The Poetry Game

When I get together with my friends Michael and Phoebe, we often find ourselves playing the Poetry Game (which Michael picked up from his Aunt Sharon, a pastime she acquired from the late poet Ruth Stone one Christmas in Vermont). Like the best games, it's simple but inexhaustible. Everyone chooses a word or devises a rule (we call them shoves) that all must incorporate into their own poem. We write for about a half hour, usually over a second round of coffee, then re-assemble to share what we've come up with. Not a bad way to spend a morning with friends.

On their last visit, we played and came up with these three shoves:

1. no abstractions

2. address the poem to a "you"

3. the second word of each line should rhyme with the last word of the line before it.

A Dream is Not an Abstraction

You were here again with me on the road

we strode up the hill past wormy fox-nibbled

apples dribbled in dew wind-fallen embrowned

above town along the shoulder walking the loop

you stooped and lifted a spotted yellow apple

a sun-dappled rotten orb to your mouth your teeth

and breath were poised like road crews

shoveling bruised heaps of land

pouring sand and hot asphalt over bodies

broken bodies buried beneath the intersection of tongue

and hunger you looked at me and it was night

dogs bright with cidery bellies howled moonward

without words you held my hand and pointed

at disconjointed stars and said you’d like to gather

them rather than see their diminished blue specks ball them

up then form a fist of light like a bunch of grapes

to place in one of your paintings to dangle there

like a chandelier against the dark hill and you and I

became like that painting so much scraped oil

the howling dogs there too with blue

and a few touches of grey at the edge like a Chinese scroll

landscape rolled into sky and you looked at me and asked why

then I turned to you and stood alone under stars that

had scattered back into their original places

the face of the moon was like a yellowing apple again

and then you were here as you had been beside me on the road

While I don't consider this a "poem" yet and perhaps it won't ever be, it was useful play. What I came up with is still too shackled within the shoves, kind of trapped within the occasion of the game itself, and language has yet to burst free and grow in its own direction. Plus, I'm not really sure why I didn't include punctuation. Still, I'm glad to have made some of these images that may be useful in other attempts down the road. Who knows? Essentially, it's a reminder that exercises can be fun and practical and maybe I should do this sort of thing more often.