… 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.
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.
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
A poem taken from a newspaper or magazine article, using words and sentences from the article.
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THE MOON IS RUSTING AND WE DON'T KNOW WHY
The moon is rusting and we don't know why.
Hematite shows, where latitudes are high.
But how can that be, since the moon is dry?
There are a couple theories as to why.
Solar wind calms in our magnetic sky.
Meteors make the surface liquefy.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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…
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.
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.
Devoted readers know I like to write these. Here are a few. I take a newspaper article and make a poem out of it.
Here’s the article from which I’ve made my latest newspaper poem.
Here’s the poem:
A Lunar Crash Won’t Hurt the Moon
A lunar crash won’t hurt the moon.
Think of an eyelash, drifting to the floor of a 747.
This is a million times gentler than that.
The sun will light the impact plume
As it lifts six miles to heaven,
Deepening Cabeus Crater’s vat
Of shadowed ice, and making a boon
For lunar bases. A little leaven,
Moon dirt, a shepherd craft…
And the rock resumes
Its even, meteoritic,
Temper.