TIP FOR THE MONOBON: RADICALIZING THE POETIC LEAP

After creating and describing a poetic form, I rarely give instructions on how other poets might write in the form. But I occasionally give tips (e.g., for the hay(na)ku I've suggested avoiding one-line articles like "the" or "a"). For the monobon, my (optional) tip is to radicalize the poetic leap between the prose and the ending monostich (one-liner). By "radicalizing" here, I mean writing a monostich that could not have been expected from the prose. Here's my example, the poem below that's entitled "Monobonbon." Monobonbon was a term I thought of while exploring what to name the form that I eventually call monobon. I loved the integration of "bonbon" because of its reference to candies. So I wrote the poem below, but which also displays a radicalization of that poetry leap between prose and one-liner. Perhaps you'll consider it for writing a monobon.

REMINDER: The deadline, Oct. 31, 2023, is coming up for a Monobon poetry folio to be published by The Halo Halo Review. Go HERE for Submissions Call.

Nota Bene: This is just one way for writing a monobon. Also, it's a first draft so I'm still tinkering with it--e.g. the "enjoyed" in last line of prose would be better as "relished".

NEWPAGES GIVES REVIEW TO ...LOVE...

 

NewPages has published a review of BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR. My book has many layers--I love to cram as many layers as she can in a single book--and this review is the first to look at the project in terms of archive-related issues. You can see entire review HERE but here's an excerpt:

"What is so magical about this collection is that we are not left hanging and lost in the dense material of this ambitious project; we are shown abundance and astounding imagination in what remains. This project is love."

 

A POEM FOR MY MOTHER

It's so difficult to write for/about my mother. But I did manage the poem "The Peony Named Beatrice" (my mother's name was the derivation "Beatriz") and I'm grateful it recently found publication in Entanglements2: A Curated Collection of Contemporary Culture, Curator Annette Wylde (PreNeo Press / Hunger Button Books, 2023). Here's my poem and other images from this gorgeous book that explores “Biophilia,” defined as biologist Edward O. Wilson as the “emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” into our cultural consciousness and conversations:

SUBMISSION CALL: MONOBON POETRY

In the prior post, I introduce the Monobon. Here is a Submission Call for a forthcoming feature on the Monobon--you are invited to participate!

Submission Call for the “Monobon,” A Poetry Form

 

You are invited to write and send Monobon poems. A Monobon is a poem comprised of prose and ending with a monostich, or one-line poem. The prose can be one or more paragraphs.

 

Updated Deadline: November 12, 2023.

Selected Monobons will be published in The Halo-Halo Review.

Send poems (with brief bios) by Facebook Messenger to Eileen Tabios, or by email to galateaten@gmail.com

 

Monobon is a form inspired by the monostich. Ideally, the poet would consider its one line to be a valid stand-alone poem as befits the monostich. The form is open to all styles, subjects, treatments, and also welcomes variations. (An example of a variation can be the “Found Monobun” where the prose paragraph(s) can be an excerpt from a previously written text which then inspires the ending monostich. Poets should feel free to create other variations.)

 

As a poetry form, the Monobon can be written by poets with different aesthetics. Here are two Monobon examples by two poets who write in different styles (see their bios at end of this Call).

 

Bruce W. Niedt

 

Two Sides of Temptation

 

 A little six-ounce screw-top jar. Every 90 degrees, a hole drilled through the glass near the neck, four in all. Through each hole, a red rubber stopper, flower-shaped with a smaller hole in the middle. A half-cup solution of one part sugar, four parts water, almost fills the jar, which hangs by a hook over a piece of clothesline, strung under the eaves of the back porch. A ruby-throated hummingbird accepts the invitation to quench his thirst and need for energy, and he flits and darts around it, dipping his needled beak, hovering with blurred wings, before he flashes off just as quickly as he came. He remembers this station, this sweet oasis, returning again and again, and if we let it go dry, that clever little dynamo reminds us by buzzing around our back porch door, peering in at the humans who feed him. Today, though, there are different visitors, and they march single file up the post that leads to the tied-on clothesline, tightrope-walk across it to the jar, and crawl in through the little faux-flower holes to find the source of what they smelled, that sugary lake inside. But they are trapped, unable to get a foothold, and drown there by the dozens, while a parade of unsuspecting comrades pushes on to a deadly objective. By the end of the day, the sugar-water is black with bodies.

 

The sweetness, the trap—

 

 

Sheila E. Murphy

 

Tone Tempura

 

Humpbacked hashtags winter here among the decibels caught up in an ear trumpet just newly cleaned. I stole a moth from the giveaway coat as beige as let-go winter trees. I writhed with smudged wings to be included in a chamber music mainly insects know. Mirroring the sotto glow of bronze bells lifted to another weather. Astride a full-grown tarp draped across a dry dark fence. A kind of limbo marks the close of trail toward and away. Any deviation, a sullen mischief marks the smudge that seeks a quiet shrillness in the cold. 

 

Mortuary science left to tithe beyond young gravitas

 

 

About the Poets:

Bruce W. Niedt is a retired “beneficent bureaucrat” whose poetry has been published in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Writer’s Digest, Mason Street Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Spitball, and Your Daily Poem. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Best of the Barefoot Muse, Poem Your Heart Out, and most recently, Poetry for Ukraine. He has won poetry awards from Writer’s Digest, ByLine Magazine, and the Philadelphia Writers Conference. His first full-length collection, The Bungalow of Colorful Aging (Kelsay Books), and his eighth chapbook, Knit Our Broken Bones, (Maverick Duck Press), were published in 2022. 

