2009 Survivor Bonus Round Challenge #3: Earth Day.

Lauren Hynde

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There are now 3,300,000,000 people worldwide living in concrete jungles. As an architect, it always bothers me when people see this as a struggle between concrete and nature, as if there is something inherently evil about concrete. In my mind, concrete should be used to enhance our interaction with and appreciation of nature. As a poet, I want to be able to do that as well. For this Survivor Bonus Round Challenge, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a concrete poem in the service of nature.

You don't need to be participating in Survivor to take this challenge. If you are participating in Survivor, for your poem to be eligible for points under the Special Bonus Rounds heading, it needs to be submitted to Literotica.com and be posted between 03/25/2009 and 04/22/2009.

Feel free to use this thread to workshop this challenge, to banter about this challenge, to post links to your submissions to this challenge, and to give your opinion on poems submitted to this challenge.
 
oooh! This will be my first concrete poem!


I think I have to do a cylon poem. I can't stop dreaming about Battlestar Gallactica so I might as well write about it. I think I may rent the entire series again from the start now I know how it ends........

Sleep deprived. Too many dreams of Kara Thrace.
 
oooh! This will be my first concrete poem!


I think I have to do a cylon poem. I can't stop dreaming about Battlestar Gallactica so I might as well write about it. I think I may rent the entire series again from the start now I know how it ends........

Sleep deprived. Too many dreams of Kara Thrace.

What the frak was up with that? 5 years of totally sweet awesomeness, the best season finale of television history (3rd) and this is how it all ends? I need to kick Ronald D. Moore in the teeth. :mad:
 
What the frak was up with that? 5 years of totally sweet awesomeness, the best season finale of television history (3rd) and this is how it all ends? I need to kick Ronald D. Moore in the teeth. :mad:

Have you heard anything about Caprica? Don't hurt him too badly, I want to see how that one turns out. Sorry for the Cylon invasion of this thread. I am totally pre-occupied, still!
 
Have you heard anything about Caprica? Don't hurt him too badly, I want to see how that one turns out. Sorry for the Cylon invasion of this thread. I am totally pre-occupied, still!
I heard some good things about the cast. The premise is so soap-operatic that I'm still not sure how excited to be about it. But I did clear my entire month of June in waiting for "BSG: The Plan", a movie that will show the attack on Caprica from the Cylon POV. :D
 
I just realised there was a link there and I didn't understand a word of it!
How about some examples, then? :)

poem.gif


or

lin-twigs.jpg


or even

Triangle

I
am
a very
special
shape I have
three points and
three lines straight.
Look through my words
and you will see, the shape
that I am meant to be. I'm just
not words caught in a tangle. Look
close to see a small triangle. My angles
add to one hundred and eighty degrees, you
learn this at school with your abc's. Practice your
maths and you will see, some other fine examples of me.​
 
This is a famous one by the late Mary Ellen Solt:

Forsythia3.GIF


Her poems were often about nature.
 
how the hell do you do that?!! reminds me of when I was in the WRAF and some of the guys used to make complicated pictures on the teleprinters
Could I draw a picture or take a photo, write on it and scan it into the computer? Is that allowed?
 
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how the hell do you do that?!! reminds me of when I was in the WRAF and some of the guys used to make complicated pictures on the teleprinters
Could I draw a picture or take a photo, write on it and scan it into the computer? Is that allowed?

That sounds like it would be allowed and welcomed! I intend on using pencil and paper to do this, then scanning the file and putting it as Illustrated.
 
Gravity
........Reaches out

................Across the empty sky,


........................Veers the launched stone from




................................Its intended, youthful path








........................................Toward an eternal love,
















................................................Yearning for the earth.
 
Gravity
........Reaches out<snip>
Two questions on this:
  1. Does this count as a concrete poem? I think of concrete poems as being much more of a visual work than a poem as such (like the Mary Ellen Solt piece I referenced earlier), but the examples Lauren posted have much more "poem" about them than that.
    .
  2. If this does qualify as a concrete poem, and qualify as being about nature (which I think it surely does, being about physics, but I'll defer to Lauren's judgment on that), can I simply post it here? To make this an illustrated poem, I'll have to make the print so small as to be unreadable, and I don't have enough control over the HTML that Lit generates to trust that the presentation of the poem as a regular post would come out correctly.
Thanks.
 
Two questions on this:
  1. Does this count as a concrete poem? I think of concrete poems as being much more of a visual work than a poem as such (like the Mary Ellen Solt piece I referenced earlier), but the examples Lauren posted have much more "poem" about them than that.
    .


  1. I think it is both concrete and poem enough. And can't get more natur-ey.


    [*]If this does qualify as a concrete poem, and qualify as being about nature (which I think it surely does, being about physics, but I'll defer to Lauren's judgment on that), can I simply post it here? To make this an illustrated poem, I'll have to make the print so small as to be unreadable, and I don't have enough control over the HTML that Lit generates to trust that the presentation of the poem as a regular post would come out correctly.
[/QUOTE]

I think that sounds perfectly fair and fine.

And if it is not, I offer this to you and all who seek the same:

email me your poem as a PDF and I will post it online and send you the link. When you submit the poem, just put the link in the submission box. I think this should work.
 
I think your trajectory is off. Do you have a graphing calculator handy?
I'm compromising on representing the acceleration by simply doubling the white space between lines, which ignores the effects of the vertical height of each text line. If I include the text line itself, the last interval would be 31 lines of white space preceding the last line (progression of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32). I'm treating the text lines themselves as points of no vertical dimension (although this also has a misrepresentation, as the first two lines would show no acceleration at all).

Story problem: If a poem is launched with a linear velocity of five meters per line (either iambic or trochaic) with an interlinear acceleration of ten meters per second per second, what is the angular velocity of the ending foot when the poem is a sonnet? Triolet? Free verse (approximate the asymptotic value, as the poem is of indeterminate length)?

To solve this problem, disregard the effect of metaphoric friction.
 
and I think it would be cool if you made your words more elastic so I can see it bounce at the end.
I have found even well-grounded critical opinion to be perfectly inelastic. As my words are similarly undeformable, I have disregarded all morphological effects and instead treat the energy transfer of the impact as merely dissipating thermally.

Creating a lot of hot air, in other words.

(Speaking as/for pushkine, of course.)
 
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