April 28th, 2022
UD WRITES A NEWSPAPER POEM…

… in which she versifies words found in a newspaper article. Other examples.

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INGENUITY HELICOPTER

The parachute, intact,
Its suspension lines
Trailing from the back-
shell, lies in olivine
Along the rocks.

The salmon surface pocks.

This otherworldly wreckage
Has a supersonic message.

My detachment, while alarming,
Shows no obvious signs of charring.
You and your scribe study chaos control.
All to calm my fiery roll.
July 7th, 2021
Newspaper poem.

Most of its words come from here.

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Lit only by the dim background of stars,

Rogue planets, adrift in the Milky Way,

Are bullied children shoved from a schoolyard,

Alone, at the heart of the galaxy.

July 1st, 2021
Newspaper poem.

Its words are largely taken from this interview.

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Water seeping in from thunderstorms made

Changes at the geologic level

Until the pillars of the pool arcade

Put paid to all our revel

May 7th, 2019
Newspaper poem.

[These are poems whose lines come from a newspaper article.]

THE BIGGEST HEADWIND IS HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

Miles of buff-colored subdivisions

And new emotionless algorithms:

So the Phoenix home of Dora Cagnetto

Moves molto molto allegretto.

Selling a home with a handful of clicks

Scales and streamlines decades-old frictions.

And when the housing market cools? Where then

Is paradise? Well. It is a small part of the market.



March 2nd, 2019
Another one of UD’s newspaper poems…

This one taken from this brief article.

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Mosul Museum

Assyrian bulls with human faces:

Recall, or imagine. In their places

Drilled stone is the most famous absence

From halls of lesser absence.


Imagine Warsaw a museum,

The city leveled to a mausoleum

By arms steadfast and methodical.

That is the museum at Mosul,


Architecture and aesthetic rubbled.

A vast image out of Yeats. Sight troubled.

And yet the millennia-old city

Advertises a new exhibit.

July 20th, 2017
Newspaper poem.

UD likes to write poems whose words are taken from a newspaper or magazine article.

DARKNESS VISIBLE

Two ghost columns of visible writing
Lay beneath the parchment on a book board.
Bookmakers reused medieval binding
Whose text the makers had scraped and obscured.

Imaging hyperspectral, fluorescence,
Revealed the meaning of the hidden notes:
The old precursor text was in essence
A group of sixth-century Roman codes.

June 20th, 2017
UD Writes a Newspaper Poem

She has written many of these (click on this post’s category).

They’re made from the words of a newspaper article.

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PYROSOMES

Spawn of the eastern Pacific transformed
By a blob of water bizarrely warmed,
Something like ghostly Tibetan longhorns:
All over the ocean are pyrosomes.

When fishermen were trolling for chinook
Says Alaska Fish and Gamesman Shaul,
They came up with them on every hook.
Ten thousand appeared on a research trawl.

We don’t even know what they consume.
We only know their luminscent firebody bloom.

January 25th, 2017
A Magazine Poem.

[A poem drawn from words and phrases in this essay, in the New Yorker.]

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Survival Condo Project

I will arise and go now, and go to Wichita.
I keep a copter ready, gassed up all the time.
For to think ad infinitum is to think dystopia:
Quake on the fault, pandemic, dirty bomb.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from silo walls to where the bitcoin rings;
There the prairie’s all aglimmer on the live video
And evening full of taped birds’ wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear disaster slapping with loud sounds on the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

May 9th, 2016
Newspaper Poem.

Made out of words taken from a newspaper article.

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THREE DAYS INTO MAY

Auburn broke the seal on arrest season:
Four players charged. But none of them is the
Quarterback. He also was arrested
And was held to a much higher standard.
Because he’s quarterback. Stands to reason.

A coach recruited in dead period.

All of this is no more than mere footnote;
Quite good for schadenfreude but little more.
Yet cast your gaze a little farther west…
Oxford! Where finer scandals lie in store.

February 25th, 2015
Newspaper poem.

The source of the poem is here.

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What Will Survive of Us Is Love

A team of excavators find
Bony lovers intertwined.

Flickering light illumes
Their prior-day Arundel Tomb.

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Atop a terraced slope,
Their bodies yield to isotope:

The crania of their burial bones
Have been pelted by occultic stones.

October 17th, 2014
Newspaper Poem.

The point of the exercise, as you know, is to make a poem out of words taken from a newspaper article.

Here is the article.

Here is the poem, whose title is the article’s headline.

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CASSINI SHOCKED BY SATURN’S SPONGY MOON

Cassini’s shocked by Saturn’s spongy moon
(Craggy porous distant Hyperion).

Although a predicted phenomenon,
To be caught in a beam of electrons

Cannot be pleasant, even after ten
Years. Thus Nicolas Altobelli, when

Interviewed, said Cassini has again
Proved its altogether superhuman

Value as we study interactions
Between humanity and solar winds.

December 20th, 2013
Newspaper Poem

[A poem made up of phrases from a newspaper article.

For the original article, go here.]

 

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Vaguely Decasyllabic Newspaper Poem


Ancient Herculaneum was chic.

Well-furnished rooms, with views out to the sea.

Mosaic scrolls, monastic libraries.

 

 

Unlock the scrolls of Herculaneum!

But the scrolls tend to go to pieces.

The ink is dull black and iridesces.

 

 

Some pieces, the eye can make out nothing.

Black lines on a pale grey background,

Black dust of the scroll powdering.

 

 

Not all the villa’s scrolls have been unrolled;

The scrolls are tightly wound and creased.

Still…  orphan fragments make a text:

 

 

hold power… think… with a moderate force

 

 

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Fiber; sand; the structure of papyrus…

What further scrolls remain there still?

Early editions of Aeneas…

 

 

 

November 5th, 2013
Newspaper Poem

UD hasn’t done one of these in awhile. This one’s largely taken from the language in this BBC article.

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EVERY FIFTH STAR HAS A PLANET LIKE EARTH

Every fifth star has a planet like earth,
One in five suns a habitable world.

I combed through stars — 42,000-worth —
And planets missed by software then unfurled

(Software made to sift through planet signatures).

Not places where the dayside’s molten
But with persistences of water —

Interplanetary Waldens.

August 12th, 2012
Newspaper Poem.

UD, long-term readers know, likes to write these. You can only use phrases from a newspaper article. Slight alterations are permitted.

Click on this post’s category – newspaper poem – to read earlier UD efforts.

Here’s one for today, from this article.

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Canterbury Tale

Over the swell rose a raft of pumice.
Floating rocks drifted to the sea surface.

Solidified lava-drifts filled with air
Spread over thousands of water miles square.

Lighter than water, the rocks quickly rise
To cover an area Belgium-size.

February 7th, 2011
Poetry from Prose

UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.

(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)

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LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.

The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

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