 

Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy’s most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023). Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy

INTRODUCING THE "MONOBON" POETIC FORM

I'm pleased to introduce a new poetry form, the "monobon" consisting of a prose paragraph followed by a monostich (one-line poem). I present the form's inaugural poem below, which is based on a true story of a recent cancer scare:

 

Without

 

Have poems always been conscious of mortality or has my aging recently passed some threshold that makes me now read poignancy in any poem? Prageeta Sharma* reveals relief when she discovers her “breasts are okay, just dense with benign cysts” and that her nurse told her those cysts are “from coffee or chocolate, two things I love.” This is from her poem “Annual” where she quotes me when I wrote (and forgot) on Facebook, “A problem with entering your sixth decade is that death is no longer unimaginable. To continue, you must renew your commitment to an art/poetic practice that most others find irrelevant. That renewed commitment is… hard.” I quote her now in this poem because Prageeta doesn’t know that I read her poem shortly after my doctor discovered a cyst in my left breast. Prageeta doesn’t know how I kept the news private and relied on the comfort of sharing her coffee and chocolate habit until my doctor confirmed the cyst was benign. “It wasn’t cancer, but it was still a brush with death,” I wrote in another Facebook post that concludes, “A brush with death is a potent muse.” With these words, I inaugurate a new poetry form I call “monobun,” a prose paragraph that concludes with a monostich. My first draft wanted to end this inaugural monobun by citing another poet and Facebook friend with this line: “Harry K Stammer says Death’s pause by your door ‘will fuck with your head’ long after the peevishly immortal Death ends its brush to move on with its breath turned dank and hair turned oily by wide experience whose breadth cannot avoid regret.” But the sentence’s length would diminish its visual impact on the page; nor do I wish to hearken Walt Whitman’s long monostich from his 1860 Leaves of Grass. Thus, I shall end this poem instead with

 

A life without is darker, especially without you

 

* After “ANNUAL” by Prageeta Sharma, The Bennington Review, Issue 12. 

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The Monobon is also inspired by its initial name of “Monobun” which is also a hairstyle which provides a metaphor I appreciate, a gathering of hair atop the head--above the brain--to clear one’s vision of impediments to seeing clearly before alchemizing what’s seen into the single line of the monostich:

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If any of you write in this form, please share your poem(s) with me!

Here's an illustration of my coffee and chocolate habit in my poem "Without," a real-life scene on my writing desk:

~~

Master poet Sheila E. Murphy who's known for writing in such forms as the ghazal, pantoum, and haibun--as well as hay(na)ku--also has just written a monobon which you can see HERE.

SHEILA E. MURPHY WRITES A MONOBON!

I'm delighted to share master poet Sheila E. Murphy's monobon! I'm honored she wrote in this form, about which you can read more HERE.

Tone Tempura

 

Humpbacked hashtags winter here among the decibels caught up in an ear trumpet just newly cleaned. I stole a moth from the giveaway coat as beige as let-go winter trees. I writhed with smudged wings to be included in a chamber music mainly insects know. Mirroring the sotto glow of bronze bells lifted to another weather. Astride a full-grown tarp draped across a dry dark fence. A kind of limbo marks the close of trail toward and away. Any deviation, a sullen mischief marks the smudge that seeks a quiet shrillness in the cold. 

 

Mortuary science left to tithe beyond young gravitas

~~

Thanks Sheila! Here's more information about her:

Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Recently released from Luna Bisonte Prods in 2020 is Golden Milk. Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).  That same year, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory. Luna Bisonte Prods published Underscore (2018), featuring a collaborative visual book by K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy is known for working in forms including such as the ghazal, haibun, and pantoum in her individual writing. As an active collaborator, she has worked with Douglas Barbour on an extended poem called Continuations. Murphy’s visual work, both individual and collaborative, is shown in galleries and in private collections. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, Murphy is associated with music in poetry. She earns her living as an organizational consultant, professor, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life. 

THE HAY(NA)KU IS STILL TRAVELING AROUND THE WORLD!

The Philippine Scholars Program, founded by Gary W. King (Minnesota, USA), began in 1994 with prioritizing the education of children of political detainees and desaparecidos. It since has expanded to include the children from marginalized groups encompassing farmers, urban poor, among others. Participants in its workshops come from both high school and college-level students. This year, the organizers thought to include a creative arts workshop for the first time in its summer camp that took place in the SVD retreat house in Lapulapu City, Cebu, Philippines. Writer/facilitator Malou Alorro handled poetry writing and Nenita Pacilan handled music and creative dance.

 

In presenting poetry, Malou also introduced the hay(na)ku (thank you, Malou!). Here are photos of the lovely participants Bryle, Byron, Lalaine, Maymay, Ereln, Jasper, and Prence.:

The following is a chained hay(na)ku encapsulation of the workshop:

(Malou) 

Workshop 

Its literary 

Now in culmination. 

(Bryle) 

Precious 

It's treasure 

Time well spent. 

(Jasper) 

Ideas 

Good work 

Expressing them well. 

(Maymay) 

Friendships 

Are built 

Knowledge is gained. 

(Ereln) 

Evokes 

A high 

Creative imagination, awareness 

(Lalaine) 

Scholars 

Summer camp 

Good times together. 

(Prence) 

Interesting 

Unexpected happenings 

So much learning.

 (Byron) 

Difficult 

But beautiful 

And it's enjoyable. 

(Malou) 

Poets 

Now free 

Are truly home. 

 

June 25, 2023 

Literary workshop of Philippine scholars at the SVD retreat house, Lapulapu City, Cebu, Philippines.

*

 

I continued to be envious of the hay(na)ku’s global jet-setting lifestyle, but am happy to receive such field reports. Thank you, Malou and other teachers. Thank you, Universe.