Tag Archives: spoken word

Semi-formal? or Spoken Word? RHL, ‘Life is a Bubble’

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A life is a bubble:
somewhere the Grand Druid
dips his wand into the universal fluid
and then a new life is formed, floating
on chance breezes until it – pops –
and the thin skin coating
falls back to earth as mere drops,
the shape and rare rainbow glint gone to air,
and the bubble is where?

Earth is a bauble
in the universal flux,
as it foams, boils and freezes,
just dust from God’s various mucks,
sneezes afloat on chance trans-solar breezes.

The humans babble,
rabble rising from the rubble of other lives cut to stubble,
they burble some Bible as they gab, grab and gobble,
cobbling conning towers of Babel and Hubble,
their progress hobbled by their wobbly bobble,
reams of hopes, dreams and schemes
just a bubble.

*****

Sometimes a chance-occurring phrase in some moody mode of thought lets me ramble wildly through tangled words and ideas. It’s not amenable to regular form, but it’s fun. It seems in the spirit of Spoken Verse, though I’ve never performed. The earliest poem I wrote in this style is from over 50 years ago… which is 30 years before I ever had a poem accepted for publication. I was definitely out of step with the non-verse that then controlled the poetry industry to the exclusion of almost all actual verse. Things have eased in recent years, and dozens of poems from those early years have since been published. (Note to struggling young poets: Don’t give up! But have another career that pays money!)

Anyway, ‘Life is a Bubble’ only needed a couple of years to be published in 2024 in The Lyric.

Photo: “Blowing bubbles” by Song_sing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poetry Resource: “Shot Glass Journal”, Poem: “In the Metal Box”

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You sit in the humming metal box
And the unlikely landscape rolls
Beneath you in its crumpled seas and rocks
Seen from some miles above on long papyrus scrolls.

This little poem was recently published in Shot Glass Journal, whose motto is “… brevity is the soul of wit …” Accepting only short verse (although “16 lines or less” seems overly generous for “short”) in either free or form, it is remarkable for an American institution in reserving half its space for non-US poets. In the current issue, the left-hand column of 21 US poets is balanced by the right-hand column of 21 poets from Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, India, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey and the UK. This in itself adds richness and interest to the journal, all the more tasty and accessible in a short-form environment.

Normally edited by Mary-Jane Grandinetti, the current issue (#29) is guest-edited by poet R.G. Rader, the poet and playwright who founded Muse-Pie Press. Muse-Pie Press publishes Shot Glass Journal, as well as two other idiosyncratic magazines, Bent Ear Review of spoken poetry (audio or video submissions only, naturally) and the fib review of Fibonacci poetry. All are open to both formal and free verse.

Technically, this might or might not be a “throwaway poem”. That’s how I would describe it, meaning just a casual thought in verse; but on the other hand some people use the term to mean hand-written thoughts (usually not well-formed) on scraps of paper left behind on public transit or in the park. This one has a bit of form: rhyme, meter, and the last two lines lengthening in imitation of the endlessness of air travel and of the landscape that is being flown over.