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

metaphor dice iv

[Do scroll down and read two more Metaphor Dice poems I've written this week.]
Remember Magnetic Poetry?  I still mess around with several mixed-up sets of those sticky little words, and I still feel the little frisson of recognizing that Madonna's "Candy Perfume Girl" was made of the original set of 150 Magnetic Poetry words (although apparently she denied that at the time, which is shockingly TWENTY years ago).

I mention the lasting usefulness of MagPo today because I'm getting, after only a week, the first hint that my fabulous Metaphor Dice are a bit limited.  There are 12 dice, 6 sides each, which is 72 words.  If I have used this permutation calculator correctly, that means there are 59,640 metaphor possibilities, and yet today's roll offers me four combinations of which none is really doing it for me...and I think I know why.

The whole point here is to take a big abstract concept and talk about it using an adjective and a "smaller...humbler" concrete noun. So here we have big stuff like my birth, my soul, memory,  and power as the given starting points.

This is not working for me because this way of approaching a poem is, I can say unequivocally, never the way that a poem comes to me.  I never suddenly think, "Oooh, look at this gigantic concept I have come across in daily life, POWER!  Let me sit down and write a poem about power."

Instead poems come to me in tiny specific seeds, like a surprising combination of words or a poignant moment of emotion, which are noticeable or intriguing because of the way they connect to something unexpected and sometimes more universal.  Perhaps this is why I often dislike big classic sweeping poems about Truth and Beauty.  The poems that speak to me are small (thanks, Valerie Worth) and precise and do just enough of the hard work of revealing links between things that I have missed.  My favorite poems slow me, stop me, dazzle me with the accuracy of their literal description even as they crack open a wider mystery that demands my participation.

Here's a poem that I share with 2nd graders, an extended metaphor that we read during the time of the year when we are first studying Native American culture and change over time by observing the moon.  We read it first while looking at a picture of a birch bark canoe, and then we reread it with the sliver of a new moon before us.

The New Moon | Eve Merriam

Hold on to me.

We will slip carefully carefully

don`t tip it over

into this canoe

pale as birch bark

and with the stars

over our shoulders

paddle

down the dark river

of the sky.

Do not delay.

By next week

the canoe will be bulging with cargo,

there will be no room

inside for us.

Tonight is the time.

Step carefully.

Hold on to me.

I LOVE this genius poem because the first line demands that we forget all about the new moon in the title and get a physical grip on this slightly risky, rather urgent canoe trip.  This would be interesting in itself--but then the "dark river of the sky" alerts us to something more going on, and with a small investment of attention and imagination, 7-8's can suddenly see how the crescent moon resembles a canoe, a canoe that changes shape and fills with cargo (what cargo?!), and how the climbing in and paddling (which we actually do with our bodies) puts us in a whole different place with a whole different view of both the canoe and the moon. Genius, like I said.

If Eve Merriam were using Metaphor Dice, this poem could not have come to be (even though moon appears on a humble blue die). With Metaphor Dice you can't roll something small and concrete like moon = full + canoe, if you go with the basic red = white + blue.  So, as usual, I'm just going to break "the rules," which, to be fair to Taylor and his team, probably shouldn't be considered rules.  This workaround stuff started already on Tuesday with a poem about iconoclasm, so I shouldn't be surprised. Today I'mma work with meadow again....

meadow

meadow is a rugged midwife:

tireless she brings forth leggy

flowerchildren of soil and rain.

they with their hueboldened

heads are not her own,

they leave home, sow their oats,

die back, are mown,

but meadow counsels earth

to breathe and push again,

again, unalone.

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The roundup today is with Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect (ooh that turns out to be a nice connect to ms. meadow the midwife, right?) who is doing it old-school, ever charming. Hike on over for some Poetry Sisters action.