Duran Duran Interrupts My Mental Health Walk
A glosa first draft from NovPAD Week 1 + thoughts on writing poems again
It’s a little too cold for early November in the woods. Oaks and elms already giving up, already flaming out, letting go. And everything already feels heavy, but here I can let go too. Suddenly a lo-fi car radio cuts the stillness with a 1992 hit: “I won’t cry for yesterday…” (Sing along if you know it.) Later I’ll look up the video and lyrics to write this poem, wonder why they chose that hat for a bride in white (of course, it was the 90s, you know). But the woods, the woods The scattering bluejays, the crunching of twigs, the radio — there’s an ordinary world out there. Terror and beauty, the rage of weak strongmen, the kindness of small talk. Maybe I can step outside my head long enough to feel the wind, to be free, like my terrier romping in the leaves, bowing to a skittish spotted blue dog she meets on the trail. I’m tired. Somehow I have to find a measure of peace, a laugh. We are all travelers here, all ordinary. We are bound to each other, to the woods, to the birds, to the dogs, somehow yes, to Duran Duran, in that space where a busy road bumps against the wildness. Now I can breathe easier. I will learn to survive.
We’re a little over one week into November Poem a Day, and I think I just might feel those atrophied poetry muscles waking up again. In Week 1, I managed 4 out of 7 prompts, all a little bit decent start in their own way, but this one was the most fun in all its stream of consciousness.
Last week, I took Malika for a walk at a nearby wooded trail. Do I need to drive my dog 20-30 minutes every other day to get a good sniff walk when we have a perfectly okay neighborhood route? Probably not. Does it bring me joy to get out of the city for a bit and be under the trees, even if it’s just a pocket of nature preserve? Absolutely. (This is one of the gifts of working from home.)
Anyway. The thing is, sometimes these little nature pockets are right next to houses, and sometimes you are walking on the trail close to said houses and catch their music playing loud, and it feels so weirdly out of place, but you are supposed to be writing poems this month and the prompt is “found poetry,” and you whip out your notes app.
That’s it. That’s the story. I’ve wanted to try writing a glosa1 again for a while. I have one in my first book that uses lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, from when I was a younger ✨intellectual✨ poet. Who knew a 1992 Duran Duran hit about grief would be my glosa breakthrough?
Glosa is a Spanish form that expands on a 4 line epigraph. 4 stanzas, 10 lines each, each stanza ending with a line from the epigraph. Sometimes they have a rhyme pattern, but I went free verse here. They’re fun to write!