grass | Valerie Worth
Busy this weekend--not planning to make the PF rounds. But you never know! Hosting today is Susan at Soul Blossom Living, who is rounding up all our celebrations of National Poetry Month.
Climate Action Alert: Is YOUR state legislature attempting to undo some of the damage to our planet? Mine is, and I have advocacy work to do today, which I know about because of my state's Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry. Go here to see if your state has a one-stop shop for action alerts on matters of social justice, climate justice in particular.
I met Bobbi on a few occasions in the 2000's, and she's the person who said, when I mentioned my family was moving to Paris for a year, that she knew a children's poet who lived there, an English woman named Sandra Guy. Unbelievably, it turned out that Sandra lived LITERALLY ACROSS THE STREET from our exchange apartment in Vincennes--of all the addresses in Paris! Thanks to Bobbi, I had a faithful critique partner during that year in France.
But I digress...here's that first poem.
How I Got to Be a Princess: An Autobiographical Note | Bobbi Katz
Yesterday my friend said,
"You look just like a princess.”
I could not believe him.
Was he talking to someone else?
I looked behind me
and
in front of me.
I looked under the bed
and
on top of the closet.
No one else was there.
Again my friend said,
“You look just like a princess.”
He really said it to ME!
I felt all twinkling inside.
That’s how I got to be a princess.
This is a pretty unusual poem for Bobbi--most of her work is rhyme-and-meter perfection, playful and very definitely early-childhood friendly, not usually autobiographical. (For those familiar, this volume also includes the original "Things to Do If You Are" form, with "a Subway", "a Flower," "the Snow" and "a Pizza," among others. Bow down to Bobbi!)
Next I pulled down THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE by Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). I don't know where I got this one either, but I swear, despite knowing of Marge Piercy since I was in college (Wesleyan University, whose press published her first two collections), I don't think I have ever opened this book, considered a "classic text of the feminist movement." My loss, my goodness!
Marge (b. 1936) is roughly the same age as Bobbi (b. 1933) and I am. so. fascinated. by the juxtaposition of Bobbi's princess poem and this stanza from Marge's longer poem "Excursions, incursions".
Excursions, incursions | Marge Piercy
Princess and godmother, girls and women, viewed and twinkled and labeled and priced: may they yet declare themselves queens of their own being? I hope that both poets, now in their 80s, continue well and comfortable, and I am so grateful for their voices.
Linda at TeacherDance is our host today for Poetry Friday, and she is also exploring time and its nonsense and constancy and how it makes us think about our moments, our long lives, and how old rules don't apply...see you there!
I'm banished from the downstairs where my beloved is cooking me a birthday dinner, a surprise dish that smells excellent. I do not have my poetry books to hand, so today I don't bring down two from the shelf to explore & match; instead I avail myself of goodness from the Poetry Foundation website.
From Linda Pastan, "Counting Backwards":
And I must say, I do feel a bit like I'm at a starting line, like the pall of the last year is lifting (oh cross all your fingers!), and also, as our two seniors graduate and move on, full of all the possibilities that might come to pass in the next stage. Let's tackle childhood poverty head-on! Let's plant trees and spread love! Let's light our birthday cakes with light bulbs!
No, Calef's Grampa is right...you gotta have the flame and the breath for wishes to come true. (In fact, I've been working for a while on a theory that the invention of the electric light bulb was the beginning of the end for humanity. Nothing was ever meant to be that easy for us and it's finally catching up with us.)
So I'm lucky to be standing at the threshold of a new era for me and, I hope, for everyone--if we can make it to the end of this school year--and isn't poetry always a door to step through? Please add your links below, and let us make merry while we March!
P.S. Can you tell I'm a little drunk on the sunshine and 75* we've had here this week?
It's the first Friday of the month and my critique group--the Sunday Swaggers--despite the wild ride in our classrooms, schools and physical BODIES, is soldiering on with a monthly challenge. Today Margaret of Reflections on the Teche feeds our delight in the refreshing force that is Amanda Gorman by sending us to find a poem through a scavenger hunt.
That would be enough to get us going, but IN ADDITION we would like to give a nod to today's Poetry Friday host, Kat Apel, who just last week shared a seat-of-the-pants poetry form called the LaMiPoFri. It's ideal for people like me who are sitting down at 6:30 am to a) write my Poetry Friday post including b) writing a response to my group's challenge. Here's how Kat describes it:
"What is a lamipofri? It’s a poetry snapshot that’s quickly scribed, to give people an insight into the world around you at a given point in time – that point being the last minute as you’re scrambling for a Poetry Friday poem to post! Hence the name: LAst MInute of a POetry FRIday! The trick with the lamipofri is to pause, take a moment to look around and share that moment with others. But don’t take too long, or the moment will pass!"
