Happy Poetry Friday! This week our host is Molly Hogan ather blog Nix the Comfort Zone. She’s been busy lately, getting ready to return to the classroom and taking pictures of Monarch caterpillars that she shared this week on her blog. Stop by to see what she has in store for Poetry Friday.
I’m enjoying a brief on-line workshop on children’s poetry with Georgia Heard and Rebecca Kai Dotlich. It’s wonderful seeing poets I’ve met at previous workshops and sharing work, reviewing nuts and bolts of writing.
I’ll share a poem I wrote for the workshop last week about the wind. The prompt was to write about the wind, paying attention to verbs:
THE WIND
It white-capped the lake, waves slapped at the shore,
stronger and stronger,
today around four.
It pummeled the pebbles, an old plastic chair,
our collection of driftwood
and took them somewhere.
By Janice Scully
Not windy, but this has become a favorite spot for me, Long Point State Park on Cayuga Lake. Lots of room for social distancing on this hot Monday afternoon.
Here’s a poem by Shakespeare about the wind comparing its bite to the bite of a friend’s ingratitude.
BLOW, BLOW THOU WINTER WIND
by William Shakespeare
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most freindship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Have a jolly week and stay safe. My thoughts are with all the teachers and students who are planning for a return to school.
Want to know more about Poetry Friday? It’s here, on poet Renee LaTulippe’s website. Thank you Molly Hogan for hosting today!
It’s Poetry Friday, today hosted by the amazing Laura Purdie Salas. Let’s see what she has in store for us this week. I hope everyone is well as we get through each new week which fly by. My thoughts are with all the teachers and students trying to get back to their important work.
Just for fun and interest I entered the 2020 Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Contest, not that I thought I would ever win or place and did not. The winners were recently announced here, chosen from over 2,000 haiku entries. It was the eight annual contest run by The Heron’s Nest, an on-line haiku quarterly journal that welcomes submissions. In the above link, the editors shared the winning haiku and honorable mentions and described in detail why they are chosen. It’s well worth reading if you have an interest in haiku and it made me think about this popular form.
Though I write them on occasional I still know too little about haiku as an art form. I did know that classically, haiku is a three line poem originating in Japan with a 5-7-5 syllabic count, though some haiku poets veer from this. The number of syllables varies. I found the syllabic limitations useful and fun when I set out several years ago to create snapshots of historical figures, such as John Q. Addams, the first president to ever be photographed:
We could use someone interesting and innovative today, like you, JQ!
Classically, within the 17 syllable format, the haiku was often divided into two parts, that contrast in tone. An example given was this, written by Issa:
Look at the warbler-
he's wiping his muddy feet
all over the plum blossoms.
I think the shift in tone here is between the lovely image conjured by the warbler contrasting with his muddy feet on the plum blossoms.
Beside contrast in tone within the poem, the other classic haiku characteristic is the “kigo”, or seasonal word, which gives the reader a sense of, or course, the season. In the above haiku I see plum blossoms, a warbler, and mud . . . I guess spring.
According to Lowenstein, optimistic SPRING is often implied by “cherry blossoms and certain birds.
The bright exhausting SUMMER is implied by “flower and tree words.”
AUTUMN is “melancholy” and expressed images such as a “full moon, wind and dying leaves.”
Words like “snow” might signify a cold and difficult WINTER.
On The Heron’s Nest’s website submission page they post a list of qualities these contemporary editors look for when evaluating haiku. These do seem to take their cue from classic haiku.
Present moment magnified (immediacy of emotion)
Interpenetrating the source of inspiration (no space between observer and observed)
Simple, uncomplicated images
Common language
Finding the extraordinary in “ordinary” things
Implication through objective presentation, not explanation: appeal to intuition, not intellect
Human presence is fine if presented as an archetypical, harmonious part of nature (human nature should blend in with the rest of nature rather than dominate the forefront)
Humor is fine, if in keeping with “karumi” (lightness) – nothing overly clever, cynical, comic, or raucous
Musical sensitivity to language (effective use of rhythm and lyricism)
Feeling of a particular place within the cycle of seasons
So much to think about in writing such a brief poem. Haiku can feel to me to be inscrutable, though fascinating and worth the effort. Here are a few from the Japanese masters:
On a withered branch
a crow has settled.
