poetry
This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote recipe poems. Laura Purdie Salas is the queen of these, in my opinion, so for sure check out her post (below).
Next month, we are letting “box” inspire us. Does that mean a box-shaped poem? A poem about a box or boxing or being boxed in? Whatever it means to you, write a poem inspired by the idea/concept/word “box.”
Here’s my poem for this month:
This month, my poetry sisters and I agreed to write a poem about string, thread, rope, or chains.
So I wrote an email thread for one of those chain emails. Because it seemed related enough, and/or doubly valid (depending on how you look at things).
You have been selected to receive a blessing!
Add your wish below, then
forward it to seven people
for your wish to come true.
I wish I had seven people
who would read an email
if I sent it to them.
[send]
I wish the person
who sent this to me
knew that she mattered.
[send]
I wish people wouldn’t
send chain mail.
[send]
I wish I had a Twinkie.
[send]
I wish for an end:
to hunger
to violence
to racism.
[send]
I wish I could win the lottery.
[send]
I wish my mother
would stop calling,
but not because she
can’t call, because
that would also be bad.
Maybe I should
call my mother.
[send]
I wish that everyone else
would have their wishes
come true.
[send]
Add your wish below, then
forward it to seven people
for your wish to come true.
Poetry Friday is being hosted by Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise. You can find the other poems by my Poetry Princess sisters using the links below, though Laura is just back from travels and Liz is off on a jaunt, so they will not be joining us this month.
Andi at a wrung sponge
Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
Sara at Read Write Believe
Tanita at {fiction, instead of lies}
Tricia at Miss Rumphius
Next month, the Poetry Sisters will be writing Byr a Thoddaid poems. These are a Welsh form written as one or more quatrains. Each quatrain is composed of an eight-syllable couplet (rhymed aa), and a couplet containing 16 syllables, but split as 10 syllables in the first line followed by six in the second.
The 10/6 couplet has its own rules, where the end word of the six-syllable couplet is rhymed near the end of the 10-syllable line, and the word ending the 10-syllable line is linked by rhyme, alliteration, or other device to a word in the 6-syllable line.
If you write more than one quatrain, you can switch the order of the couplets (either 8/8/10/6 or 10/6/8/8).
Here’s a link to Robert Lee Brewer’s explanation at Writer’s Digest.
This month, our challenge was so much fun. Like, serious fun. We played with the concept of an “exquisite corpse,” a writing exercise where the story is passed around.
In our case, we did it by having one person write the first line and send it to the second. The second person then sent only their (second) line to the third, and so forth. In the end, the eight of us each wrote one line in what would become an eight-line poem.
When we met, we first read our lines aloud before typing them into a Google doc to share. Here’s what the first draft of our exquisite corpse poem looked like:
This month, odd one out, running short on days and sleep, (Liz)
This month, past meets pride, roots ripped from native soil still somehow grow. (Tanita)
The once-bright future dims. Shadows grow (Kelly)
But there, near canyon rim, in broken light (Sara)
the yearling hawk shrieked in futile fury (Andi)
and the steel-edged clouds looked away (Laura)
trees bow and bend on a blustery day (Tricia)
that rattles old oak leaves down the street. (Mary Lee)
And now? Each of us is editing the poem in different ways. I seriously cannot wait to see what everyone has done with it. As of Sunday, I had high hopes of writing additional drafts, but between my husband’s heart issue, outrage and sorrow at the news (Texas criminalizing trans youth and their families and healthcare providers as well as Ukraine), and my second boost shot for COVID, I had to let that notion go.
Here, however, is my edit of the poem draft:
This month
Odd one out, running short on days and sleep.
Past meets pride. Roots ripped from native soil
still somehow grow. The once-bright future dims.
Trees bend and bow—a blustery day.
Old oak leaves rattle down the street.
Shadows grow. There, near canyon rim,
in broken light, the yearling hawk shrieks
in futile fury as the steel-edged clouds look away.
