(Poem #60 on new numbering scheme)
I was gazing up at the green trees, meandering to work one day, and that Lou Reed song came on. "What makes a perfect day?" I wondered and thought: "Not.much more than quite simply saying so."
– a nonnet
Category: Book 1
Caveat: Nonnet #34
(Poem #59 on new numbering scheme)
In my most advanced Tuesday cohort there is a student named David. I think he's full of anger. When he gets a low score his face scrunches up, he shouts at me, he hits desks, he cries, "No."
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #33
I made this nonnet after reading the article I mentioned in my previous blog post.
(Poem #58 on new numbering scheme)
A new rain of unfortunate ants has arrived, my fellow workers! Let's welcome them to our dark yet thriving, cold abode! Let's show them the walls! Let's move this dirt! Let's begin to eat(,) ants!
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #32
(Poem #57 on new numbering scheme)
Grasping the atmosphere like despair, the humidity guards the dusk. The equinox approaches. A hazy twilight hangs. My expectation helps me walk home, awaiting longer nights.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #31
(Poem #56 on new numbering scheme)
While the sun was glaring, a cloud drifted meditatively across a hazy sky, but the cloud failed to commit to any kind of rainmaking. It felt no inclination for mud.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #30 “Imitation bug”
(Poem #55 on new numbering scheme)
I was walking to the hospital the other day and wondering how to make some poetry on a late summer day. I heard some crickets. My conclusion: like those bugs, I can speak.
– a nonnet
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Nonnet #29
(Poem #54 on new numbering scheme)
Time is not exactly a progression of simple events. Rather, it loops and whirls, perhaps like a falling leaf caught up in a vortex of wind skittering across our grassy minds.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #28
(Poem #53 on new numbering scheme)
Korean ghosts are thick on the ground: everyone's ancestors cluster round each monument or tree. There are some migrants, too: shades that have followed a sorry soul's displacements: Michelle's ghost.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #27
(Poem #52 on new numbering scheme)
Otorhinolaryngologists' polysyllabifications obfuscatorially institutionalize impenetrable medicalized colloquies. Doctors talk.
– a nonnet of nine words
Caveat: Nonnet #26
(Poem #51 on new numbering scheme)
I want to discuss these rice-eating rules, since, for me, rice is a problem. Pieces get lost in my mouth, dodging my broken tongue. Sometimes I will choke. Porridge can work. Starvation also works.
– This nonnet is a “response” to Jeong Ho-seung’s poem that I posted earlier today.
Caveat: Nonnet #25
(Poem #50 on new numbering scheme)
Automobiles are a kind of theme that were roaring through my childhood. My father grew up with cars. My youngest memories thrum with the noises emerging from my father's Model A.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #24
(Poem #49 on new numbering scheme)
Last night we got a refreshing rain. so my coworker turned to me and wanted to know what kind of idiom we use to express that breath of cool pleasure in English. "I don't know."
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #23
(Poem #48 on new numbering scheme)
Some kids have a lot to say in class. Other students stare wordlessly. I want them to feel their worth, understand our topics, and become engaged. Mostly I fail. It is hard. They just sit.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #22
(Poem #47 on new numbering scheme)
Fall can't come all at once. Fall must sneak in, catch us unawares with a yellow leaf here and a northerly breeze there. I smelled autumn's covert rustlings today: percepts tasting of woodsmoke.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #21
(Poem #46 on new numbering scheme)
That ineffable cobalt color was painting the glowering clouds. Conspiratorially, the air whispered its plans for inundation. Then I felt it on my cheek: one cool drop.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #20
(Poem #45 on new numbering scheme)
Joy is not easily correlated with other events. Instead, it arises, as if spontaneously, immanent to the warp and woof of quotidian experience.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #19 “Sum”
(Poem #44 on new numbering scheme)
Some days feel like things are going well. Some days start well but end badly. Some days I dread but end great. Some days are smooth like glass. Some days are bumpy. Some days give joy. Some days don't. Some days suck.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #18 “Moss removal”
(Poem #43 on new numbering scheme)
Maybe I am becoming a plant. Every Sunday I cut my hair. In the weird fluorescent light, today, in the bathroom, I looked at the floor. Surprisingly, the clippings looked like moss.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #17 “The breeze”
(Poem #42 on new numbering scheme)
Small ripples propagate across the brown, cream-colored surface of my morning's coffee, put there by the blowing wind exhaled by my electric fan which perches in my window, bird-like.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #16 “As worms will do”
(Poem #41 on new numbering scheme)
Perhaps the ground has dried out too much. The last rain was a while ago. So the worm started a trip across the vast sidewalk, its goal uncertain. The sun's so hot. It wriggles; going east.
