The Sunday Poem

Every Sunday I post an original poem.

Feb 252007
 

I am running out of bits of the Jungle Book poem to post. 🙂 There were only seven segments that I finished, out of many more planned. Ah well, I doubt I will ever resume the project, given that it’s from 14 years ago. I was discouraged from proceeding with them by my thesis advisor, actually, who disliked the style — basically prosy, observational and imagistic.

The way these developed is that they were actually written based on room descriptions I had done for the LegendMUD Seoni Jungle area. When I read them now, they read less like poems about the original Kipling stories, and more descriptions of a place, a setting that is somehow a fantasyland, an ur-version of the Seoni, as if it were a real place that Kipling and I both dreamt of. That’s what gameworlds try to pull off, often, so it’s unsurprising that these read to me like poems about a gameworld with trees larger than possible, civilizations more ancient than history, and so on. And of course, often our gameworlds are greatly incomplete — lacking in solidity. As this poem says, “…everything is shaped… like the spaces between plants.”

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The Sunday Poem: Moldering

 Posted by (Visited 6539 times)  The Sunday Poem
Feb 182007
 

This is likely to be the oldest poem I ever post on this site — it dates back to March of 1989. Yes, it’s that most horrific of artifacts, a poem from high school. At least one person who reads the blog has commented that he of course “skips over the bad poems from high school” — perhaps there is some meager consolation in the fact that this particular high school poem in fact won an award — I think it was at the district level or something.

Anyway, I’m not so foolish as to present the original version; this is actually the slightly revised version, cleaned up a little bit the subsequent year, after winning. 🙂

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Feb 042007
 

It feels weird to try to follow up “Ode to Code”, which is easily the most popular poem I have ever posted on the site. Most of the Sunday Poems get a few dozen reads, and that one has crested 1500.

Well, here’s a song that is in some ways similarly geeky. After all, it’s about orreries, sextants, Dava Sobel’s wonderful book Longitude, determinism, and even name-checks Aristotle. It also has a shipwrecked sailor hallucinating, of course. For those who don’t know or haven’t read the book (which I highly recommend), before John Harrison developed his clock, longitude was fiendishly difficult to calculate, which led, of course, to sea travel being extremely dangerous and unpredictable.

I ended up making it the title track on that “full band” CD that I still haven’t finished after all these years (it’s been since 2001!). I should probably just call it “done” and put it up somewhere. Oh well. Read on for the lyrics and also how to play it on the guitar:
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Jan 282007
 

OK, people are on my case about being late with the Sunday Poem, so I had better post something despite the fact that I am wrestling with site load. I am unsure what that means in terms of popularity of the Sunday Poem, since it’s only two people. But hey, two is better than zero. So even if I post the Sunday Poem, odds are it won’t increase load too much. 🙂

This is actually a song lyric. I don’t have a recording of the song handy, so you will just have to come to a jam session sometime if you want to hear it.

Married Life

You fell in love and you signed the papers
And moved home to annoy the neighbors
And it was good, just fine, living the married life
No kids yet, but what’s the hurry?
They just mean you have to worry
That’s no good, no time in the married life

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