Nightfall in autumn.
Bashō (1644-94)
Wandering through a stream
in summer, carrying my sandals.
How delightful!
Buson (1715-83)
Is that crow tilling
the field or just
walking around there?
Issa (1762-1826)
After I'm dead, tell people
I was a persimmon eater
who also loved haiku.
Shiki (1867-1902)
I hope you liked these. Have a great day and take time off from our troubled world, perhaps, and write a few haiku. Maybe it will provide a small respite.
It’s Poetry Friday and it’s hosted this week by Catherine at READING TO THE CORE. Thank you for hosting! Be sure to stop by.
This week I am posting a poem from a prompt offered by the Poetry Sisters. The prompt was to write an etheree about summer or about foresight.
An Etheree is a poetic form. It is ten lines long. The first line is one syllable and each subsequent line increases by one syllable.
When I heard of the summer 7/24 reopening of the National Zoo in Washington D.C. I thought I’d write about that, a place where children might learn about nature and animals safely during the pandemic. Everyone above six must wear a face mask, and those from 2-6 recommended but optional. What will the animals think?
I just want to note that today was the funeral and celebration of the life of Congressman John Lewis.
May he rest in peace and may his important human rights work be continued everywhere in America till it’s complete. Listen to President Obama’s eulogy here.
Welcome to Poetry Friday. If you don’t know what Poetry Friday is, learn more about it here at Renee LaTulippe’s fabulous poetry website, No Water River.
This week our host is the talented Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche. Please check in there to find out what she has in store for poets this week.
Let me say up front that I have been overwhelmed for a while by the feelings engendered by the phrase “While Nero fiddled, Rome burned.”
It just seems that as there is so much our country should be doing now to solve real problems, yet leaders fight and waste time and money.
However:
Yesterday I found some fun topics to think about. On Wednesday evening on the PBS show, “Animals with Cameras,” tiny cameras that weigh 5% of a meerkat’s body weight, were placed around the necks of meerkats. These clever engineers scurried off to reveal their burrows four feet underground, like a dense subway system.
The cameras revealed a birthing room with five infant meerkats, eyes still closed, actively rooting around for mother’s milk. (I don’t have a picture but you can watch the show.) Apparently this had never been seen before, the babies’ level of activity was a surprise to the researchers. These creatures made me smile. Thank you PBS.
A family of meerkats out and about. They emerge from their burrows two or three weeks after birth.
I also leaned on NOVA why planets and moons are spheres–Gravity of course. It inspired this.
Fortunately this week I’ve felt some progress as I try to write a novel in verse inspired by my brother’s Vietnam letters. I hope to have a first draft done, the story down soon, in time to share some of them in a workshop I’m taking with Georgia Heard next month.
Don’t forget to check out what Margaret Simon is up to this Friday at Reflection on the Teche.
Welcome to Poetry Friday this week hosted here at Book Seed Studio. You will find a post about one of my favorite things in the whole world. I won’t give it away, but it usually involves wearing a swim suit and is very relaxing.
I’ve been looking at our old travel photos because I’ve been home so long. I went to Ireland in April 2016, when the world was a different place in so many ways. Was there really a time before the 2016 election?
Today I heard a piece on the news about how the pub owners in Ireland are enforcing the rules that Americans can’t come in until they quarantine for fourteen days. They don’t want another surge. I’m glad they’re doing the right thing.
One of the many things that struck me about Ireland were the brilliant shades of green that abound there. Moss grows thick in forests and enchants it, as if there really are leprechauns and faeries behind every rock and tree.
And as most teachers know who might be reading this, moss is a pioneer plant, like a lichen. It begins with a spore, and is one of the living things that can grow and thrive over time in a rock’s crevasse where there is little nourishment. Moss also grows and clings to tree bark in dark damp wooded places. Moss is a sign that the air is not polluted.
I wondered if moss harmed trees, but I discovered that generally it doesn’t. But when moss takes hold on rocks, it begins to collect pieces of loose soil blowing past and eventually, over time, breaks rock and turns it into soil.
I took this picture in a national park near Killarny in Ireland
The Aran Island of Innisheer. This is the rockiest landscape I had ever seen, marked by hundreds of stone walls. A good place to look for mossy rocks.
