Last week's post of Next Line, Please (poems inspired by a poet or poem from the past) left us with a little bit of a ghost, a shadow, something to be said. In other words, we knew what we were in for this week, and we were hungry for it! I am happy to report, that this part two post delivers. Let's get down to the poetry:
Jane Keats’s inspiration appears to be based on Robert Burns (“My love is like a red, red rose”) mixed up with Gertrude Stein (“rose is a rose is a rose”):
My rose is the violet of roses
for my whosis.
My lover is the invisible inviolate
of the violent night’s noses.
You know I speak true, Miss.
My violet is the violet of vivid lovely violets.
My rose is the violet of roses.
Donald LaBranche’s “The Shade of Ash Trees” is a powerful piece of writing:
The power company men are here to cut the trees
that the ash-borers and woodpeckers have killed.
Some went to the saw mill, some went to heat the house.Some of the ash fed the forge fires of Haephaestus,
Some became strips of paper in Keats’ coat pocket.
A small chunk became a totem in an artist’s house.Among the five elements, earth produces growth
mixed with wood; metal glows white hot when kissed by fire;
and water holds them all in place to build you a house.Ash trees grew right up the barbed wire where the stream
feeds that end of the meadow. A rear guard of them
spreads out over ten acres to surround the house.The County wants to bring dozers in for a road
so the neighbors can live there and raise their livestock.
The borers’ work will never be done in their house.Sometimes people like me stand in these woods, trembling.
Mostly, it’s in winter. Mostly, like deer, we’re harmless;
living in the shade of ash trees like it’s a house.
Now, next week's prompt takes the ghostly companion to a different level. Instead of another writer, we will be writing in the manner of a time period, a place, an item. For next week then, please write a poem “in the manner of”… a friendly poker game, a gothic romance, a Chopin piano sonata (no. 2, for example), a garment of which you are fond, or of the year in which you were born. Fourteen lines or less. How you construe “in the manner of” is entirely up to you.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the whole post and to enter your candidate!