Poem: Christening

a rough draft 

From about half a year ago.  Strike-through and red text are edits.  Gentle constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated!

Hush now, sleep.
Don't dream straw that burns
into gold, that diabolical
transformation. Death's bitter taste Bitter death
coated the back of my throat.
I couldn't fathom the scent
of skin-and-milk,
the heat of sweat-stained cheeks
in fitful sleep, after our intimate
ten-month
acquaintance.
                    Oh, God! 

                                   I would have traded
even you
to usurp nature’s sovereignty. 

Forgive me. 

I thought I wanted to hold magic
in my hands. I didn’t know
true magic dozes
out of reach and hums
itself the old stories, tracing
illuminated letters, growing toes
and fingers.  

                         You curl
your fist near your temple;
lashes skitter. Hush
little baby, I will scale
towers without doors, sift
lentils from soot and cinder,
wear out three pairs of iron shoes, cross
the briar-tangled border into wilderness
to and lay down my power;
ransom back the blood-token;
find the name
                         that will set you free.

Elenore Abbott

A Few Fairy Notes

1.  With the disappearance of the classic SSiG background, I'm revamping the imagery; so please bare with me and the shape-shifting blog for now!

2.  My poem "Achilles's Sister" was published in Fickle Muses.  Click the link to read.

3.  A new fairy tale publication is being released by the editor of Enchanted Conversation, Kate Wolfold, brought to us by World Weaver Press!  Beyond the Glass Slipper: Ten Neglected Fairy Tales to Fall in Love With introduces a collection of lesser known tales with the non-tedious yet intelligent blend of professionalism and personability with which Ms. Wolfold mans Enchanted Conversation.

In honor of the book's release, World Weaver Press is hosting a Fairy Tale Festival until May 6.  Go and join the fun!  And purchase the e-book because EC will be hosting a group discussion on the book you won't want to miss out on!

Poem: To the Sphinx

second revision

The latest version.  Do you prefer this one?

Dame, you ask questions that ring the nerve-cells.
Squat at brown crossroads and sound our death-knell.
What walks on four legs, on two legs, three--?  Tell.Laius and I know conundrums as well. 

Squat at brown crossroads and sound our death-knell,
riddles and rimes to crack open our brains.
Laius and I know conundrums as well.
Why stone-cracked famine, cold orphans, dry plague?

Fairy Tale Prompt: Volume 2

"The World's Bride"

Fourth Friday Fairy Tale prompts are exercises for the fairy tale, writing, and fairy tale-writing online community for the purpose of cultivating creativity, helping with, and sharing our art with others.

This poem has been hard to find my footing on.  Perhaps because the prompt was a complete, though mysterious, story in itself.  "I cannot explain," it says, and that strikes me as very appropriate.

Martine Johanna

The World's Bride   

The bride of the world
goes in ceremony,
hair dressed with shell and
pinned with a tiny bird's skull.
She makes her vows in a court
lit by clouds, curtained
with night-fabric, moon-studded:
powdered, coiffed, ruffed,
anise-brushed,
she unbuttons plush turf
from around her wrists
of moon-bath flesh.
Come to retire
Anubis's feather,
she holds three offerings:
a dandelion scepter gone
to seed; a bubble for a
globus cruciger; in the slope
of her breasts, the answer
to an half-formed question.

Poem: To the Sphinx

revised

Remember this?

Here's the first two stanzas after some intense revision.

My old dame, you ask questions that ring the nerve-cells
while you squat at brown crossroads and sound our                  death-knell.
Now what manner of things walks on four legs, three—?      Tell.
Poor King Laius and I know conundrums as well.  

While you squat at brown crossroads and sound our                death-knell,
we’ve wrought riddles and rimes to crack open your                brain.
Poor King Laius and I know conundrums as well.
Why Jocasta, cracked famine, cold orphans, dry plague?

Still not finished!  As always, gentle feedback desired and appreciated.

Poem: To the Sphinx

I've been working on this one for almost ten years.  I think it's close to getting there.

Here's the first two stanzas:

Sphinx, you ask questions that ring the nerve-cell,
while you squat at brown crossroads and sound our                     death knell.
What walks on four legs, two legs, three?  Tell.
King Oedipus and I know conundrums as well. 

While you squat at brown crossroads and sound our                     death knell,
we have crossroads and riddles to crack open your brain.
King Oedipus and I know conundrums as well.
Why Jocasta, why Laius?  Why the Theban plague?

Feel free to give feedback.  Useless bonus points if you know what poetic form that is.

This poem began life rather formless, kind of scattered, then drew back in, started to arrange itself.  Dropped some words, added others. Got a form, started to rhyme.  It's so awing, these poems have a life of their own.

