{"id":345,"date":"2007-09-17T05:00:59","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/17\/a-poetry-challenge\/"},"modified":"2007-09-17T05:41:44","modified_gmt":"2007-09-17T13:41:44","slug":"a-poetry-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/poetry\/a-poetry-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"A poetry challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Guardian, <\/em>John Hartley Williams posed a poetry challenge<\/a>. Essentially, the assignment was to fracture a proverb and combine it in a poem with at least seven of the following words: beat, mother, fashion, ghost, pool, dance, disturb, knife, croak, shimmer.<\/p>\n

The contest caught my fancy, and I gave it a try. I might have missed the deadline, though, unless they cut me some slack for being on the West Coast. Anyway, here’s what I came up with.<\/p>\n

Whom God loves his bitch births pigs
\nA quien Dios quiere bien, la perra le pare puercos <\/span>
\nBy Thomas Christensen<\/p>\n

Light danced round the chicken bus
\nWobbling from the village of
\nSan Juan Sacatapequez —
\nIt shimmered from the knife of
\nThe crone who had fashioned a
\nBlanket around her chest. I
\nThought her a nursing mother
\nUntil the blood pooled across
\nThe dirty fabric that had
\nClasped the pig to her body.
\nThe beast’s eyes caught mine, disturbed,
\nIt seemed, to be exposed at
\nSuch an intimate moment.
\nEl que quiere baile,<\/span> the
\nWoman murmured, que pague<\/span>
Musico.<\/span> To dance to the
\nBeat of this world, sometimes
\nYou have to slay the piper.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the second line I don’t much like the word wobbling. <\/em>Can anyone suggest something better (needs to be two syllables)?<\/p>\n

(I don’t like “shimmered” either, but it’s one of the assigned words.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Guardian, John Hartley Williams posed a poetry challenge. Essentially, the assignment was to fracture a proverb and combine it in a poem with at least seven…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}