A POETRY BLOG

This will be a poetry blog, sometimes involved with trying out
new stuff as it comes along.

I keep the daily energies flowing through exchanges with
friends, these based on various rules.

With Lawrence E. Lione of Santa Monica, CA. I do haiku renga
(the third hand here belongs to Kelly O'Keefe in Boston) and
a form I invented called "84's" (each link composed of exactly
84 characters).

With Donna Rudolph, northern CA., I exchange on themes
each poet sets the other.

With Jordan Rome, former student taking an MFA a Sarah
Lawrence in N.Y., the rule of exchange is time-limits: we shoot
5, 10, or 15 minute poems back and forth, have literally
thousands of pages of these stored up by now through four
years of practice.

As an illustration, here's what the Barry/Jordan exchange
came to today (now and then one of these warm-up exercises
leads to a draft taken seriously and promoted to the Active
Poem Writing file).

5

8:44 p.m.

no one eats what they want at all times
or gathers the pleats in the sewing as well
as they might at all times or wrestles with bears
hardly ever and no one murders as well
as they do on TV what an act to follow plus
no one clips at their toe nails a lot
if they're busy cooking the food they don't want
sometimes

and no one loves enough at all times
or at any time or speaks so sassy
that everyone in the room turns round
the way they do on TV when no one
loves enough or speaks so sassy
most of the time and let's not be fooled
because who believes he gets enough
cream for his hair or registered mail?

8:49

- b (me)
---

15

3:52 p.m.

Story of the Pumpkin

Back, back, back,
long time ago, so early in our culture
people living at that time
called it the past. Earth still flat
and Gawd had yet to create the Elk
or quartz. An orange tree
stood in an open field,
almost touching the incomplete
sky. Two oranges grew
on the same branch and were
constantly fighting.
Who was going to be sweeter,
more brilliant in color,
have more seeds. Their bickering
was heard for miles;
it’s why fish have no ears.
One day, a huge cloud appeared
and the two oranges thought
that, surely, the best orange was the biggest,
and so they swelled
and swelled, trying to out do each other
till eventually the tree branch could not hold them
and they fell. Over the years
they grew so angry at each other that they lost
most of their sweetness.
They stayed huge and had families,
giant competitions over who could get the biggest.
Then cross pollination was invented,
then genetic alteration. Today,
at State Fairs, there are pumpkins
the size of Volkswagens.

4:07

- j (Jordan)
---