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CALEB PARKIN

Poetry. Play. Possibilities.

NaPoWriMo 29: Excerpts from a Report on the New Poem Aquarium

Apr 29, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 29: Excerpts from a Report on the New Poem Aquarium

An empty aquarium – shall we fill it with poems? Shall we? So yes, it being the end of NaPoWriMo, I’m going quite deranged and using increasing amounts (and oddities) of Found or – in this instance what I’m calling ‘Poached Poetry’. (Poached in the sense of hunted and stolen, or I guess it could be poached in the egg-sense.) This has reached new and ridiculous heights (or depths) today: I have just watched a news report about a new Chinese visitor attraction and written bits

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NaPoWriMo 27: Tami Is Using Pinterest

Apr 27, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 27: Tami Is Using Pinterest

All that glitters is not what’s good for the goose. Feeling experimental today! I have been out running a workshop earlier, so just used the NaPoWriMo prompt to co-write a search-engine poem with my partner. It is based on the first few words of proverbs and the results they yielded from search engines. We then wrote 5-line stanzas and interlaced them… Here it is! See if you can guess the two proverbs… Tami Is Using Pinterest Tami is using Pinterest to collect and share a car

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NaPoWriMo 26: Stories and/or Plans and/or Ideas

Apr 26, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 26: Stories and/or Plans and/or Ideas

This became the nickname for my Mum, so my step-dad made her an actual Mothership logo – AWESOIME. Here’s my Day 26 offering, from Jo Bell’s lovely prompt to write a sonnet (or something sonnet-like) about your parents, distributing the lines across your Mum (ABABCD on Sandy, then), then your Dad (CDEFEF on Jeremy, then) and finally, you – for the last couplet (GG on me, then). It was a fairly quick effort – been a busy day at work! But I managed to keep to the structure – an

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NaPoWriMo 25: Picnic Ballad

Apr 25, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 25: Picnic Ballad

Here is your hamper… …have a lovely time Sometimes, you’ve just got to let it all out. But, so a long-standing motto of mine goes: Make Your Pain Entertaining. It’s not been a great day, so when the prompt of a Ballad came through, I wrote the following ‘picnic ballad’. Don’t worry, it won’t be anything as chintzy as you first imagine. The idea came from working with a student today, on Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade‘, which features the lines ‘All in the valley

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NaPoWriMo 24: Dust Across the Beam

Apr 24, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 24: Dust Across the Beam

Hyde Park Picture House: 100 in 2014! As you may have noticed, things have been a bit cinematic on my blog during NaPoWriMo. I’m reading a few poems (including my poem about the Invisible Cinema walking tour, from earlier in the month) on Sunday morning at an event to mark the centenary of Hyde Park Picture House. And here is a piece I wrote based on an earlier prompt from Canal Laureate Jo Bell, which was to write a poem of Welcome. So, to celebrate the Picture House’s cente

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NaPoWriMo 23: A Triolet for Entropy

Apr 23, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 23: A Triolet for Entropy

The Universe loves things to get more disordered. (So most of us fit right in – We Are Stardust!) I’m running on a slightly altered NaPoWriMo timetable, or flexi-time, if you will: there’s a Welcome and a Blessing brewing for Sunday, from earlier prompts. But as I’ve slightly stumbled on these – and am going to return to them – I thought I’d try out a triolet from today’s NaPoWriMo prompt. Looking around for some inspiration, I found this article about entropy and intelligenc

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NaPoWriMo 21: White Violin or, Lord Raby’s Massive Silver Wine Cooler

Apr 21, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 21: White Violin or, Lord Raby’s Massive Silver Wine Cooler

Lord Raby’s Massive Silver Wine Cooler – as so described on the signs in Temple Newsam House! Filling in an earlier gap from NaPoWriMo: I started writing this a while back based on a trip to Temple Newsam House, just outside Leeds. It’s an amazing house – no doubt about it – and it’s great that it’s now in public ownership, with gorgeous grounds to walk or cycle round. While I was there, there was a concert of Early Music – a series of concerts, in fact – and I sat down to li

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NaPoWriMo 20: Rising Suns

Apr 21, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 20: Rising Suns

Piss-en-lit! Taraxacum! Yesterday’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to use a prescribed list of words and include 5 or more in a poem. Jo Bell’s prompt was to write about something that was growing. So I did both: PROMPT-JAM. Yeah. As I walked near where I live yesterday, I noticed a patch of grass with lots of dandelions on it – and I was thinking about John Donne and his poem Sun Rising. There was an Afternoon Drama about him on last week – The Flea (which was wonderful: a great rend

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NaPoWriMo 18: Me or Him, Even

Apr 18, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 18: Me or Him, Even

Even? A really quick one today, from both Jo Bell’s prompt (write about something you feel guilty for) and the NaPoWriMo prompt, to start with the same word as you finish with. So I’ve done both – about a time at school which stays with me, when I pushed someone (after an embarrassing incident) who then fell off a table, on to a chair, tipped back and got concussion. To this day, I still don’t know if I meant that to happen, or just to get them to shut up. Either way, the out

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NaPoWriMo 16: Apple ’til Blackened Lager

Apr 16, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 16: Apple ’til Blackened Lager

Look! Blackened Lager is an actual thing! This was really good fun: the prompt today was to find a poem in a language other than English – a language you don’t know – then to translate it by sound. So not to think about what the words mean, just what they sound like, in English. It’s actually a wonderful way of showing musicality in poetry and one I might use in workshops or schools in future! So thanks for that, NaPoWriMo. So on to my attempt, which either says something abo