I have been very, very productive with poems of late.  Now to send them out, to find homes for them.

Sandara of deviantART, Sphinx's Day Off, source

Fairy Tale Prompt: Volume 1

"Miranda at the Stern"

If you haven't seen this before or are new to SSiG, this is a writing prompt community project in which we share our art and writing for encouragement and constructive criticism.

Click here for the rules and deadline.

I'm posting this way ahead of time in case some people are still unclear about how to go about participating and what that participation entails.

Copyright Claudia Bernasconi Esposito.  Source.

Reflecting on the prompt (above) made me think of undines, which became the wreaths or petals of the poem, and grew backward and inward from there.

I would be very grateful for a critical eye: style, word choice, stanzas, story, anything that catches your attention.  I purposefully did not ask for feedback on this before hand.  

The idea is to encourage and critique.  But please be gentle and considerate!  We want to uplift, not to trample.*

Miranda at the Stern

The buoyant fruit, seeded

with pearlescent faces bearing names

of extinct, pedantic gods,

dives from father's cay

in albatross form, sails puffed

but breathless, catching no current,

slapped by the wide palms of rain;

the mineral sea a mouthless

appetite, devouring islands, spitting them

back like stones.

The waves' tongues pitch and roll

the rootless boat.  Fish-eyed

undines swirl, stare

at she who tore and drifted through

the veil, broke the soot-circumference

of Prospero's pentagrams, forsook

what is solid, with no place

to anchor.

*  Please also be aware when offering constructive criticism that, as a writer once said about her craft, "there are no mistakes, only effects."  Tone and style are unique and personal.  It can be hard for the un-trained critiquer to recognize the difference between what isn't working and what isn't his personal taste.  I would be mortified if, through a desire to help foster someone's creative inclinations to art and writing, we unwittingly discourage and cause self-doubt and discouragement.

Poem: Two Autumns

Ghosts hang in branches,

bonfire incense upon

bleak autumn altars.

Autumn sheds excess--

leaves, thin fur, warmth; climbs toward

shuddering winter.

source

Fourth Friday Fairy Tale Prompt: Volume 1

Welcome to our first Fourth Fridays Fairy Tale Prompt (slightly late).  And here's the prompt:

Copyright Claudia Bernasconi Esposito.  Source.*

How to Participate 

 

1. You have until the fourth Friday of next month to use this prompt to inspire a piece of art, music, or writing.
2. Your piece does not have to be supernatural, as long as it is inspired by the fairy tale prompt.
3. Post your finished piece on your blog, site, or other online presence.
4. Link your virtually published piece to this post.  (See inlinlz tool at the bottom.)
5. Read (or view) the other entries.  Offer insights, appreciation, constructive criticism, and encouragement.  Have fun.
6. Use the following image in your post and link back to this post so that other people may find us and participate in the future.

<a border="0" href="http://spinstrawintogold.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n59/GreenInkling/fairytaleprompt.jpg" /></a> 

I look forward to sharing the creative experience with you!

In the spirit of sharing, please have a look at Bolts of Silk and my poem, and do consider submitting something in support of this worthy publication.



*  Please always give credit and link back to the original source of the prompt.  It should go without saying--not under any circumstances is the prompt to be used for personal monetary gain; it is the rightful creative property of another.  Nor does Spinning Straw into Gold receive any compensation through the use of these prompts.

On Submissions II

My little poem "Collector" was published online this morning!

The Red Poppy Review is a neat little e-journal, which I like to peruse for its varying styles and genres.  I enjoy the simple-but-encompassing sturdiness of its poems. 

The Bedtime Book, Jessie Willcox Smith

Also, our own contest is drawing to a close tomorrow.  Please be sure to upload your entry using the inlinkz tool.  It will end at midnight, like Cinderella's jaunt at the ball.

Summer Fruits

The latest issue of Goblin Fruit is just as it should be: decadent and enticing, too heavy to digest in one sitting, and posessed of a haunting aftertaste.  I've been sampling it for the past two days, laying it aside and coming back to it, for these poems are dishes too rich not to be savored slowly.

from Rossetti's Goblin Market, artist unknown

Samantha Henderson, author of Heaven's Bones, has this to say about Goblin Fruit, and I concur:

The thing that continually impresses me about GF (besides the poetry, but you knew that) is that to me it's the closes thing I've seen to something in a virtual space (i.e. the internet) be a tactile object.  . . . With new models of buying and playing music we're losing the idea of an album and its implied narrative, but the poems in GF always strike me as being arranged like an album, and I think this adds to the idea that it's something crafted rather than pretty pixels.

This issue was full of sing-songs and summer.

