Poemorama at Paper Poetry
Interstellar Crisscrossing Ever Nearer
A monoku and golden shovel poetry combo
pulsating expansion steadfast ever nearer cascades over me
Rhythmic surges urgent pipe organ pulsating Heart reverberates into full expansion Intrepid bowed strings, pulled stretch-tethered steadfast Transpiratory inspiration, now breathe in out and ever Interstellar crisscrossing dimensions spiral nearer Precipitant patter of fingered keys crescendo cascades Metronomic triumph, cadent hypnosis won, too and over Please take me
© Carolyn Hastings 2022
Okay, let’s call this experimental, hybrid poetry! And you can add pretentious if you like but, in my defence, please let me explain what’s going on here.
A while back — I’m talking last year — Somsubhra Banerjee wrote a musically-inspired monoku that intrigued me enough to want to give it a try myself. I did. I wrote the 8-word monoku you see at the beginning of this post.
My source of musical inspiration? Hans Zimmer’s No Time for Caution instrumental from the Interstellar movie soundtrack.
But me being me, I wanted to push the boundaries — my own boundaries, that is. My plan was to use the words from the monoku to create a golden shovel poem. Monoku I’d done before; golden shovel was a new frontier. I set about and wrote an early version of the eight-line poem you see here, but only got as far as line 5. At that point, I do here confess, I gave up.
While I’m talking confessions, I’ll confess that music is not really a big deal for me. More to the point, I’m frustratingly picky and choosy — just go ask my husband! “What kind of music do you like?” he asks me. “I don’t know,” I reply, “I know it when I hear it!”
That’s what happened when I first heard Hans Zimmer’s No Time for Caution track. I don’t know what it is about it but I could listen to the 4-minutes of instrumental brilliance over and over for hours on end. Totally hypnotic and all consuming. But that’s just me, see what you think -
I came back to my monoku-golden shovel combo today with the idea of resurrecting it from the too-hard basket. You can be the judge of how it turned out.
I’m submitting it to Poemorama Part 1 as a double dipper: two prompts in one — prompt 1: monoku, and prompt 9: golden shovel. Pretentious, right?!
But wait, if you think that’s pretentious, what about this?
A golden shovel, by definition, is a form of tribute for a well-known poem. Each word from a line or lines of the famous poem are used as the final word in successive lines of a completely new poem.
Er, my monoku hardly rates as famous; nor is it deserving of a golden shovel! Unless, of course, I’ve criss-crossed dimensions into the future and discovered that my monoku is a sensation! Now that’s being pretentious! 😅
Find out more about the poetry prompts for Poemorama Part 1 here –
Inviting Lisa Bolin | Louise Foerster | Javier Ortega-Araiza | Irdandy Fidastra to join our Poemorama celebration for National Poetry Month.
Please enjoy these wonderfully unique creations made for Poemorama —
“L” is for Laundry by Kimberly Hampton Nilsson
Confusion by A Rustic Mind (Manali Desai)
Thank you all for reading. 🙏 💕
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