Every Sunday I post an original poem.
every corner we turned there was the moon
north south east west the moon
full and every corner bigger
until the sky was made of moon
you stood between me and moon
and said i'll take the hit
and you did
now when i see the moon i reach
it is always waning
As hopefully you know, I released a little book of the poems that I have been posting here on the blog on Sundays.
Today Motherboard did a little piece on it:
I think next time I should make a game that has the poems in it, and I bet it would be seen by a much larger audience. Why should these things be tied down into traditional media and release methods? Why couldn’t we commingle them much more? If you were doing the game adaptation of that poem about network optimization, what the heck would that be?
Of course, it also got plenty of exposure from BoingBoing’s feature on it, which included several of the poems and illustrations. Gaming sites like Massively Overpowered and The Ultima Codex wrote about it too. All of this coverage is quite out of the ordinary for poetry, I suspect, which mostly gets covered by sites about poetry.
 Starting in 2005, game designer Raph Koster decided to post a poem to his popular blog every Sunday. Ten years later, this is a selection of eighty of those poems, accompanied by gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations and illuminating endnotes.
These are verses written to an audience that didn’t necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children’s homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. In them we voyage across the world, or deep inside apples; we see a toddler become a pterodactyl, and clouds become mundane water vapor. We see sonnets written in computer code. These are poems for everyday people about ordinary things made extraordinary.
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After years of threats, I finally made it happen. Sunday Poems is my new book, collecting many of the poems published here on the blog in the Sunday Poem tag, as well as a smattering of others. Sunday Poems is available right now in paperback, and is available for pre-order on Kindle (and those are both Amazon affiliate links). I will be working on getting the book to more digital services in the coming days.
London squall, Islington gusts,
Wash the Barbican clean.
Tidy households in tiny flats
Open windows, let out cats
As raindrops stop and shatter
And rental bikes go clattering
Down Clerkenwell streets.
Puddles, unavoidable mess,
Are temporary consequence.
Each lost leaf in King’s Square
Is labeled where it fell.
London squall and Islington gusts
May discomfit, yes. But we will not
Permit them to disrupt.
– Outside a café, London, Aug 2014
It has been a very long time since I posted a Sunday Poem. That is because it has been a long time since I wrote a poem. But here is one that popped out the other day.
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Afternoon Joggers
The way they run, struggling against invisible wind, These flagellates billow out each afternoon, This is their duty to themselves, their dream |
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This, however, saves you from the one that my mom found today, that I wrote for her for Mother’s Day in the third or fourth grade. 🙂