"Burnt Lyric" by Sofia Samatar mixes the heat of desert places with the bloodlessness of ghosts in the hills of Spain.  It has a highly lyric quality and a fascinating back-story.

Under the cypress tree, my lover said to me,
If it's evidence you're looking for,
you'll find it.
You'll prove whole cities from a broken brooch, and blur
what the lost dead know.

Reminds me of how sometimes, in our enthusiasm, we try so hard to "figure out" or explain art, that we end up killing it.

The last line sobers with its finality:

Death, like the lyric, is carried in the mouth.

Sonya Taaffe's "Lyric Fragment" snake-charms the sensual Mediterranean:

Under the olives, I unbraid your hair
dark as violets in the sea-shifting light,
the sea who shrugs and turns a shoulder
as black and white sails come and go.

Violet-dark hair and seas that shrug . . . needs no exegesis.

I love this magazine.  So.  Much.  Donate?

On Submissions

I've no lack of poems and stories to contribute to the mythological tradition, but securing a spot in print for one's voice to be heard is not an easy task.  I've read enough of seasoned authors' advice to know that's more the norm than it isn't.

Still, it's hard to judge which is the right place or publication: which journal or e-magazine or blog is one with which I stand less of a risk, tremblingly pressing into its editors' hands my submission.  It's not an easy guess, especially if trying to stay true to one's own voice and finding that it is not the trend (either in style, tradition, or philosophy) for the genres in which the work is written.

Or that one's work simply isn't good enough (yet?).  Ouch.

Gustav Dore

Here's an interesting and practical reflection by poet Donna Lewis Cowan, author of Between Gods.

And here's a little glimpse at something I've submitted lately.

In the telling, they forgot
Achilles later had a sister
birthed through foam-flecked mourning.
Her mother labored, faint
as vapor, salt as sea, and pressed in her
a secret wound.  The wise
naiads sang, "Let her be fair
as apple's flesh, with a glance
of clouded mirrors, and let her be
cursed
to lie in idle love or waste
immortal minutes chipped from beggared fate
with words on her lyre and foxglove
on her fingertips."

Speaking of submissions, don't forget to make yours to Spinning Straw into Gold's fairy tale writing contest.  Practically speaking, I intend everyone to be a winner in one way or another.  So consider entering, if only (if only!) for other writers' fellowship.

Poem: untitled

Something old that turned up when fumbling through my notebooks.

I don't think it's finished.  But some parts caught my attention enough, reading it after all this time, to make me keep it; and maybe it will grow.

Prince, our story's old:

you stalk your bony tower
choked with thorns, and dream
your un-sleep. 

I am that knight,

who would wake you, take your
fine, clean hand, lead you
from the narrow dark
into the bright, and watch you
blossom like a rose.

Visconti Tarot card, Venice 1600s, via Yale University

Poem: Step

Rie Cramer

I haven't posted anything original lately, so here's something small and inadequate. 
 
Thoughts are welcome.

Her stepsister's maiming mistake
was to step into Cinderella's rigid shoe.
Maybe she was wart-ugly or wicked
as a steel blade, but when a square block
pegs a round hole, it's going to fail
or lose its shape.

Poem: The Story-tellers

Huddled, our plumed bodies curve
in arabesque.  Convex vertebrae
are charms; they
ward off the dark and cold.

We pass tales like glass
marbles back-and-forth,
in pinched beaks.  Friction
warms our palms, our words.

Prometheus, have pity.
Breath ignites 
salvaged kindling, a spark
as hot as a pin-prick.

Now we chant each others' stories,
a noisome flock in blanketing
gray and whisper a rumor
of dawn.

P.J. Lynch, The Six Swans

This is the second draft, much changed (and better, I hope), from the first.

Still, this is not quite hitting the spot of what I want to do with it.  The third stanza limps.  I'm trying to find a way of showing how the friction of passing the stories back and forth ignites a spark.  And I like the pin-prick, like when you get stung by the spark from a sparkler, but I don't know how to use it.

I wanted to say something about "a benediction."

Oh well.  I guess now I should just let it sit.

Comments, constructive crit.?  Please and thank you.

Please take a look at our fairy tale writing contest and consider joining.  I'm thinking of extending the deadline, if you've seen and are hesitant because of lack of time.

Truth-telling

This poem by Serena Fusek resounds on "the ends of the nerves."  Here it is, re-produced in its entirety, because it embodies so much of what I want to accomplish here:

The True Poem

The true poem
though spoken in
human tongue
is pronounced
with the lisp
of a fox growling
over a dead rabbit.

The true poem,
even when typed
on a computer,
is inscribed
in the rabbit's blood
by a quill
from a crow's wing.