Next month, we are writing dodoitsu (a Japanese form) based on ekphrastic prompts. You are invited to join us! Pick an image or photo and write a dodoitsu to share on the last Friday of March!
Here are the links to everyone else’s edits:
The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by Tricia at Miss Rumphius Effect. Here’s the link.
This month, my poetry sisters and I are writing poems about bells, whatever that means to each of us. I’m pretty sure that if you click through to read everyone else’s poems, you will see that we all scattered in different directions, using “bells” as a jumping-off point.
I considered writing one about bells in Christmas carols, then remembered that I’d already done that in a poem entitled A Head Full of Bells, which I share below:
Despite four pages of notes and false starts and various ideas, I kept coming back to the idea of swapping a bell for something else in the scene with the three witches (or “weird/weyward sisters”) in Macbeth. Which is how it came to pass that I wrote a very short poem indeed.
You can find the poems by my poetry sisters on their sites by clicking their names, below.
Andi Sibley
Liz Garton Scanlon
If you’d like to write to our theme for next month, we are going with “poetry inspired by something overheard.” Our friend Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti has done several of these as a form of “found poem,” and it seemed like a fun challenge. Here's a link to one of Susan’s poems.
This week’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.
This month, my poetry sisters and I are taking on “wordplay” poems, which use the format “_____ is a word" as the start. Laura Purdie Salas has done many of these, and has written some how-to information that you might find helpful here. Where Laura delves deep into the interior of a word as part of her poem, even finding other words or meanings from letters, I prefer to do mine a bit more broadly.
Which is how it is that I ended up with the following poem:
Clock is a tick-tock word,
a way of holding time in its hands.
A handy word,
one that can slip by unnoticed.
Clock can be tall
as a grandfather, or
alarmingly small.
A punctual word,
lacking second syllables.
A simple word,
missing minute details.
Clock is a word that stands
the test of time.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is with Linda at TeacherDance.
Poetry Peeps! You're invited to join our challenge for the month of November! Here's the scoop: We're writing an Ode to Autumn. An ode is a lyrical poem, and like the ancient Greeks, modern humans also enjoy marking an occasion with a song. Whether you choose an irregular ode with no set pattern or rhyme, or the ten-line, three-to-five stanza famed by Homer himself, we hope you'll join us in singing in the season of leaf-fall and pie. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on November 26th (the Friday after Thanksgiving, so plan ahead) in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.
This month, the challenge that my poetry sisters and I came up with was to choose a poem by one of our sister Poetry Princesses and then “ write a tanka in response or inspired by or in conversation with.”
Friends, I had such high hopes. Because I freaking love tankas, which I have on occasion called “a haiku pulling a trailer”. In the US, a tanka is usually formulated as a haiku plus two lines of seven syllables. So it’s 5/7/5/7/7. Where a haiku is often a snapshot of what is, and should include a kigo or seasonal word, a tanka is allowed to delve into simile or metaphor and explore things a bit more deeply. Which is one of the reasons I love them so.
I was going to meet with my sisters last Sunday to get started. I was going to write a whole mess of tankas—one for each of my poetry sisters. I was going to write a long, thoughtful blog post and have it up for yesterday’s Poetry Friday.
NONE of that happened.
I missed our Sunday meet-up. I didn’t get started in time. There are lots of reasons, but none of them makes me less disappointed about it.
So here I am, on SATURDAY, with ONE TANKA. And I am letting that be enough.
Mine is based on one of Laura Purdie Salas’s “Haiku Classified/Craigslist Ads”.
WANTED: Wrecking ball
for chrysalis destruction
Reward: butterfly
Here is my tanka in response:
Cocooned from all storms
Autumn winds cannot reach here
Cozy blanket fort
There’s time enough for flying.
Why hurry to meet the world?
I am hoping to write one per day next week, and will post them as I go, tagging the authors of the original poems as I get to them.
