Napowrimo PROMPT 9 A CONCRETE POEM

Our featured participant today is Hephaestus’ Waste and Cosmic Rubble, where the borrow-a-line prompt for Day 8 resulted in a Plath-inspired foray into sensuality.

Today’s resource is Kirsten Kaschock’s chapbook, Windowboxing. Kaschock, a dancer as well as a poet, titles her poems using neologisms or portmanteaus, and each one proceeds as a series of essay-like sentences. The poems are interspersed with drawings, and some are even formatted in the shapes of boxes, forcing the reader to turn the book (or their head) and engage with the poems as they move through space.

Our prompt for the day (optional as always) is inspired by Kaschock’s use of space to organize her poems. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “concrete” poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organized to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. This might seem like a very modernist idea, but poets have been writing concrete poems since the 1600s! Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like this poem in the shape of a Christmas tree.

Happy writing!

The walking stick

A soggy old man, groggy with sleep, heads towards his tumble down cottage.
His eyes look around frantically for his lost calf; ‘ho! ho! ho!’  He bellows
some vague impulses, some wayward fancies, some laughable absurdities,
and recurrent revelries, whirl in the mind of this soggy, old shepherd.
A twig between his chipped and discolored teeth, breathing
in sporadic bursts, eyes fixed at a beetle, predator-like.
There is the gentle, soothing tinkle of a goat’s bell,
his eyes light up, looking around frantically,
a benediction springs to his lips,
easing a crick from his neck
rubbing a nervous tic, he
gropes for his stick,
finds it, then he
hobbles forth,
stumbling.
Shouting 
happily.
Baba’,bleats
the
calf.
Says
he,
ho
ho
ho
ho
ho
ho
Ho
ho
ho!
ba
ba
ba
ba
says
the
lost
one
in
joy.