Maximizing Joy
Found poetry for April 5, 2022 National Poetry Month Poetry Challenge
Hidden Brain’s “Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy” episode is described, “Life is often filled with hardships and tragedies. For thousands of years, philosophers have come up with strategies to help us cope with such hardship. This week, we revisit a 2020 conversation with philosopher William Irvine about ancient ideas — backed by modern psychology — that can help us manage disappointment and misfortune.”
For April’s Poetry Challenge, I am writing short poems create from words in the Hidden Brain podcast. These are called found poem because the words are all found in a piece of text, in this case the hidden Brain podcast transcript.
Years Ago
questions know answers
heard it before start every
day same depressing
same day endless with
frustration, rage, lash out, want
prediction gray life
figured it out you
have other options bounce right
back it’s history
The following poem uses AnthAdi, a poetry style used in Tamizh or Tamil literature, where the last word of the previous line is repeated in some form in the first word of the next line. I learned about this style from Nikita Parik’s “Circles”, July 2020 Editor’s Choice in the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge. Note that the Rattle has monthly ekphrastic poetry challenges where they post a picture and accept submissions for several weeks.
Tomorrow’s History
History is history
history is over you can’t change
change what happens tomorrow
Reliving Memory
The memory returns rewinds
as if I am reliving it each day
the trauma
the feelings
the frustration
I am poisoning myself
change the tape
relive the joy
―Found poems / blackout poetry / erasure haikus by Kimberly Burnham from Hidden Brain podcast https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/minimizing-pain-maximizing-joy/ from an interview between Shankar Vedantam and William Irvine.
