Friday. You can read about Poetry Friday here.

Todays poem is a Haiku. I have to say I’ve never really been a big fan of the Haiku, but being the Hairbag poet that I am, I must confess I never really understood the Haiku. Like most areas of my life when I don’t understand something, I research it.

Haiku (hokku), is a form of Japanese verse.

According to Poetry Foundation (2017) “A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time. Not popularized in Western literature until the early 1900s, the form originates from the Japanese hokku, or the opening section of a longer renga sequence. In this context, the hokku served to begin a longer poem by establishing a season, often with a pair of seasonal images. Unlike the rest of the renga sequence, which was composed collaboratively, the hokku was often created by a single poet working alone, and was subsequently used as an exercise for students. Over time, the hokku began to be appreciated for its own worth and became distinct as a poetic form, formally mastered by poets such as Basho and Yosa Buson.”

I believe my Haiku below captures both the requirement of image and season capturing the specific moment in time that we have all come to know as the bomb cyclone.

“Despite its formal history, the haiku’s composition has expanded somewhat over time. This is due in part to the differences between the Japanese language and Western languages. In its original Japanese form, the haiku is often divided into 17 mora (a Japanese unit of syllable weight) and arranged in a single vertical line. However, in English there is no exact equivalent to the mora unit. As a result, in English and other languages, haikus are most frequently adapted into three lines of verse, usually unrhymed, composed of five, seven, and five syllables, adding up to seventeen syllables total” (Poetry Foundation, 2017).

The Hairbag Poet

Photo by Donald, titled “A Can of Hope in a Stark World.”

Can of Hope

Whiteout darkens skies.
Grayson’s Bombogenesis
Clouds part; hope glitters.

The Hairbag Poet-“Ephemeral Friends”

January 5, 2018March 7, 2018jeanjames 3 Comments

Hi and welcome to my Friday series The Hairbag Poet.

You can read about the history of this series here.

In the blogging world Fridays are known as Poetry Friday. You can read about Poetry Friday here.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time reading about different types of poetry terms and forms. Since I am The Hairbag Poet, I realize I may like to write poetry, but I have a lot to learn about poetry, and trust me there is a lot to learn! Todays poem, I think, fits the form of an Epigram.

According to poets.org “An epigram is a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end. The subject is usually a single thought or event. The word “epigram” comes from the Greek epigraphein, meaning “to write on, inscribe,” and originally referred to the inscriptions written on stone monuments in ancient Greece. The first-century epigrams of the Roman poet Martial became the model for the modern epigram.”

The Hairbag Poet