I've always called such last-minute poems Instadrafts™ but Kat's has the special feature of focusing on the moment.
So here we have it: three words from Ta-Nehisi Coates's BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME. It is taking me months to read this book, so painful is it for me to understand his experience of growing up in a Black body. It takes me 10 minutes and an effort to revisit pages 11 (my 'lucky' birthdate, next week), 22 and 33, but here are the words I choose:
declaration ~ edge ~ suspended
and here is the out-the-window poetry moment they become.
Find the rest of our group's responses here:
-Catherine at Reading to the Core
-Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
-Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone
-Linda at A Word Edgewise
Many thanks to the unwitting conglomeration that led to this AmGorScaHuLaMiPoFri, and thanks and congratulations to our host Kat on her new book A BIRD IN THE HERD (the egret has landed hee hee hee). May we step, eyes wide open and socks on, toward a warmer Reality.
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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME (written to his teen son), p. 10-11
For the project, the theme of which is BODIES, I posted this for today:
Legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti left us this week at the age of 101. He came to prefer the term “wide-open” rather than “Beat” poetry, because of the way it ranged and raged. One critic characterized Ferlinghetti’s work as “a revolutionary art of dissent and contemporary application which jointly drew a lyric poetry into new realms of social—and self-expression. It sparkles, sings, goes flat, and generates anger or love out of that flatness as it follows a basic motive of getting down to reality and making of it what we can.”
I invite you to enjoy Ferlinghetti’s “Underwear”, below and continued at the Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42871/underwear, and then to write about our "foundation garments," channeling Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s revolutionary art of dissent and contemporary application. [Underwear ads included as extra fodder.]
I have not yet written my own foundation garment poem because during my explorations I found a fine and important poem called "I Am Waiting." It is full, as the critic says, of Ferlinghetti's "sad and comic music of the streets." And then I saw that this poem was published IN 1958, in A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, and somehow it sounds so current and live, and I am kind of stunned.
This is the fifth of six stanzas. The other five are worth your time!
I Am Waiting [excerpt] | Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder
Ferlinghetti preferred to call his poetry "wide-open" and now we see why. Why can't Tom Sawyer and Alice in Wonderland and Childe Roland and Aphrodite meet on the same turf? Oh, they can. My, I feel educated today. Thanks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Our host today is Karen at The Blog with the Shockingly Clever Title where she also is marveling, with Billy Collins, at the age of things. May we hang on to history, everything from Aphrodite to Cheerios to the Governor of Louisiana, and publish our howls. Friendly note: I will probably not comment on PF posts this week so that I can do due diligence by the Feb Project responses.
So today in my self-led poetry study I reach for a wee volume called 101 POEMS THAT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE: An Anthology of Emotional First AID (HarperCollins 1999). Published in the UK and edited by Daisy Goodwin, it has familiar famous poems and some you wouldn't know at all.
This one's in the birthday section, and I'm familiar, but I never read it as a poem about aging. It's a poem about learning, I think. Which, oh, IS a poem about age, wisdom, experience.
What Fifty Said | Robert Frost
When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.
Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I go to school to youth to learn the future.
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I've lost my faith in school--not all schools, but in School as a concept. It must be cracked and sprung and I'm too tightly bound to break it. There is, there will be suffering.
What could possibly go with this, from my collection of poems for young readers?
In the same year as my SQUEEZE came out, Wordsong published A WRITING KIND OF DAY: Poems for Young Poets by Ralph Fletcher (2005). I. love. this. book.
I've just rediscovered this poem.
Writer's Block | Ralph Fletcher
We're doing grammar in school
which is bad enough but now
it's infiltrating my dreams.
I dreamed I was playing football
against a huge run-on sentence--
Coach said I had to stop him.
I threw a wicked block on that sentence
that knocked him into the next paragraph
and dislocated three compound words.
Verbs cracked! Nouns splattered!
That big sentence just splintered.
Til. Only. Fragments. Were. Left!
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Hm. Perhaps I'm less downtrodden than angry. I dream of dismantlement.
The round-up today is with dear Ruth at There is no such thing as a Godforsaken town.
I shall go in search of braided sweetgrass, of solace.
