welcome april! welcome national poetry month! welcome all!

Greetings and salutations! It is my distinct honor to be hosting Poetry Friday on this auspicious first Friday of National Poetry Month 2022, and I'm delighted to have you all here!

BIRTHDAY #1       

There's quite a bit to accomplish today, first of which is to wish my little April Fool the happiest of birthdays! My first-born is 23 today and finally celebrating a day of majority cautiously but not under total lockdown, which is how she passed 21 and 22. For her pains she is receiving the first Harry Styles single since early 2020 from his new album HARRY'S HOUSE.  Let's all share in her joy...

 

 

POEM #1

Second on the agenda is the April challenge for the critique group known as INKLINGS, consisting of  Margaret Simon, Linda Mitchell, me, Molly Hogan, Mary Lee Hahn and Catherine Flynn.  This month, thanks to Mary Lee we are writing with help from Ellen Bass and a heart-wrenching poem.

Use “The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass as a mentor text. Keep the title, but choose a theme/message either from your own life or from current events.

I also incorporated Metaphor Dice into my effort, with plans for entering Taylor Mali's Golden Dice contest.

<poem forthcoming in POETRY BY CHANCE: An Anthology of Poems Powered by Metaphor Dice>

This is why we keep at it, right, folks?  Because we cannot help ourselves, and because as bell hooks said, "The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is--it's to imagine what is possible."

 

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So now let's look at the poetry-art that's moving from possible into REAL over the next month. We have everything from new books to author chats, from poem-a-day projects to line-a-day collaborations!

Birthday #2

Today is also the book birthday of IMPERFECT II, an anthology of poems for middle-schoolers focused on PERSPECTIVE.  This is a follow-up to IMPERFECT I, published in 2018 and also edited by Tabatha Yeatts, and it's already trending on major book sale sites!  I'm thrilled to have two poems in this collection (alongside many Poetry Friday regulars), which offers poetry to answer this question:  

When we've lost sight of the big picture, how can we help ourselves put things back in perspective? 

Get it now at Indiebound, Barnes & Noble or Amazon, and follow the blog at https://imperfectii.blogspot.com/ 

NPM PROJECT #1

Mine!  Here you can find more information about my month of response to ALL WE CAN SAVE, the collection of essays and poems edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.  I'm reading it and listening to it and learning soooo much.  I can't say I'll write a poem every day, but I'll try to write something every day, and I'm challenging myself to write outside my comfort zone. 

NPM PROJECT #2

Joining me in responding to ALL WE CAN SAVE is Mary Lee Hahn, who WILL be writing a poem each day and depositing them here at her Poetrepository (one of my all time favorite coinages).  She has some intriguing themes lined up. I'm enjoying the feeling that there could be some dialogue between our projects...

 

 

NPM Poetry Friday Tradition #1

Jama Rattigan at Jama's Alphabet Soup will once again provide us with the NPM Kidlitosphere Events Roundup. Her catalog of all the exciting bites on the National Poetry Month menu will make your mouth water, maybe even make you shout!

NPM Poetry Friday Tradition #2

It's the annual Progressive Poem, originated by Irene Latham (who kicks us off this year) and now hosted by Margaret Simon.  Over 30 days, 30 poets will attempt to (and succeed; we always do) cobble together a collaborative poem, line by precarious, unpredictable line. Check out the team in the sidebar to the right!

NPM PROJECT #3

Linda Mitchell's APRIL poetry project at A Word Edgewise is to read one letter per day written by her grandmother from decades before she was born, as an inspiration for a new poem.  Can you IMAGINE how wonderful this will be?

NPM PROJECT #4

Michelle Barnes has resurfaced from a long pause (oh, we missed her!) for NPM and will be repeating last year's NPM project at Today's Little Ditty—Filling the Well. Playing with the stuff that inspires poetry, she'll be creating daily "inspirational musings" that pair quotations with art, photography, poems, music, dance... anything that strikes her fancy and gives the words new life.

NPM POETRY CHAT: SCOOP!

Laura Shovan's annual poetry chat at the Nerdy Book Club Facebook page is Sunday, April 10 at 6 pm. This year's topic is "Staying Out Past Dark: Saying Hard Things Through Poetry." It's a roundtable discussion with MG author/poets Chris Baron, Rebecca Balcarcel, and Rajani LaRocca about reading and writing poetry as a resource for kids during tough times.

 

 

 

Isn't it all heady and exciting!?  And now, finally, YOU get your say!  

Leave your link below and LET'S PARTY!

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You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

caution: poetry may be habit-forming

Some weeks I think, "Maybe I won't post this Friday.  Maybe I'll just read around the posts of others with a little more attention than usual." And then I think about how maybe this is my only chance to write this week, and how I've made this commitment to myself, and how my audience will feel if I don't--

No, that's a joke. I care a lot about audience, but it's not WHY I write this blog; it's for the practice, the habit. And if I think back over the last week, or month, or three months, it's clear: my habit is SOLID.

Since January 1 I've written 42 poems, 11 posts at mjlu, 2 posts at a new blog for my congregation's Earth Ministry, and at least a dozen cogently-argued, strongly-worded letters to various candidates, board members and organizations (and I've filled out a shedload of retirement forms!)

So while I can't quite leave mjlu silent this week, I can do it--I can take a break and read around the posts of others with a little more attention than usual, instead of flinging an ekphrastic dodoitsu up here without sufficient attention.

After all, April looms and I have plans to make about writing in response to All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, the collection of essays and poems edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson.  And a cute Canva graphic to go with it. The climate crisis totally deserves a cute Canva graphic!

Meet me here next Friday when I host the FIRST DAY OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!!!  Woohoo! Amy LV is our host this week over at The Poem Farm where she is also gearing up for an April project of proverbs.

 

quotable: all we can save

Greetings, all!  It's the first Friday of the month, the world is watching with anxious eyes as both a war and a shift in global politics takes place, and just to keep our hearts full, the Inklings are writing to a challenge set by Margaret Simon:

"Choose a quote that speaks to you. Write a poem that responds to the quote. The words can be used as a golden shovel or throughout the poem or as an epigraph."

It just so happens I have a little something I prepared earlier to answer this challenge. I participated again this year in Laura Shovan's February Poetry Project, where a group of about 40 write to a daily prompt on a theme and share and respond to each others' poems. It's a great experience in so many ways and I always come away with a pile of drafts I wouldn't have written otherwise. This year the theme was TIME.

It was a prompt from Lisa Vihos on February 11 that reminded me I owned the climate-feminist anthology ALL WE CAN SAVE: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, the book I posted about a couple of weeks ago (here's the website/newsletter/ community). 

She shared an excerpt from an essay by Sherri Mitchell, "Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth," included in the book.  This essay comes from the first of eight sections in the book, called "Root". I chose a different striking line and wrote this golden shovel.

 

Here's Sherri Mitchell reminding us how the body keeps the score.

 

That's the whole post for today [EDIT: NO IT ISN"T!  I have neglected to link to my fellow Inklings posts!]  Check out whom and how the rest of the Inklings quoted and wrote!

Catherine @ Reading to the Core

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading 

Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone

Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Kat Apel is rounding us up today at Kat's Whiskers, and sharing her newly released book!  See you there.