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