For next month, we will be writing Wordplay poems, as invented by Nikki Grimes. If you want to write with us in October, you can check out Nikki’s description on Michelle Heidenrich Barnes’s blog.
To read the poems by my other poetry sisters:
Once upon a time, in the glory days of Live Journal, when online community was a joy, I had another blog. It’s still out there, a relic that I cannot bring myself to torch yet. And it contains SO MUCH GOODNESS that it’s little wonder I don’t want to set it on fire.
This post is constructed from five different blog posts, part of a series on what I call “mathematical forms” in poetry, included the haiku (5-7-5), the cinquain, and more. I’ve edited it lightly, but it does give really good info on what a tanka is, and on the history of the form, including its feminist roots.
Today, a brief introduction to the tanka, which I have in the past referred to as a haiku pulling a trailer.
The tanka (a word which means "short poem") is five lines long - it's essentially a haiku followed by two more longer lines. In Japanese syllable count, which is a bit different from what we do in English, it's 5-7-5-7-7. It's most often written in English using those syllable counts as well.
The opening three lines are similar to a haiku or senryu, using concrete imagery to set the scene or establish the subject of the tanka. The final two lines elaborate on the subject by delving deeper into the emotional heart of the poem. The use of metaphor or simile is encouraged in the tanka, particularly in the closing two lines.
Here's one in translation from a poet called Okura, from the late 7th or early 8th century:
What are they to me,
silver, or gold, or jewels?
How could they ever
equal the greater treasure
that is a child? They can not.
a tanka is a short poem, usually rendered in English in 5 lines of varying syllable lengths, often 5-7-5-7-7.
Side note: The tanka is sometimes known as a waka, or an uta (short form of yamato-uta), which are terms historically meaning "Japanese poetry" (meaning poetry written in Japanese, as opposed to Chinese), but which now is often used interchangeably with the word tanka to mean a poem written in the 5-7-5-7-7 Japanese format. I mention it in case you have seen the word "waka" before (outside the Fozzy Bear context of "wokka") and thought this all sounded a bit familiar. But I digress.
Just as haiku and senryū can have lines that are shorter than 5-7-5, a tanka's lines can vary as well in English, and are more like short-longer-short-longer-longer, basically with 31 syllables as an outside total.
A tanka may have, but does not require, a kigo, or seasonal word.
It is perfectly fine to use the 5-7-5-7-7 construction in every tanka. What you essentially have is a haiku followed by two more lines that expand or expound on the topic of the opening haiku,.
The first three lines are usually as concise and evocative as a haiku, and tend to set the scene through physical description (although there are exceptions, of course). These opening lines do not usually involve metaphor or simile (or, if you prefer, any sense of comparison).
The last two lines expand, comment, and/or delve more deeply into the emotional heart of the poem. This is where thoughts and feelings enter the tanka (usually), and the use of metaphor or simile is highly encouraged here. The goal of a tanka isn't just to present the reader with an image, but to deliberately evoke a feeling or emotion, whether it's pathos or humor or something else.
Here is an example from Carl Brennan, a New York poet who won grand prize in a tanka contest with this one, which many writers can relate to:
She comes at night,
wrapped in convulsive perfumes
and scarred by longings,
lavishing the wrong names on me
at the worst moments: my muse
The first three lines describe a woman in interesting imagery, and we get the sense that this woman is tortured (and possibly spreads that torture around). The last two take the situation - this woman - and makes it personal: she affects ME and is so inconvenient, before identifying that she isn't necessarily a real being at all, but is instead the urge to write. Love it.
Next, a look at Ono no Komachi, a historical figure and one of the most famous female Japanese poets and a complete master of the tanka.
Some of the most famous tanka were written by women who lived centuries ago in Japan during the Heian era (during the 9th century C.E.). One of these was Ono no Komachi, who was likely born between 820 and 830 and lived until perhaps 900. The facts of her life are lost to history (isn't that always the way when a woman is involved?), apart from her romantic relationships with several powerful men, to and for (and with) whom she wrote her remarkable poetry.
