WikiLeaks are reinvented as haikus

For months now the revelations on WikiLeaks have embarrassed governments and threatened international relations.

Who'd have thought they would have spawned poetry.

The leaks, a mere 1830 of them, so far, have now become the source of haiku poetry.

A site called HaikuLeaks used a computer algorithm to find 65 different haikus within the WikiLeaks documents. Admittedly haikus such as...

It remains to be

seen how Lugovoy’s new role will affect
LDPR’s election prospects.

do not make for the most classic lines in poetry. But at least they're topical. See more at...
http://haikuleaks.tetalab.org/

Prisoner wins poetry competition

A prisoner from Northern Ireland who had to make do with jail rather than bail has won a poetry competition by writing about how he misses home.

To be fair an inmate of some way, shape or form was likely to win this one as the competition was run by the Northern Ireland Prison Ombudsman.

The winner wasn't named but here's the poem and a link to the Belfast Telegraph story.

Happy Christmas, hope you're doing well

I wish you joy from my prison cell
I'm sorry I can't be by your side
But I'll be there for next yuletide
My heart is with you I hope you know
I long to meet you by the mistletoe
The sparkles, the spangles, the tinsel, the tree
The presents, the turkey, the carols, no me
But I've learned a lesson it's true to tell
I'm sober, I'm drug free and I'm doing well
My present to you is I've changed my life
Happy Christmas my parents, my children, my wife

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/remorseful-ulster-inmate-wins-poetry-prize-15040727.html

Verse of the Day - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Snowstorm - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Verse of the Day - WH Auden

Auden captured the desolate mood of winter perfectly in his tribute to one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, William Butler Yeats.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats by WH Auden



He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.



Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


II


You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.


III


Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Verse of the Day - William Carlos Williams

This one's appropriate for all those folks buried in snow back home in England.

Blizzard - William Carlos Williams

Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down --
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes --
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there --
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

Verse of the Day - Walter de la Mare

Mistletoe a Christmas Poem by Walter de la Mare


Sitting under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
One last candle burning low,
All the sleepy dancers gone,
Just one candle burning on,
Shadows lurking everywhere:
Some one came, and kissed me there.


Tired I was; my head would go
Nodding under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
No footsteps came, no voice, but only,
Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,
Stooped in the still and shadowy air
Lips unseen - and kissed me there.

Pamela Anderson pens a poem

Pamela Anderson appearing on the cover of Playboy is hardly remarkable. Her picture on the front of this month's is her 13th.

But Pamela uses this occasion to highlight a previously unknown talent, that of writing poetry. The word "talent" is up for debate as Pammi's verse proves to be about as scant as the outfits she wears and is unlikely to challenge Wordsworth's legacy any time soon.

To save all you poetry addicts rushing out to buy a copy of Playboy here's Pammi's contribution to world literature.

"Our best isn't good enough - right now our eyes are far-reaching. Please let's show the good in us... The brilliance... The wonderful... It's abundant - it's just not tapped as it should be," she writes


http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2010/12/pamela-anderson-covers-playboy-with-a-poem/

The Seafarer

The Seafarer was one of the first poems I taught to a disaffected and disinterested 12th graders in my short and unsuccessful stint as an English teacher. Still it stands the test of time. The poem was told almost 2,000 yeara ago and passed on by word of mouth in the mead halls of the Anglo Saxons.
It's a long poem but here's the first quarter.

The Seafarer

This tale is true, and mine. It tells
How the sea took me, swept me back
And forth in sorrow and fear and pain,
Showed me suffering in a hundred ships,
In a thousand ports, and in me. It tells
Of smashing surf when I sweated in the cold
Of an anxious watch, perched in the bow
As it dashed under cliffs. My feet were cast
In icy bands, bound with frost,
With frozen chains, and hardship groaned
Around my heart. Hunger tore
At my sea-weary soul. No man sheltered
On the quiet fairness of earth can feel
How wretched I was, drifting through winter
On an ice-cold sea, whirled in sorrow,
Alone in a world blown clear of love,
Hung with icicles. The hailstorms flew.
The only sound was the roaring sea,
The freezing waves. The song of the swan
Might serve for pleasure, the cry of the sea-fowl,
The death-noise of birds instead of laughter,
The mewing of gulls instead of mead.

New verse by jailed Chinese poet is published in the US

Poetry by imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (lee-OO' show-BOH') is coming out in the U.S, according to the Associated Press.

Graywolf Press announced Thursday that "June Fourth Elegies" will be published in 2012. It is a bilingual edition of verse by the 54-year-old Chinese dissident and literary critic.

Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion handed down last year after he co-authored an appeal for human rights and political reform.

Needless to say his book hasn't been published in China. It refers to the 1989, suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

Here's an extract from his writing.

Experiencing Death

From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

Verse of the Day - Sylvia Plath

I can rely on Sylvia Plath for a happy verse to celebrate a hard day's Friday night...

The Dead by Sylvia Plath

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,
Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
Dead men render love and war no heed,
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
And when at last they blunder into bed
World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
These bone shanks will not wake immaculate
To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day :
They loll forever in colossal sleep;
Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up
From their fond, final, infamous decay.