– a nonnet
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Nonnet #15 “A bit of a tautology”
(Poem #40 on new numbering scheme)
Some say the world is a living thing; Or that it's a clockwork machine. But I don't see it that way. Instead, recursively, the world gives a proof of the theorem that says that we are here.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #14 “Lo que cantó la cigarra”
(Poem #39 on new numbering scheme)
Ví que amaneció nublado pero ya al mediodía se había convertido en día de calor. Una cigarra allá arriba me cantó, "Hola, pues."
– un noneto
[Update: My friend Bob suggested I translate this into English, but retaining the nonnet form. I took the challenge:]
I saw that the morning dawned cloudy but by the middle of the day the weather had changed so it had become a hot day. Then a cicada somewhere up there sang to me "Hello, there."
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #13 “The commute home”
(Poem #38 on new numbering scheme)
Sometimes at day's end I'm exhausted. I finish work and I walk home. I feel like my mind is dust. I can't even daydream. I find some music. I move one foot... the other, heavy foot.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #12 “Near Uijeongbu [의정부]”
(Poem #37 on new numbering scheme)
Looking out the window of the train, the stretch of elevated track lends a feeling of flying, as if in slow motion, across cityscapes which seem almost infinite... full of souls.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #11 “Visa problems”
(Poem #36 on new numbering scheme)
I have been staying on this planet. The planet is sometimes called Earth. I just have a work visa. So, if I stop working I will have to leave. But departures are sometimes very sad.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #10 “Not actually the territory”
(Poem #35 on new numbering scheme)
Most people see maps as simply tools, or at best, perhaps metaphors. What if a map is not real? What is it a map of? Imagination's distant spaces manifest and made art.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #9 “Involuntary anorexia”
(Poem #34 on new numbering scheme)
Choosing what to eat is always hard. Lately, sometimes I make oatmeal. I chop up half an apple. I add some cinnamon. After I cook it, it's difficult. I need to try to eat.
– a nonnet
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Nonnet #8 “Upwelling”
(Poem #33 on new numbering scheme)
The conversation began as most. I wanted to point some things out, observations and comments, some inconsistencies, in how we do things. I got angry. I ranted.... Ah, why try?
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #7 “Azar”
I’ve decided to take on the challenge I suggested to myself (with encouragement from my friend Bob) a few posts back: I will make a nonnet every day. The last few days I’ve tested, to see if it’s doable, and I have done it. So I have a little stockpile, now, of half-a-dozen nonnets. And I will move forward, and try to make a nonnet every day, and post it. I guess a side-effect of this is that I’m am, tentatively, returning to my old two-posts-a-day pattern, which I abandoned around the time of my cancer diagnosis, 3 years ago.
Counting backwards among the ones posted previously, starting with one last year, I think this would be number 7.
(Poem #32 on new numbering scheme)
Living is what we do till we die. We take on difficult questions, or we simply live each day. We love that children play. We can watch the rain. We can see trees. Then it ends. It's just luck.
– a nonnet
Caveat: Nonnet #6 “up in the trees”
Now I have made an “inverted” nonnet. I have no idea if this is a thing that’s been done before. It’s the same as a nonnet, just the other way around. Below, I drew the “blue cicada in a bottle” and originally posted it some years ago.
(Poem #31 on new numbering scheme)
Blue singing cicadas up in the trees have explained to me without using language that summer is not so bad, that it passes in a moment, that the green, breeze-blown leaves caress them.
– a reverse nonnet
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: Nonnet #5 “This House Opposes Summer”
One reason I like nonnets is that it’s possible to compose them entirely in my head. They are sufficiently compact and structured that I can hold the whole thing in my “working memory” as I work out each line. Thus, I can do it while walking, which is another pastime of mine that doesn’t always mix well with writing, since this latter usually requires having a keyboard or notepad in front of me.
I made this nonnet walking to work.
(Poem #30 on new numbering scheme)
I hate summer, because it's too hot. The sun squashes me, like an ant. The air seems thick, like asphalt. I start missing winter. I could stride quickly. I could shiver. "Ah! So cold, like a ghost."
– a nonnet.
It’s occurred to me I could write a nonnet every day, while walking to work. Am I so ambitious?
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
Caveat: Nonnet #4 “beans”
I wrote another nonnet. My friend Bob commented that I seem to have a “knack” for them. I don’t know about that, but I enjoy doing them – they are constrained like haiku, and the constraints are syllabic rather than metric (a type of constraint I find more difficult to “do in my head”). The haiku form, nowadays, has a bit of a cliche feel in English, which these nonnets avoid.
(Poem #29 on new numbering scheme)
Consciousness Speculating about my own mind: moments of consciousness might be like little fragments of light; but no, that's wrong. Instead, like so many beans, we toss them up; they begin to fall down.
– a nonnet
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: four seasons?
A nonnet I made.
(Poem #28 on new numbering scheme)
Fifth Season they say Korea has four seasons. I think actually there are five: in mid-summer, the sky hides; and the pouring rain comes; so I dodge rivers; and more rain comes; and humid, sultry air.
– a nonnet
[daily log: walking, 2km]