It is believed she may have been a courtesan in the service of the Emperor, and that she entered into relationships with other men after the Emperor died, although that is, of course, speculation. What is notspeculative is the exquisite quality of her poetry, which throbs with life and longing, and is quite complicated, given that it can be interpreted in several ways (both by readers in the original Japanese, since her words and images are subject to multiple meanings, and in translation).
Here is one of her most famous tanka, first in the Japanese, and then in translation three ways:
花の色は
うつりにけりな
いたづらに
わが身世にふる
ながめせしまに
A life in vain.
My looks, talents faded
like these cherry blossoms
paling in the endless rains
that I gaze out upon, alone. (Peter McMillan)
The flowers withered
Their color faded away
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in the world
And the long rains were falling (Donald Keene)
While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers. (Jane Hirschfield and Mariko Aritani)
Here is a list that includes other possible translations of this same poem.
No matter how you read these translations, it's clear that the opening lines deal with a nature-based image (fading blossoms), while the remaining lines deal with her own fading beauty and passion during the "long rains". The metaphor is clear, and is a good example of how metaphor in tanka can and should work.
I love how startlingly fresh much of her language seems (depending, of course, on the translation involved) despite the passage of more than 1200 years. Others of her poems exhibit longing and loneliness in heart-aching, swoons-good language.
Ono no Komachi was not the only female among the foremost creators of tanka; she was followed in the 10th century by Izumi Shizibu, who is known to have been married twice, and to have been involved with two princes. Her work, like Komachi's, is worth seeking out. Shizibu's work manages to meld Buddhist sensibilities and eroticism.
I will start today with what appears to be a tanka. I say "appears to be" because as a finished product, it qualifies. It was, however, composed in separate parts by two people (or groups of people), and it qualifies as a maekuzuke, a type of humorous verse in which the last two lines are written first, then another writer (or writers) try to top the ending with a three-one set-up. In the time after Basho's death, maekuzukecompetitions were all the rage.
Here's today's tanka, which is overall quite funny, in part because if it were true, it would be 100% pathos.
Catching the thief
And looking at him, --
It was my own son!
I want to kill him,
And I don't want to kill him.
For me, the takeaway from this poem is not based in its content, but on the way it was constructed: the last part first. It's a fun way to turn the process around, and also a way of coming up with the emotional takeaway of your tanka first, then finding the "setting" for it later.
This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote poems based on the question “What does ___ know?” We were inspired by poems written by Jane Yolen and Joyce Sidman, among others.
After not managing to come up with anything to share for the past two months, I am making up for it by sharing THREE of these poems.
These poems were wonderful to write, and I am super in love with the form/format. Also, I am super in love with the group of women with whom I get to talk about poetry and share time and space to write together.
The other poetry princesses are: Liz Garton Scanlon, Sara Lewis Holmes, Tanita Davis, Andi Sibley, Laura Purdie Salas, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, and Mary Lee Hahn. If a name looks like a link, you can read their offering for this Friday on their blogs.
Next month, we will be writing tankas in response to another poet in our little group. You are invited to write along, if you’d like, and can write a tanka in response to pretty much any poem you like, whether it’s one of our or someone else’s entirely. I will be putting up a post on what a tanka is, the history of the form, and how to write one next week.
This being the last Friday of the month, I have written poetry with my lovely poetry sisters. They are Liz Garton Scanlon, Sara Lewis Holmes, Tanita Davis, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, Andi Sibley, and Laura Purdie Salas. It’s been my pleasure and privilege to know them and write with them for the past 15 years or so. (Seriously? Seriously!)
This month, we were writing ekphrastic poems. An ekphrastic poem is one that is based on a piece of art—a painting, a photograph, a statue.
We mostly settled on two photographs of sculptures: the first is Sara’s photograph of a piece called “Spider Dress and Serpent” by Isamu Noguchi. The second is Tanita’s photograph of a piece called “El Hombre Grande” by Roy De Forest.