To further capture the mood of Ireland, the color green and moss, we need to hear the words and accent of an Irish poet. I’ll share a video of Seamus Heaney reading his poem “Digging.”
If you want to know more about Poetry Friday, you can find out here at Renee LaTulippe’s excellent blog for poets, No Water River.
Welcome to Poetry Friday this week hosted from Haiti at There is No Such Thing as a God-Forsaken Town. This blog always has something interesting and thought provoking from outside America’s borders in Haiti.
Like many of you reading this, I’m home and trying to keep busy, keep up with friends and family and write poems. With the tension and the news as it is, I need to divert myself, though I am hopeful positive change will happen. I am very worried about the essential workers and patients in hospitals. This week I returned to my brother’s letters from Vietnam and revising poems inspired by them.
Although I can’t travel now, I have always loved the thrill of different places. Right now I’d be happy with a trip to nearby New York to see my son, but that won’t be anytime soon.
So in lieu of a vacation, I will share a villanelle I wrote about a vacation, a haunted one. It was inspired by the Berenstain Bears books that I grew fond of because my two boys and my husband had fun reading them. What we used to find hilarious was how clueless the father bear was, always getting himself into trouble. Below was one of our favorite books, THE BIG HONEY HUNT. Another one I remember involved father renting a rickety old vacation house with danger around every corner.
The Big Honey Hunt by Stanley and Janice Berenstain, a warn copy, is still on my shelf.
When I wrote the below villanelle, I had the Dad illustrated above in mind. This form proved challenging, especially the rhyme sequence, telling a story, and maintaining tension with repeating lines. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know.
I hope you enjoyed a trip to the heath this Friday.
One of the most popular villanelles ever written was ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s for an adult audience and is well worth reading and rereading.
What is a villanelle? It includes five tercets followed by a quatrain. Lines 1 and 3 take turns repeating as the third line of the subsequent stanzas. Then those lines together form the final couplet. The rhyme sequence is ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA.
Have a good weekend. Thanks for stopping.
Do you want to know more about Poetry Friday? Find out about it here.
Happy Poetry Friday! Thank you, Linda Mitchell for hosting at A Word Edgewise. Be sure to stop by and check out what she has in store for us.
I’ve been writing more but, like others, am sometimes frustrated that it takes some much time between the glimmer of an idea and a poem you would consider sharing. It’s never clear when it’s too early to ask others to read it. In the last two weeks I’ve tried to write a poem comparing water to the imagination. When poet Kwame Alexander offered photos to use as a prompt on NPR several months ago, one was a picture of the ocean. I began to think about how water extends to the edges of what contains it. It stayed with me. So here’s a poem that I wrote this week.
It’s wonderful to learn something through poetry. For instance, writing this I learned that there is a god in the Canaanite Pantheon named Yam. He presides over the chaos and power of the sea and has a palace in the abyss. Imagine that! Of course, you would have to.
I discovered that poet and writer Eve Merriam (1916-1992) who was the daughter of Russian immigrants, imagined the edge of the earth in her poem Landscape. Below is an excerpt. Catherine Flynn posted this poem on her blog, Reading to the Core, on March 15, 2019 and you can read the entire poem here.
LANDSCAPE
BY Eve Merriam (2nd of 2 stanzas)
What will there be at the rim of the earth?
A Mollusc,
a mammal,
a new creature’s birth?
Eternal sunrise,
immortal sleep,
or cars piled up in a rusty heap?
I hope everyone is staying well and that those around you are wearing their masks. I went on a short hike at a state park in New York this week, and though it was great being out, I’m not totally comfortable passing people on a trail even in a face mask. Have a great weekend.
Want to know more about Poetry Friday? Find out here.
Thank you, Karen Eastland, for hosting Poetry Friday! Please check in with Karen to see what she has in store for us this week.
Several weeks ago on Poetry Friday the Poetry Sisters invited other poets to join them the last Friday of June. The prompt was to write a poem using the imagery of ‘thick woods’ or the word “susurrus.” Susurrus has an interesting sound and reflects its meaning: a whispering or rustling sound.
My mind has been on injustice, so my poem at the end will be about that. Injustice can be subtle, like a susurrus, extreme violence, or in between. As to the cause of the injustice, it’s been studied and called “white racism,” but never accepted by the government or most white Americans.
