Cool Announcement: A Freebie, Calliope / My Ex: Love / Trouble Maker, at Scribd

My Dear Fellow Poets/Readers:

Calliope/My Ex: Love/Trouble Maker, a 27-tanka sequence written on October 25th, 2013, 42nd anniversary of the expulsion of Taiwan (Officially the Republic of China) from the United Nations, was first published in the 18th (July 2014) issue of Atlas Poetica, whose editor, M. Kei, remarks that  “[Calliope/My Ex: Love/Trouble Maker] has a theme of mythology, the supernatural, … etc.”

Based on the principles of progression and association employed in Japanese court poetry (for more information, see "To the Lighthouse: Principles of Progression and Association in Tanka Sequences"), Calliope/My Ex: Love/Trouble Maker is a sequence of tanka about writing, love, sex, mythology, power relation, sociopolitics,...etc.

I hope you will enjoy this tanka sequence as much as I did.

Many thanks for your continued support of my writing.

Chen-ou

Selected Tanka:

revising

for hours in dim light

the muse and I

straddle the thin line

between pleasure and pain

Medusa

on top in the sex scenes

of a movie ...

my ex does the same

in my winter dreams

for a week

writing poems for my blind date

the muse and I

like two mice with our legs

caught in a glue trap

the chill air

this Easter morning ...

Miss Lee,

my ex and the muse

morph into one

awash

in Summertime

and moonlight

Fan Lee whispers

my tanka of longing

La petite mort

rolling off her tongue ...

for me now

there is no separation

between sex and poetry

(for Roland Barthes)

artistic
masturbation!

when I remember

my ex's cutting remark

something shrinks

Fan and my ex

carve out their spaces

in my thoughts

the harvest moon hangs high

over the Taiwan Strait

Fan cries out,

Your ex stands between us ...

water stains

on my first chapbook,

The Border as Fiction

the muse’s face

in the lake of my mind

I fish for words

rippling

from our ancient past


You can read the whole sequence of 27 tanka here.