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NaPoWriMo 16: Emancipation on Briggate

Apr 16, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 16: Emancipation on Briggate

Fortunately, the wheelie bin I saw on the move this morning off Briggate was not air-borne (just ground-borne – can something be ‘ground-borne’? I suppose earthworms and moles are…) Hello NaPoWriMo-ers! I’m looking forward to trying the prompt later and gobbledegook-ing some poetry not-in-translation… But a silly moment produced a silly poem this morning, so here it is: Emancipation on Briggate or, The Wind Creates a Performance Action around the Theme of Waste In a narrow sh

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NaPoWriMo 12: Want/Need

Apr 15, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 12: Want/Need

A magick key (for an inadvertently key-shaped poem) A quick one this: I don’t often get slushy and when I do, it tends to be short! And this is very much in that vein. The prompt for the 12th was to write a list of things you would want to say but would never (thereby, of course, saying them) – so this started from there and became a brief love poem of things unsaid: Want/Need or, Doors/Keys I want to say I didn’t know that before you, I didn’t realise there was so much I did

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NaPoWriMo 13: Windowless Walls

Apr 15, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 13: Windowless Walls

Bagel Nash, which was once the News Theatre, by Leeds Station I continue to run at a poetical-deficit, but will catch up soon (12 and 14 to follow today)… Here’s my poem based on going for a walk: on Sunday, I went on a walking tour of some of the forgotten/disused cinemas around Leeds city centre – which is part of the celebration of 100 years of Hyde Park Picture House – and was organised by these fine folk (Conway and Young). I put up some more pictures of this walk yester

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NaPoWriMo 11: Double-Duvet Mecca

Apr 13, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 11: Double-Duvet Mecca

A pair of washers at a washeteria Day 11’s prompt was to write a Tanka (five-line stanzas with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables) – so I’ve used the form to bring an autobiographical poem into being. I had this idea a little while ago: as my partner and I live on a narrowboat, we don’t have a full-size washing machine and either use a little twin-tub (which can be labour-intensive) – or visit a laundrette. On our travels up here to Leeds from Bristol via the inland waterways (see Inland Od

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NaPoWriMo 10: Un-love Poem for Call-Centre Conversations

Apr 12, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 10: Un-love Poem for Call-Centre Conversations

The battery-farming of conversation, in the form of a call centre. Day 10’s prompt was to write a poem of un-love; not a malediction, so much, but just a poem of ennui (that’s how I read it) about someone, or something. It so happens that I spent quite a bit of time doing a transfer from one credit card to another today, as well as spending some time on the phone to a large mobile phone company. While the people I spoke to were perfectly polite and proficient, there is someth

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NaPoWriMo 9: “I’m the plot, babe, and don’t you forget it”

Apr 12, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 9: “I’m the plot, babe, and don’t you forget it”

Smoky big-haired replicant femme-fatale from the future! Still catching up, so here’s my Noir poem for day 9. I actually found an IMDB list of the Top 100 Film Noir and then created a poem using only (mostly, give or take a few joining words) their titles – so it’s a found poem which, because of the diction of Noir titles, feels very noir-ish, of course. AND, as I failed to write a cinquain for day 5 (I went ‘off-piste’ that day), I’ve written it in three cinquain-ish stanzas

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NaPoWriMo 8: An Ottova Rima

Apr 11, 2013
1 min

NaPoWriMo 8: An Ottova Rima

There’ll be plenty of this going on above the Atlantic in years to come, it seems… Yes, I’m still running on something of a poetry-deficit – but I will catch up by the end of the month and have 30 poems! The 8th challenge was to write an Ottova Rima; a formal type of poem in iambic pentameter, with the rhyme-scheme abababcc. I didn’t know what to write mine about and then heard a piece on Radio 4earlier discussing some climate researchers’ work about air turbulence. They have

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NaPoWriMo 7: The Pies of Awareness

Apr 9, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 7: The Pies of Awareness

The Pies of Awareness may or may not come from Gregg’s (who feature, by the way, as a Classical Allusion in another poem of mine by a pigeon) Quickfire blog entries! The prompt for NaPoWriMo Day 7 was to write a poem consisting solely of a series of declarative statements, with one question at the end. So, based on some conversations I’ve had recently, here it is – the explanation is kind of involved, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. (By the way, days 8 and 9 – the

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Apr 7, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo – wonderful John Donne valedictions

On my way to do a 10k run with obstacles this morning – and being energised by metaphysical poetry! Though no doubt the Power of Poetry can only go so far where a near-frozen lake swim is involved… Anyway, I have not yet written my day 6 valediction, but in researching it just read some John Donne goodbye-poems. He is so robust and cosmic in his writing, thought I would share them of a Sunday morning: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ As virtuous men pass mildly away, And

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NaPoWriMo 5: Unprompted Art Poetry

Apr 6, 2013
2 min

NaPoWriMo 5: Unprompted Art Poetry

Paul Jenkins’ ‘Phenomena Secret Cargo’ – but not as we saw it in the gallery…Which is right? Day 6 of NaPoWriMo – I’m still brewing a cinquain from yesterday (which are HARD!) but here is a non-prompt piece inspired by a visit to the gallery in Cardiff (Wales, where I am today). I’m writing overlooking the Wales Millennium Centre (with its Gwyneth Lewis quote writ large on the front: IN THESE STONES HORIZONS SING) from a lovely cafe called Kemi’s in Cardiff Bay. So my NaPoWri

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