It's awfully nice that just as National Poetry Month ends, May swoops in with a fresh new Poetry Friday! (Because Poetry Month is every month, right? which is good news for those of us who MAY have fallen behind in our National Poetry Month projects...)
Today our critique partner Molly Hogan has asked us to turn our hand to epistolary poems, pretty straightforwardly defined at poets.org as "poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured." After a period at the start of The Quarantine of "no dreams," I've been having lengthy, vivid dreams that lurk and leap out at me bit by bit all day--how 'bout you? I've also restarted a book called The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. One sentence in the introduction caught my attention. I set it as the striking line for a Golden Shovel, and here's how it came out.
“Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal
[poem]
Not sure how to sign that letter, but there you have it. It's addressed to all of you.
Visit each of the other Swaggers to see whom--or what--they've addressed, and visit Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass, who's hosting our exhausted Poetry Friday with aplomb and a video!
[I'm recycling this Earth Day post from Wednesday, in the spirit of reusing our resources wisely!]
In 2009 I was teaching in what I named "The Afternoon Room," a windowless former broadcasting studio where I had been hired to work .3 of a full-time position teaching math, science and social studies to 2nd-graders, all in 90 minutes. For those 2nd-graders I planned an Earth Day Party, bought tiny mini-cupcakes iced with blue, green and white, and wrote this poem.
It's a gentle little poem in which you can assume that the Earth Day cake was served on "disposable" plates and eaten with "disposable" forks, just like the mini-cupcakes in The Afternoon Room. Those poem party organizers, those cake-eating kids in the poem were just like me in 2009, understanding the Inconvenient Truth that Earth was WAY smaller than I had grown up thinking it was, that there hadn't been "enough to go around" for a long time--but not what the implications were for my own daily life.
I love this poem I wrote more than a decade ago. I'm still proud of it. BUT IT LACKS URGENCY. The very generation of kids it was written for, kids who are now 19 and 20, who are the age of my own children--they have been watching their adults at the charming Earth Day Party in the park and wondering what the hell we are doing sitting on the lawn eating cake when the world is on fire.
planet earth is blue and there's something we can do
**********************
And now I revisit my post from Friday, March 13, the day I sent my students home to quarantine--not from catastrophic climate change, but from catastrophic pandemic virus. Here's what I wrote on that day.
"...the members of our human community once again have a challenge before us:
we are now entering a period during which daily life as we know it cannot be sustained. The inconvenience, the disappointment, the sorrow are monumental. People are feverish with virus and anxiety, and the contagion can barely be contained. Our fear for our own lives and those of our neighbors has spurred us into immediate and collective action, with or without the wise or courageous leadership of our elected officials.
This, friends, is the response the young people have been looking for in the face of catastrophic climate change. The planet is feverish with emissions and wild weather, and the reckless squandering of resources has not been contained. Our fear for our own lives and those of our neighbors has not spurred us into immediate and collective action, despite the wise and courageous leadership of our youth, our scientists and our public policy experts.
But now that can change.
Now we see that what must be done, can be done,
if we have enough fear. The governor of a state can go on TV and simply declare that
you may not keep dumping your food waste into the same bin as your trash, starting tomorrow.
A school system can spend a short amount of time and, to the best of its ability, redirect its resources and transform operations to make school transportation greener, starting today. Churches, nonprofits and individual families can cooperate to reverse global warming now, if we accept that "business as usual" is no longer sustainable.
Friends, be careful out there. Be wise and courageous IN there. And when we have moved through this challenge, don't forget that we proved we can move through the next infinitely bigger challenge."
********************************
I included the beginnings of a poem that I'm finishing today, with an urgent reminder that when the pandemic of coronavirus passes, we remember what we learned can be done.
[poem]
Here's a "freestanding" poetry video that includes both these poems, part of my National Poetry Month project. Enjoy; maybe share, and as all the YouTubers say, "Don't forget to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE!"
