Today is Poetry Friday and Christmas is coming soon. There are Christmas poems that everyone expects to hear this time of year. The most popular would be Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas". Who can't forget: "'Twas the night before Christmas/When all through the house/Not a creature was stirring/Not even a mouse".

Let's be adventurous and talk about Christmas poems that aren't as well known. While reading poetry by the famous Beat author Jack Kerouac, I saw part of his long poem "Old Angel Midnight" had words shaped like a Christmas tree. It's not your average sentimental Christmas poem:

Excerpt from Old Angel Midnight
by Jack Kerouac

         54.

        peep
       peep the
      bird tear the
    sad bird drop heart
  the dawn has slung
 he aw arrow drape

  to sissyfoo & made eastpink
dink the dimple solstice men

[read the rest in Jack Kerouac's book Scattered Poems]

Ted Kooser (remember him?) publishes a column called American Life in Poetry. The latest column has a poem written by Conrad Hilberry about Christmas night. It's pretty clever to write about Christmas after the gifts and celebrating.

Christmas Night
by Conrad Hilberry

Let midnight gather up the wind
and the cry of tires on bitter snow.
Let midnight call the cold dogs home,
sleet in their fur--last one can blow
[read the rest here]

Coming Next Time: Unpublishable poems.

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I'm no scholar, but I still have an opinion about heavy metal music. At the end of the 1990s, a new form of heavy metal music developed called nu-metal. At first, it was interesting and experimental. It combined elements of goth rock and hip-hop with heavy metal. But it quickly devolved into a morass of emotional lyrics and predictable music: Here comes the verse with screeching, now comes the chorus with crooning vocals.

Some songs even seemed slapped together without cohesive parts. What would nu-metal sound like if they had decent songwriters? Here's a comparison: a nu-metal band called Shadows Fall covered the song "December" by the group Only Living Witness.

Only Living Witness was a Boston hard-core punk rock band that had a singer who could actually sing. They also combined their music with heavy-metal and could be considered an ancestor to the current crop of metal-core bands. Notice how the verses, choruses, and bridges easily flow into each other. Brilliant!

Now here's the Shadows Fall version of the same song:

Notice how the vocal harmonies and screeching don't add anything to song.

Hat Tip: Phi Beta Cons

Today is Poetry Friday and here's another poem by the late barfly Charles Bukowski. A few weeks ago, I posted his advice to writers and today I'll publish his admonition against being boring. He says anything worth doing should be done with style:

Style
by Charles Bukowski

Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art
[Read the rest here]

Coming next time: Advent-urous poems.

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Today is Poetry Friday and I detect a cover-up. Our President-Elect, Barack Obama, is a published poet. Why aren't more bloggers talking about this? He published two poems in the journal Feast while he was a student at Occidental College in 1981.

I've avoided taking partisan potshots on this blog. So let me honestly criticize his poems as if they were written by any other college student. First, there's his poem "Pop":

Pop
by Barack Obama

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
[Read the rest here]

This poem isn't bad for modern poetry. It suffers the condition that someone else described as "prose with arbitrary line breaks". But it's not too sentimental so I'll forgive that. It's about his dad, or maybe stepfather, and uses clear descriptive language.

On other hand, there's his other poem "Underground":

Underground
by Barack Obama

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
[Read the rest here]

Apes in grottos? What is this? A surreal Playboy mansion experience? I think Mr. Obama could use some more work on this one. Dare I suggest that he resign immediately and work on his poetry?

Coming Next Time: Style is the answer to everything.

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Here is a guide to fitting in at almost any church if you visit one during the Christmas season:

They discourage doing power cleans during church. However, if I could quietly do overhead squats in church then I'd save myself a trip to the gym after the service. I'd bring enough protein bars for everyone.

Going downstate for Thanksgiving usually means going off the Internet. Today I was saved by the only place open in Centralia, IL with free Wifi: ?Characters! ... Beyond Books. Just got through discussing politics with the owner.

Today is Poetry Friday and I have a message to those who shouldn't be writers. It's a poem from the late barfly Charles Bukowski. Here's the video:

So You Want To Be A Writer
by Charles Bukowski

If it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
Unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
[read the entire poem here]

I disagree with Mr. Bukowski on some of the details. There are many mediocre poems that could be improved with some rewriting. But I agree with his main point that you need passion or what the calculus teacher Jaime Escalante called ganas. Writing because you have to, not because it will make you famous reminds me of my generation's Do It Yourself ethos.

Coming Next Time: Poems from the President Elect.

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Thanks to all who have served our country in the military, its auxiliaries, and the merchant marines.

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Today is Poetry Friday and let's talk between us guys. Ask the average American man if he reads poetry and he'll respond like you asked him if he wears a dress. To him, poetry is for chicks, kids, and guys who whine about their feelings. You know the kind of guys I'm talking about: emo rockers. My guess is the most popular poet with Chicago males is either Dr. Seuss or that guy who writes on the bathroom stalls of their neighborhood bars. What went wrong? Why are most contemporary poems about flowers and feelings?

I blame the Romantics and their recent heirs, hippies from the 1960s. Fortunately, hippies and emo kiddies aren't the only poets. Before them, men recited poems to tell stories and to cast spells. The stories were about other guys accomplishing cool feats like winning battles and defeating monsters. These poems were called epic poems. The Greeks put the goddess Calliope in charge of epic poems. But the Norse put their main god, Odin, in charge.

Angelo Vildasol Maddox, in his book The Alphabet of Manliness (Warning: Not Safe For Work), describes Odin as "the patron saint of rearranging your face." Odin slew the frost giant Ymir and fashioned the world out of his remains. Ymir's blood became the the seas, his bones mountains, his hair trees, his skull the sky, and his brains became the clouds. Odin also selects the bravest warriors who have fallen in battle, brings them to Valhalla, and watches them kick each other's butts. He does all of this and writes poetry too.

So guys, poetry is an Odin-worthy activity. Check out some poems posted by Poetry Friday bloggers. The Old Coot published Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems about the battle of Balaclava. Mary Lee at A Year of Reading published a poem about tools. I also recommend the book 52 Poems For Men by Jay Amberg (ISBN: 0970841604).

Coming Next Time: A message to those who shouldn't be writers.

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It's Poetry Friday and also Halloween. So in the spirit of the season, here is a zombie reading poetry:

The form of the poems that the zombie read was haiku. Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry containing exactly 17 on, similar to English syllables, and 3 lines. The first line has 5 on, the second 7, and the last has 5. It might seem so simple a zombie could write one. But it takes practice.

Another form of poetry is called acrostic. As seen on another Poetry Friday posting, here are some acrostic poems about Halloween. Acrostic poems are poems where letters, usually at the start of each line, form a word. In this case, the poems form spooky words.

Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the US, recently posted a Halloween poem in another poetic form, the villanelle. A villanelle is a form of poetry borrowed from the French. It has 5 three-line stanzas, called tercets, followed by a four-line stanza, called a quatrain. The first and third line of each tercet rhyme. The rhyme scheme in the first tercet is carried through the others. Writing poems in this fixed form is very impressive.

Coming Next Time: The poet described as "the patron saint of rearranging your face."

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