Here's one new to me:
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I pick this one because it does what my other favorites do: uses a profligacy of language to celebrate the profligacy of nature. You did read it out loud, right? Your brain can't quite keep up with the flood of images, right? And yet the tsunami is comprehensible if you loosen your logic and let your whole body sense the wide surroundings that he's attempting to pack into one spring-loaded canister of wildwonder. Gerard's wordplay is S U B L I M E, makes me want to shred the dictionary and wallow in the mudhole of slippery wordsherds waaaaah........ hoooo!
What poet for young readers can compare? Hmm, let's return to the shelf for a book I haven't spent enough time with....WINTER BEES by Joyce Sidman (HMH, 2014). Here's another human for whom nature is cause for elated wallowing in language.
Chickadee's Song | Joyce Sidman
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May you have enjoyed that as much as I did this morning, and may you find more to wallow in over at Nix the Comfort Zone, where Molly's post on her Artist's Prayer is a serendipitous echo.
There's so much to discover and discover anew in BLESSING THE BOATS (BOA Editions, 2000), but I chose this one, without really noticing that its title describes what I am doing. You know it's a good poem when you think it's about one thing but it turns out to be about a whole different thing too.
study the masters | Lucille Clifton
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.
Joyce's Beauty Salon | Janet Wong
They call my mother
the perm lady, "Pum Ajima."
Dozens of mad Korean women
come in each month, ugly,
furious with their families,
frustrated by their stubborn,
straight, heavy, hair.
A few hours with Mother
and they leave
carrying a lighter load,
their carefree curlsbouncing out the door.
The named women, their hands, invisible yet so central to the scene, the moment which is minutes, hours, a lifetime; the women who go by names from languages not their own all around us...thank you, Lucille and Janet.
Our host today is Jan Godown Annino at Bookseedstudio, where there is singing, so much singing going on! Go hear the angel voices.
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*This set of white supremacy culture definitions has popped up before me in several situations--this one shared by a fellow participant in a study group, so I don't have attribution. But I'm having to see that I am--despite my efforts to acknowledge and honor other ways--a walking, talking, teaching, writing embodiment of this culture. Claiming that I can, on a whim, at the drop of a hat, teach myself a general poetry survey, is putting many of the assumptions below into action. I'm trying to do better.
Happy New Year all over again, am I right? I'm pretty sure none of us is able to release ourselves fully into the glorious dawning of a new America, knowing as we do that all THAT really is Who We Are--but at least maybe it won't be quite so draining every day. Maybe we can relax a little.
But how about that Amanda Gorman, friends?! The future looks bright.
In my off-hours, I've been looking selfishly towards a time when I will not be a full-time classroom teacher and can become a full-time poet-teacher-writer. To this end I hired a local poet to coach me in the ways of adult poetry publishing--journals, chapbooks, full-length collections--and how to start submitting in earnest Her name is Sarah Ann Winn and we get along very well, not least because she spent 15 years as an elementary school librarian. I HAVE LEARNED SO MUCH.
One thing I have learned is that the 12 years' worth of original poetry published here for you, friends, is unfortunately not available to submit. Most adult journals consider work posted on a blog as "previously published" and will not accept it for publication. So I have to start keeping my InstadraftTM poems to myself until I know what they are, which represents a pretty radical change to the way I blog.
So I have an idea, which I will approach in rather a different way than the younger me, which is to say, "Let's see how this goes." I (like you?) have shelves full of adult poetry books that have never received my full attention. Each Friday I'll pull one down and find a poem that I like and post it here. If I can, I'll find a poem for young readers that goes with it in some way, and add that. Welcome to my Self-Taught Poetry Survey: the STPS.
Let's see what Mark McMorris has for us in his book ENTREPOT (Coffee House Press, 2010). [Disambiguation: not the Canadian professional snowboarder.] From the ToC I choose one that might have bearing on our current moment...and I am right.
Auditions for Utopia--for Donald | Mark McMorris
Say then that there is a room with large windows.
Sunlight filters in from the sky’s reservoir.
One wall holds a scene of naked olive bodies
and giant ferns, bodies like ferns and ferns
with the aplomb of the forest, and I am indoors.
Not that they vanish but that the mind which drew
inward to disclose the forms of one happiness
found what it did not gestate--on the island
whistle and seaside refrain, blades of sunlight
peeling automata from the senses--and chose
to be its province with its own star-apple trees.
The mind is an emperor. Or the mind is subject
to decree from obscure parliaments of language.