Of interest to me was Jill Lepore’s article in the New Yorker this week entitled “The Riot Report.” Lepore reviewed all the government commissions and inquiries into race riots since 1917. When riots threatened whites, commissions were frequently appointed so that the fearful public believed the government will do something. Nothing ever changed and the many early commissions all blamed black people for the violence.
Then the Watts riots in L.A. in 1967 was instigated again by horrendous police brutality.
President Johnson commissioned the Kerner Report, charged with the usual quest: find out why and what could be done to prevent riots. The thorough 1700-page report was published in 1968. The Kerner Report became a best seller, along with Valley of the Dolls, telling the stark truth about police violence and economic inequality. It inspired the Washington Post headline: CHIEF BLAME FOR RIOTS PUT ON WHITE RACISM.” No commission had ever blamed white people. It was astounding.
According to Lepore, our President, LBJ, ignored the report. After all, he’d thought he’d solved the race problem with the voting rights Act and 1964 civil rights Acts. That’s why, yet again, even with this report, the government did nothing and here we are fifty years later. Our institutions such as police, schools, and hospitals, the economy are racist. Many politicians pretend to care. After George Floyd’s death last month, Senator Rob Portman called for a Commission to study the problem. He should just read the Kerner Report.
I hope I haven’t been too far off track for a poetry blog. George Floyd’s death was a dramatic crime. But the word “susrussus” brought to mind the idea that prejudice can be subtle, even though to those most affected it might not experience it so. Anyway, I hope that this time around things will move forward, unlike all the other times before. Here’s my poem:
Welcome to Poetry Friday, this week hosted by Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Thank you for hosting! I hope everyone is well.
Poet Elizabeth Steinglass recently wrote a post on her blog about a wonderful craft book, Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems by poet Marjorie Maddox. It can teach and guide young poets, inspire and inform all ages. In those pages this week I rediscovered a short poetic form called the Clerihew, which is “a four line biographical poem, usually in rhyming couplets.”
I had a famous person in mind for my Clerihew and this felt like the perfect form for a brief blog post. It came to me as I watched the Netflix special “Becoming” about Michelle Obama’s book tour. It’s a fabulous documentary and it plunged me into several hours of nostalgia and missing her. The book was remarkable and wonderful to read, but seeing video clips of her and the Obama family brought tears. I felt like thanking her.
Rummaging through my computer, I discovered several other clerihews I’d written in the past that mentioned first ladies that I had forgotten about. Here’s one.
Today’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem. Thank you, Irene, for hosting. Be sure to stop by and see her post dedicated to a poet I admire, Nikki Grimes. I was awed by her novel in verse, Ordinary Hazards, which I wrote about previously, here. So I will refer readers to that. I look forward to today’s celebration of her and her prolific and marvelous work.
This week I stretched my poetry muscles using prompts from Kat Apel’s Poetry Pep Up. I thought I would share my few small pieces. I enjoyed reading the work of others’ last week. If you are not familiar with Poetry Pep Up, you can find excellent instructions for each of Kathryn’s prompts on the link above.
I warmed up with the Zentangle, but decided to keep that to myself.
Writing an EPIGRAM was next. An epigram imparts wisdom, is supposed to be witty with a “twist in the tail”, is written as a couplet, quatrain or one-liner, and it sometimes rhymes.
I love Kat’s example by Oscar Wilde. “I can resist anything but temptation.”
So here is an epigram:
TONIGHT’S MENU Chicken or eggs- whichever comes first.
The next prompt was an ekphrastic poem. Kat had several great photos but I’ll use one I found on my phone of our newest family member, Marshmallow.
Marshmallow
All I’ve ever known is people. They feed me play with me and love me Still, a cat must be vigilant so that’s why I’m viewing askance the one in the tan pants.
Next: GOLDEN SHOVEL . The first and only golden shovel I wrote was from a prompt by Nikki Grimes from an interview on Michelle Heinrich Barnes’ blog . If you are not familiar, you’ll find description of this form on the link above. Here’s my golden shovel from a poem by Christopher Marlowe:
Christopher Marlowe
WHERE IS OUR RELATIONSHIP GOING?
(A Golden Shovel poem inspired by a line from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan poem, THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE: “Come live with me and be my love”)