Its letters are read
not by the eyes
but by the ends
of the nerves,
as Braille is read
by fingertips.

The Lady
and Her lover
trail through the poem,
their footprints
fading in the drying dew.
They pass
the crossroads
under the beam
of the Hanging Tree.
The white doe
watches from the hedges
of wild roses.

The true poem
may seem slight
but the must of
wild mushrooms
and leaf mold
worm through the lines.
As if Grandmother Spider
crawled over his nape,
the reader shivers.

First of all, I am struck by the simple language.  It's pure poetry, without any cliff notes to meaning.  The words speak for themselves.  She allows "drying dew," "crossroads," "wild mushrooms," and "rabbit's blood" to do their magic and dominate.

I challenge anyone not to feel the mysterious significance of "Pronounced with the lisp of a fox growling."  On the surface, it probably speaks to the mystical fact that a poem comes from someone's in-most self, is guterral, primeval, and intuitive.  But to explain it away dulls the deep-cutting edge of the line.

In a way, it's the opposite of the unusual word-pairing I've been doing with my poetry.  While I like that the surprising uses challenge my reader to look at reality from a different perspective, I think I can learn from Ms. Fusek about using the heart of imagery to speak to the soul.

This poem is published on the aptly named Mythic Delirium.

Additionally, please see posts below for our fairy tale writing contest.



"The True Poem" is copyright Serena Fusek and Mythic Delirium.

Quench Your Thirst with Goblin Fruit

Goblin Fruit is a delightful little e-publication whose work features the fantastical and surreal, often with a hint or more of wry humor.  This spring's issue features a lot of water-themes.

I like the concrete movement in Kathrin Köhler's "Submersion":

seaweed growing serpentine through her hair,
undulating and hypnotic

and

The moon
caressing her skin
with cold light.

Pressed down by the weight of water

Even the music of the words remind me of waves and tides.

Oh, and how uncomfortable does "Zac Efron Being Eaten by a Shark" by Jade Ramsey make you?  Yikes!  (A psychoanalyst would say here that food and sex are closely related.)

Season these tasty dishes with art that is evocative and stylistically primitive.  Love the splashes of red.  Goblin fruit, indeed.

Please consider supporting the outstanding poets and generous editors with a small donation.

Poem: Cinderella Complex

My mother measures worth
in tidiness
how other people measure flour--
packed tight on the tipping scale--

in seconds spent bent over
steaming, screaming dishes

and strokes of the sticky-handled,
stiffened broom;

soggy potato peels collected for the
wormy compost;

hours wiping dull windows until
they disappear;

ironing pleated trousers
'til they stand on end;

intercepting dandelions
tiptoeing into the hedgerows;

inching together the seams of sheets
and flattening the breath out of them upon
the bed.

The earlier you rise, the later
you work, the better she knows:
the more staggering the contrast between
before-and-after,
like two color photographs on a double-page
home improvement ad--

the better to consider your humanity, my dear.

A jeweler weighs gold;
she balances solid value with
intrinsic density.
Now you tell me:
who is the stepmother and who
is Cinderella?

Mag 117

For Magpie Tales, rough draft.  I think I'll call it "Fisher King."

knife, bowl, cloth

creased from disuse

grubby faces like cherubs' heads

await the miraculous

cure

sacred instruments

(sword, grail, shroud)

each planted

upon the altar

clouds rumble but do not

break fast

objects scattered

before the glacier-time

have been gathered

to table

who will draw first

the chalice to chapped lips?

drink?

seeds burst

juices flow

the waste land holds

its breath

Paul Gauguin, The Meal

Please check out our writing contest for a chance to win a $15 Barnes & Noble gift certificate.

Poem: Vampire Lover

Here I stand, glittering
and cold as a breathless fish.
Paradoxically, I aim to smolder, to catch
a spark and ignite.

Kiss me, don't look closely
at the waxy sheen preserving
rotting cells and brittle sinews.
This glamor lasts past midnight,

as long as you fancy.
So let me help you believe
my sunrise ancestors didn't
strike the heart like a poison

spear.  I will love you (feebly)
into damnation.  One day, you'll wake
in musty sheets, bloodless like an insect,
and wonder when the guts went out

of sinning.

Obvious Twilight references are obvious.  However, this isn't a criticism.  From a commentary on an movie photo of Edward and co. standing shirtless in a river (wth?), it went in a quite different direction.

A rough draft.  Thoughts, comments, constructive feedback please.

I'm playing around with the blog banner, so you may see it change a couple of times within the next week.

This one is from a vintage fairy tale illustration of Rumpelstiltskin.

Look here to see a contest in which you could win a $15 Barnes & Noble gift card!