Our hostess with the most interesting bird mnemonics--not to mention today's Progressive Poem lines--is Christie at Wondering and Wandering. While you're poeting, you could also join the 3-day Earth Week livestream to learn more and show support for environmentally-friendly candidates and policies.
My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.
Today's poem is the first in a series for Earth Week. It's the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on Wednesday, and I'll be sharing some poems like this one, with some extra-earthy themes. Also possibly my longest poem...
Cauldron Full of Compost
I’m raking for dollars when I find it—
my red kindergarten lunch box,
buried deep under leaves and tangled ivy
between the playhouse and the herb garden.
I guess plastic really does last forever.
I fixed a lot of food in this lunch box:
boiled summer cauldrons full of onion-grass spaghetti,
mixed pans of mudluscious spring brownies,
scooped great heaping mountains of snow cream
sprinkled with sugar, garnished with icicles.
And once, on Uncle Mark’s birthday,
I filled it with oozing mulberries
and tiny wild strawberries
tossed with encourage-mint.
Everyone ate that for real.
Who knows what I last cooked in here?
Now nature’s doing the brewing: a dark sludgy soup,
a decomposing mess of dead plants laced with worms.
A few of the leaves are new enough—
I can tell which are walnut, tulip, maple—
But most have moldered here so long
they’re part of the primeval stew.
I stir it with a wooden spoon gone greenish
with moss, drag up a dripping clump, spread it wetly
at the foot of the maple, richer and thicker than syrup.
With this dead soup I feed the tree.
My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.
Today's poem might be a good one if your coronavirus quarantine is beginning to feel long and dull and mind-numbing. It probably needs an additional illustration...
Howdy to all and welcome to Day 17 in this year's Progressive Poem! Started in 2012 by Irene Latham, the tradition has been carried on this year by Margaret Simon.
Our Day 1 Donna led us over the that nice bridge there into a suspenseful adventure by providing not a single starting line but TWO options from which Day 2 Irene could choose!
Well, everybody loves THIS twist, of course, so here we are on Day 17 with Linda Baie's two lines to weigh, and two more lines to compose for Mary Lee's deliberations on Saturday. Here's the poem so far.
Progressive Poem 2020 Sweet violets shimmy, daffodils sway along the wiregrass path to the lake I carry a rucksack of tasty cakes and a banjo passed down from my gram.
I follow the tracks of deer and raccoon and echo the call of a wandering loon. A whispering breeze joins in our song and night melts into a rose gold dawn
Deep into nature’s embrace, I fold. Promise of spring helps shake the cold hints of sun lightly dapple the trees calling out the sleepy bees
That's a pleasant rhyme Linda Baie provided, isn't it? Not to mention fawns--at least two! I also like the theatrical quality of those last lines. So now let's zoom in (yes, I said "zoom;" it is just not possible at this stage for any interaction online NOT to include the word ZOOM). So, let's zoom in closer on these creatures. Will the encounter be slow and mesmerizing, or brief and energizing?
Option 1: We freeze. My green eyes and her brown
Option 2: I shift. Banjo twangs. They bound away.
I now hand it off to Mary Lee in full faith that she will take either option and make the most of it! Follow along as the poem makes its journey through April. Here is our intrepid band of collaborators.
Poetry Friday is hosted today at Nix the Comfort Zone, where bread and jam for Molly provide loads of comfort to all us. I think we're nixing the nix today!
Finally, may I invite you back in time to check out my National Poetry Month video project? I'm sort of enjoying using my amateur YouTube channel to present poems I'm still pretty proud of (you know, when I'm not fussing over the position of my head vis a vis the bookshelf and how long it's taking to upload! What was I thinking, adding to my screen time?). Start here on April 2nd with "Throwing the Roads." May your road be easy over the next weeks...
My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.
Today's poem does not include white-tail deer like the Progressive Poem does, but it IS about horses.
If you faithfully expect something, does it come?
My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.
Today's poem tries to capture just how powerfully the sun determines my mood and energy--and how low I go when it's cloudy and grey. Are you like that too?