And if the latter, the leafy bodies motionless
in the heat intimate a turn from ordinary sickness
draft a pledge to labor to liberate the faculty
from grammars beholden to icy winds and freezing
waterways winding down to the naval port.
Antidote to tyranny and serfdom, beauty is a face
alive with secrets but no designs on the soul.
The other wall of the sun-dazzled room shows
the polis in smoky industrial affray, the emblems
of feudal lord and banker and sea captain
in stately parade underneath the parchment heaven.
Stevedores load gigantic ship holds with cotton.
A locomotive circles the stockyards like a cheetah.
Somewhere else, counter-posed to labial orchids,
the estates of sugar and coffee transact menace.
Unless the muralist desire the comity of slave
and feudal lord, or captain and bulky stevedore
the earlier scene must altogether disappear
to become the prehistory of advertising perfume:
langorous beaches kissed by a glittering sun
where industrialists repose in the elbow of a cove.
The mind is bottomless. The mind is a membrane
of nothing where beam of light falls toward
a gravity well, curving into the fall, a fragment
of expanding cracks in a stable law ante bellum
center-most oleander and the shade it gives.
Only images to keep a body quiet. Little wishes.
Phew...the density, the vocabulary, the transportation. We have been sold a bill of goods, people, and it is time to open the box, take out all the bubble wrap and packing peanuts and see what's really inside.
As it happens this poem reminds me of one for young readers which is quite familiar. 😊
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| by me, from SQUEEZE: Poems from a Juicy Universe (WordSong, 2005) |
Our host this Poetry Friday is my neighbor and friend Laura Shovan, who, as I hoped, is properly shining the spotlight on that Amanda Gorman. Let's spend more attention on the battered and less on the beautiful now, okay?
although it seems that at this time, we don't have need of any metaphor. We have just had the most powerfully honest and revealing story of US play out (yet again, but this was maybe finally loud enough for the people in the back) just 12 miles from my house at the Capitol. May we now move forward from our imagined Garden of Eden in commitment to naked truth and brave change.
I set the poetry challenge for today, knowing that we all were captivated by the concept of Irene Latham's 2020 collection THIS POEM IS A NEST (Wordsong, illustrated by Johanna Wright). In it Irene uses a longer, 4-part poem organized by season to hatch many, many "Nestlings," found poems constructed by taking words from the longer poem.
Irene's book includes a direct invitation for readers and writers of all ages to try Nest & Nestlings themselves, and even includes a guide at the end--and who are we to decline such a generous invitation? The main rule is that the words must be kept in the order they are found, and most of us realized quickly that this challenge was trickier than it looks!
In addition, it really matters what nest poem you choose to begin with, and somewhere I'm sure someone has interviewed Irene about how her Nest came to be and in what relation to her Nestlings. Luckily, there is freedom in being able to use any words for each nestling's title, and in grabbing an s or several to tidy up tenses.
For my experiment, I chose a 2011 poem about a rug. Not just any rug, of course; the rug I bought for my then-new full-time classroom remains one of the best purchases I have ever made. The careful reader will notice that the version below used as my Nest is slightly revised, which happened in order to give some of my Nestlings stronger wings.
Here is my Nest, followed by the best of my many, many attempted Nestlings.
A huge thanks to Irene Latham, who Lives Her Poem in so many ways, including her continued commitment to our Poetry Friday community throughout her years of busy publishing success.
And thanks to the Poetry Sisters, whose monthly challenge inspired our group--I don't think we've ever acknowledged that sufficiently--and to Sylvia Vardell, who is our host today at Poetry for Children, performing her annual service of listing forthcoming poetry books for 2021. Just looking at all the covers has my mouth watering! HAPPY NEW YEAR OF POETRY to all!
I got lucky, yes I did! My Winter Poetry Swap elf turns out to be my own critique partner Margaret Simon! She knows me well and so my gifts are perfect.
I love this fresh new/old journal made by Marcie Melancon,
the illustrator of Margaret's book SUNSHINE.
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Essence of HeidiThere you are rolling playdough balls,placing them onto a fake birthday cake,lighting each candledeep breath in, then screen-blow--a ritual of celebration, exclamationof You Matter!There you are creating a caterpillar's undoing,how it digests itselfto become something miraculous,shouting the great wonder--a ritual of changing, shedding the old,in silence.There you are writing words,passion-pulsed onto the pageto a inspire a child or grown-up--a ritual of reading aloud, praisefor turn-the-page, frosted icemelting into a poem.--Margaret Simon, 2020 Winter Poem Swap
