whoa nelly! poetry friday is HERE

Welcome all, especially any new folks who are finding their way to our little weekly poetry party. If that's you and you're still not sure how it all works, find the easy answers here!

The days have been zooming by, careening towards big changes here at home: by the time you read this, both 18 and 22 will have launched into their first seriously independent adventures (one gap semester in Costa Rica and one apartment+jobhunt in Brooklyn). By the time you read this, my spouse and I will officially be Empty Nexters! (That may be my own favorite typo of all time and I'm clinging, clinging to its promise.)

This week I'm not only hosting the general poetrypalooza but also the monthly challenge of the critique group now known as INKLINGS. Each month one of us chooses a challenge (an idea which we shamelessly ripped off from the Seven Poetry Sisters) and we all do our best to meet it. It's always fun to see the way-different ways we tackle it, even if it's not always exactly fun to do the tackling!

Set by Margaret Simon, who thankfully rode out the very nearby Hurricane Ida with minimal impact, this month we wrote ghazals (pronounced similarly to "gazelle" or "ghuzzle"). I-yi!

"The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet's signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet's own name or a derivation of its meaning."

Here are two grand examples, by Kazim Ali https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54262/rain-56d23467ac47f and Evie Shockley https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55669/where-you-are-planted.

To help us along, Molly directed us to this handy "recipe" for a ghazal, and our newest Inkling Mary Lee provided this annotated ghazal by John Drury (from RAVISHING DISUNITIES, ed. Agha Shahid Ali which led me to this beautiful essay on American ghazals) to scaffold our efforts. It does require a lot of moving parts!

I myself got intrigued by how most ghazals end with "the makhta, the signature couplet [that] allows the poet to sign off with a flourish. It is less a requirement of the form than an opportunity." It led to this.

[poem]

Does that hit the mark of "traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions"? You decide. Now let's go see what the rest of the Inklings have come up with.

Catherine Flynn @ Reading to the Core
Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading (welcome to our group!)
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

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And now for this week's brief installment of Climate Friday. A couple of years ago, battered by the number of causes and needs for action, I decided to PICK ONE and get on with it. "It" has turned out be the ever-more-popular (in the sense of can't ignore it) code-red climate emergency, and I'm choosing to use my individual set of skills to be a Climate Action Communicator--the closest I'll ever come to my middle-school dream of being a cheerleader [insert Peter Pan jump here].

A couple of weeks ago I invited folks to consider a climate action post of your own for today, to let us know what's going right in your area, whether it's home, community, town, state or slice of the Planet. I didn't really properly warn anyone, though, so we'll leave that for another time. However, I did in my daily writing find this prompt from a week ago Tuesday, which led really very unexpectedly to this poem of my childhood in Richmond, VA.

[poem]

We're learning our lessons now, though, aren't we? So here's an opportunity to make your voice heard regarding this particular emergency...write a little note to the Biden administration about oil & gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I've read that it only takes 10-20 letters and phone calls to congresspeople to make a difference in how they address an issue; maybe it's 1000-2000 to sway the President.

Good to have you all along today! Leave your links below and I'll be around to comment Sunday when we've returned from Brooklyn.

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