I decided to write to both images, and did so using a new-to-me form called the 4x4, which was invented by Denise Krebs. The rules of the form are as follows:
4 syllables in each line
4 lines in each stanza
4 stanzas
4 times repeating a refrain line–line 1 in the first stanza, line 2 in the second stanza, line 3 in the third stanza, and line 4 in the fourth stanza.
Bonus: 4 syllables in the title
No restrictions on subject, rhyme, or meter.
Here are the two poems I wrote for the “Spider Dress and Serpent” piece, which is not just a sculpture, but was meant to be worn—and to be danced in. Noguchi created it for a performance of the story of Medea (the woman from myth, not Madea from Tyler Perry’s movies). You can see snippets from the ballet at around the 40 minute mark in this presentation at the Library of Congress.
The next poem is based on El Hombre Grande, a seven-foot tall sculpture made up of all sorts of things. I loved the colors and shapes, but also the way his one arm expanded to hold up so many things.
You can find my sisters’ posts by clicking on their names below. (Not all of us wrote this month.)
OH! And I have a BRAND NEW PAINTING that is completed and I have to list her for sale. She is on a 24” x 36” gallery-wrapped canvas that is 1-5/8” deep, and this one is called 11:11. She’s all about angel time, and has lots of delicious energy to her. She isn’t yet certain which way she wants to be hung, but likes both of these aspects quite a bit. Will be going into the Paintings portion of the website shortly at $750 plus shipping. If she really calls you, let me know—for the next few days, she will be available for $650, including US shipping.
Poetry Friday is here, and so is my latest poem that I wrote with my poetry sisters.
This month, we wrote dizains. It is a ten-line form that comes originally from the French,, with a fairly simple rhyme scheme: ABABBCCDCD. Each line is 10 syllables (or, some sources say, 8-10 syllables) in length. I chose to write mine in iambic pentameter (that’s five iambs—stress pattern ta-DUM—per line).
This month, my poetry sisters and I met up via Zoom.
During our conversation, Laura tossed her metaphor dice: an actual set of 9-12 cubes with words or phrases on them. They came up with things like “Home is a well-worn zoo” and “Love is a broken wonder.”
The metaphor generated for me was “Your body is an impossible blessing.” Why, thank you, Laura. And also, amen to that.
I immediately decided to write a poem about poop.
Hear me out: It was all because of the words body and blessing in close proximity. And because, as a menopausal woman, there are almost no times anymore when my body is “regular,” in any sense. Size, shape, function . . .
Sometimes a few days go by and things are slow or stalled, and when they start again, I’m always grateful. (Does it matter if I’m talking about poop, or about something else? Probably not.) When things start again—the flow of ideas, if you will, or whatever else has been stopped up, I am always grateful.
At those times, I think hallelujah.
Read the poems by my poetry sisters here:
Andi Sibley
Poetry Friday is being hosted by Karen Edmisten this week.
This month, my poetry sisters and I met on Zoom (where else?) to write poems together. Our prompt was to select one or more words from the list of words that first appeared in the year of our birth.
Some candidates for 1964 included barf bag, gender identity, homophobia, mack daddy, and sucker punch.
As it turns out, being born in April of 1964, I am almost as old as dirt.
Or rather, as old as the word used to describe the scent that rises from dirt as the rain begins to fall. That word—one of my favorite words and scents, as it turns out—is petrichor.
“Petrichor: a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period and that arises from a combination of volatile plant oils and geosmin released from the soil into the air and by ozone carried by downdrafts ”
Petrichor entered the English language in March of 1964, less than a month before my birth, when Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas published an article,“Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” in the journal Nature.
If you want to see exactly how a raindrop on warm, dry rock or soil creates aerosols that rise and distribute the scent we now call petrichor into the air, I highly recommend this link, which includes research from MIT.
I of course fell down a research rabbit hole on this, and have learned that one of the key components of petrichor is a sesquiterpene called geosmin, which is an essential oil that contributes to the earthy flavor of beetroot, and the earthy scent of petrichor.
