Jeff Mullen

	Writing Poetry Samples

I'm a gadget poet.  Where other poets write rhyming couplets and use their poems to preach and paint the same old pictures, I use rhymes between and rhymes within lines, ABCABC and syllable counts, and I believe in the lost art of symbolism.  Here are a few examples.

I often use "Common Objects" as a teaching example and counterpoint to most of the poetry that I am asked to comment on.  While I don't confuse it with a masterpiece, I think that it has its good points, and can help to get a prospective poet thinking about things that are good for poetry.  Hint to the reader:  count the syllables in the stanzas.  The numbers are part of the poem.

I wrote "Sequoia Sempervirens" as an attempt to "let my hair down."  It's a classic, 14-line, shakespearian sonnet--quite a deviation from my normal style.  Of course, we all know that Sequoia Sempervirens is the scientific name for the Sequoia Redwood tree that is currently found living--though fewer are living as time goes on--on the west coast of the United States and Canada, among other places.  Sempervirens is latin for ever-living, and it refers to the fact that the trees have chutes, called berls, at the bases of their trunks, and that, if the tree is damaged, the berls sprout and grow new trees off of the existing root system.  In that sense, a Sequoia Redwood literally could live forever. 

"Trench Coat Mofia" is as much an exercise in role-playing as it is a poem.  I find it shameful that so many people broadcast so much hatred these days, without giving any serious thought to the obvious end-result of this foolhardy practice.  It was inspired by a historical incident.  A group of children, feeling cast out, decided to take things into their own hands.  They brought guns to school one day with them and started shooting people.  Eventually, they shot themselves, too.

Naturally, the children were vilified, and the in-group that they chose to associate themselves with, goth, was added to the list of the unworthy.  This did wonders for the symptom, while doing nothing to cure the disease.  As I write this page, my country is fighting a war with the same arrogant pretext:  we can do what we want and call it "good."  We can ignore anyone who gets left behind.  If they take up arms against it us, we can kill them rather than find out what's at the root of the problem and working to solve it.

Prediction:  as long as that attitude, that right-wing arrogance, continues to haunt this country, we will continue to be plagued with killers intent not only on punishing us, but happy to kill themselves rather than permitting us the arrogant pleasure of punishing them because they punished us instead of doing something to solve the underlying problems.