Chicken tetherball (GIF)
Chickens peck at the cool, fresh globe
stabbed by an eyescrew, hung by a chain,
heads bobbing with each playful bite
as they bat the food-toy one to the next,
back and forth, back and forth, and
I stand, a child in the museum foyer,
hypnotized watching a hundred-pound ball
knock down pegs as it swings in easy
rotation—or rather, as its path stays fixed
and the earth spins beneath—
back and forth, back and forth, and
every few minutes, the sound—click—
of Foucault’s proof. Today I muse
Did the French devise tetherball too?
I recently took a (free) poetry on Coursera, Sharpened Visions, taught by Douglas Kearney from the MFA program at the California Institute of Arts. It was a 6-week class that covered the basics of writing poetry and offered several assignments for practice. (If you’re interested, the next round starts September 12, 2016.)
As a fairly experienced poet, I found the course a good refresher, and I even took away a few new terms (synecdoche, metonymy). The sample poems studied were fresher than one often finds in an introductory level poetry class, which offered a chance to meet some new voices. I’d also note the instructor has an amusing (to me) sense of humor and the production quality of the videos is high relative to other online courses I’ve taken.
Week 2 of the class focused on image (things you can literally touch/taste/see/hear/smell) and abstraction (things for which we have symbols, e.g., a heart for love). One of the fun assignments was to make up a title in the format “The [Concrete noun] of [Abstract noun],” then write that poem.
Thus, I present “The Cabbage of Illumination.”
Karin S. Wiberg 