Day 3 of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo2018 and I am feeling a tad flat. It’s rainy and the temperatures are hovering just above freezing. I truly would rather be baking cookies for the guys at Toastmasters tonight. Today’s prompt is a list poem and usually I LOVE list poems, but today the prompt is not really doing it for me. What I can say of my effort today is that I took out my pen, my notebook and tried to string together words, although I am doubtful that it qualifies as poetry. This is the prompt from napowrimo.net:
Today’s prompt (optional as always), is inspired by our interview with Peter Davis. As he indicates there, his latest book is rooted in endlessly writing ideas for band names. Today, we challenge you to try this out yourself by writing a list poem in which all the items are made-up names. If band names don’t inspire, how about a list of titles for romantic novels? Or new television cop dramas? They can be as over-the-top as you like, because that’s (at least) half the fun.
I did attempt a Regency Romance theme, but stopped with “Trumpet Fanfare for a Strumpet , Nell Gwynne Goes Holyrood, Red Coat Romance (where bodices fall since gussets didn’t exist.” You can thank me for abandoning that. Your welcome!
And as no other option turned up, what my mind did turn to was a conversation with a recently departed houseguest. We were trying to enumerate examples in classic literature that had happy endings.
Happy Endings in Classic Literary Fiction
With winter still here and the cattle chawing fodder
we reckoned once we shot the Austen canon
(our favourites Pride & Prejudice, but let us not
forget Anne Elliot in Persuasion) pickings were slim
We furrowed our feminist brows, dismissing
“Dear Reader, I married him”
As not meeting some essential criterion for bliss
Dickens could make ’em laugh as well as cry
A Christmas Carol, for instance
ends on a happy note
David Copperfield wises up
Pip is rewarded with his Great Expectations
But sadly Sidney Carton lets the side down
since beheading put a pall on reading proceedings
It’s become a bit of a grail quest
after reviewing high school set text lists
Tolkien makes many internet lists
Otherwise we may be forced
An exhumation order for Trollope
plying his pen, ranging round Irish Districts
for the Post Office
Although the Irish RM nods to him
Otherwise most other Irish classics
tend towards the grim
with the possible exception of
Flann O’Brien
So we broadened our definition of classic
To allow more modern editions
20th century happy being perhaps more
life-affirming than feeling joy filled
but light-hearted would be a welcome addition
a brace of Jeeves, a dash of Wimsey
or the redemption of Ida Doom
from the woodshed on Cold Comfort Farm
Blog hits include The Shipping News by Proux
which I will admit
As does Homer’s Odyssey
which may just go to prove
that the trick of happy endings
is for love to conquer all
and that there is no place like home
but you need to journey out
to journey back in
not at all unlike Tom Sawyer
and his friend Huckleberry Finn
©Bee Smith 2018
I really like this! Thank you for sharing.
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Thanks for the feedback. Sometimes it feels like a void space. Comments like this make a dreary day cheerier. Now I can bake cookies with a lighter heart.
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