The word petrichor was coined by research Richard Thomas, composed from petra (rock) or petros (stone) and ichor (the fluid that ran through the veins of Greek gods). Basically, it is “the blood of stones”, so don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t get blood from a stone.
For the past many years, I have been part of a poetry group. Once a month, my poetry sisters and I write poems together. We pick a theme or a poetic form, and we all write our own take on things, then we share on the last Friday of the month.
Only for the past two years, I have barely written a poem, and even more rarely shared.
To quote Taylor Swift, “this is me trying.”
This month’s assignment is to write a wistful poem. Here’s my haiku:
almost time to sing
remember the forgotten
Auld lang syne
You can find the other wistful poems here:
Andi Sibley
The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by Irene Latham this week.
The world lost an observer, a speaker of truth this week, when Mary Oliver left our realm. I am a published poet myself, and even in my wildest dreams cannot imagine achieving the popularity and success that she did. I don’t resent her for it, but am instead grateful that we had her for as long as we did, and that she left us so many books.
I am spending a hyggelig day here, nestled on the couch reading some of her poems. The quote above is from her poem, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long, Black Branches?”, which is from her collection entitled West Wind. If you haven’t read her work, or even if you have, I highly recommend the poem “Wild Geese”, which begins “You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Here’s a link to allow you to read the rest.
“Tell me , what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Probably moreso at my home in New Jersey than here in Summerville, South Carolina where I’ve been spending the last couple weeks in order to help transport my dad to his weekly chemo appointments, though even here there’s been a chill in the air for a couple nights, with more cool weather to come next week. I mean, it’s still in the 80s during the day, and I actually made it to the beach for the first time this year.
Here’s a shot of my feet on Folly Beach last Friday.
One of my favorite poems from college was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, and towards the end you’ll find these lines:
“I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
Perhaps a little too apt, right? Here’s some of the rest
“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
Here’s hoping that Eliot is wrong and that a mermaid choir shows up after all. Meanwhile, here are four pieces I still have available from my Jersey Shore series. Each of these is approximately 4”x6” in size, and is matted and ready to pop into an 8”x10” frame. They cost $48 each, plus shipping, and 25% of the purchase price goes to Clean Ocean Action, an organization dedicated to keeping the beaches and the waters off of New York and New Jersey clean.
Jersey Shore 2 and 3 are on the top row, Jersey Shore 4 and 7 are on the bottom.
Please let me know if you are interested in one of the above pieces, or in chatting about T.S. Eliot (also author of the poems that became they lyrics to most of the songs in the musical CATS). And if you are interested in signing up for my newsletter (which only goes out once every few weeks), you can do that here.
For many, many years, I've had a blog at the (now unfavored) LiveJournal, where I mostly kept my writing. Original poems, interviews, and book reviews, lengthy series about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and more. It is still in use, but I am considering winding it down, quite frankly. However, I have an ongoing poetry project with five (sometimes six) beloved poetry sisters, and we write new poems each month on agreed-upon topics or using agreed-on forms.
Kismet sleeping on my legs.
This month's assignment was to write a sonnet (on any topic we wanted). I chose to write about Kismet, my six-year old calico.
I watch small brown birds puffed fat against cold
peck gravel for small sustenance at best.
A finch, a wren, some dark-eyed juncoes wrest
the smallest bit of God-knows-what. I hold
the cat up to the window, where she tries
to follow hops and jumps, small bursts of flight.
We both pretend she’d catch them all, despite
us knowing that is all a flock of lies.
She’s lived inside a house since she was small,
found toddling by a highly trafficked street,
a tiny, bat-eared calico fuzzball
with pink toe-beans on all four small white feet.
She asks to be put down, climbs in my lap,
curls up, then dreams of birds during her nap.
I am unsure whether the rest of the poems will move here or not, but as this is ART & WORDS, I thought I'd see how it goes.
