I stood up and accidentally bumped the next lady in line. I’d been down on my knees with my phone camera, looking up at Lindt chocolates and their 99¢ sign. “Um,” I said, “I was taking a picture of the chocolates. It made me think of a project.”

She laughed, obviously not one of those road-rage types, and I turned to the cashier, trying to use my library card as a credit card. Well, you know, when you get an idea that involves questions of chocolate, poetry, and worth, you get a little distracted.

The idea was so simple (and it involved chocolate, at least for me), that I couldn’t resist:

What can you find for 99¢? Take a picture of it and share it in a blog post or on Facebook. If you want to write a poem about it, go ahead. If you want to just eat the evidence (minus the receipt and the photo, of course), that’s also permissible. Okay, and if you find nuts and bolts for 99¢, you might not want to eat those. (However, if you do, we REALLY want a poem about the experience ;-))

Share your blog or Facebook posts on the T. S. Poetry Facebook Wall by Wednesday, June 8 for links and possible feature.

Here’s mine :)

Lindt

It must have been destiny,
the way you were red
and just short of a dollar,
the way you were sitting
foiled and cool,
racked and wrapped
under florescence—
waiting sweet for me.
____

Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life. This post is also being shared with One Stop Poetry.

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— read a poem a day with us, become a better poet or teach others to become better poets.

This week was terrific fun playing with words. On Facebook, a few of us managed to speak in R’s until we were quite tickled (and at least I was laughing; if not everyone else :)). We started out with rogue, and it snowballed (degenerated? generated?) from there. Here’s a little barely-a-poem to commemorate the festivities…

Rogue.

Renaissance Rogue?
No, my friend,
more like Restoration Rogue,
a scandal if there ever was one.
That’s what happens when
you mix your R’s, go renegade.

Rogue. Resistance. Restoration. Renaissance. Rebel. Rascal. Racketeer. Rabble-rouser. Rowdy ruffian.

Why not relish the words,
like a recluse, eating riffraff
on a Monday afternoon
(and most likely up to no good)

Roger that. Even if
it isn’t vogue.

— taken from the fun words of Karen Swallow Prior, Kathleen Overby, Jessica Kistler McGuire and Deborah Henry. Goodness, not even the poem is immune to rebel activity.

Now. Back to the serious matter of today’s feature. I loved this simple poem from Maureen based on Marcus’s Barbies Wordle…

Black eyes like stone
cool everything,

make night burn empty
even around poetry.

That’s it. Poetry is a fine receptacle, for everything from the fun-loving to the contemplative. Thanks to all our Random Acts of Poetry participants…

Violet’s Mourning Music
Sandra’s Poems in Waiting and More Poems in Waiting
Maureen’s Black Eyes Like Stone
Karin’s Poems Hiding in Plain Sight and More Poems Hiding
Karen’s There Isn’t a Story

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— read a poem a day with us, become a better poet or teach others to become better poets.

I saw a headline the other day, about how Lady Gaga crashed Amazon with her 99¢ music offer. As far as I could tell once I clicked through, the Lady hadn’t actually crashed Amazon. She just slowed it down to a thick cyber-syrup.

All because her fans couldn’t wait to join the music craze for a mere 99¢.

I considered what it might take for us to do the same to the Book Giant, if we offered a lifetime of poetry fun for a yearly cost of 99¢. I didn’t have any art deco spectacles or 9-inch heels, inverted triangle dresses or purple bouffant wigs. But I did have a red ribbon (and the picture above to prove it).

I know, I know. Who’s going to crash Amazon with poetry and a red ribbon? Well, it could happen. After all, for 99¢ we want to give you the chance to subscribe to our Every Day Poems newsletter, where you can…

• read and enjoy a hand-selected poem every day (except weekends when we like to spend time writing)

• never miss a poetry writing project announcement again (unless you forget to check your email for days on end :) )

• connect with other poets

• possibly get featured (or see someone else you know-and-love get featured), in Every Day Poems or at one of our poetry partners

• get terrific writing tips from published poets, poetry teachers, and people who love poetry

• hear about our upcoming Twitter parties, before they happen :)

• help us cover the cost of Every Day Poems (depending on our number of subscribers, the cost can rise to several hundred dollars a month… oo la la!)

It’s pretty easy to
Sign up for Every Day Poems.
Then Amazon kindly asks you for 99¢.

And maybe we show the world how a little poetry can make a person ga-ga too.

___

In his letters, the Apostle Paul usually addresses the churches, such as the churches at Corinth and Thessalonica. In his letters to the Ephesians and the Philippians, Paul speaks to the “saints.” Peter speaks to “God’s elect.” But while different terms are used, all are generally understood to mean the people – the living people – who comprised the churches in these cities. When Paul wrote to the saints in Ephesus and Philippi, he was not addressing people who had been recognized and canonized as something special and different after their deaths. And so too today, in most of the Protestant traditions (Anglican and Episcopal being obvious exceptions), the terms “saints” refers to the living, breathing members of the church.

And then there’s Saint Sinatra.

I have to say that I laughed when I saw the title of this collection of poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. I’ve never really considered Frank Sinatra a saint, even in his early singing career when young women (like my mother) swooned over those famous blue eyes. Yet his poem, the title poem, leads this volume. And it should.

It is a collection that is at once serious and humorous, focused and yet playful. It speaks to and about saints who are both familiar and known for being saints (like “St. Kate,” or Catherine of Siena), as well as those who are not – like St. Ikaros, the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun. And O’Donnell includes a variety of literary figures to populate her saintly domain here – like St. Seamus (Heaney, the poet), St. Melville and St. Hawthorne, St. Edna (Vincent Millay) and St. Emily (Dickinson).

The idea here seems to be that these figures are all saints, have all been found worthy of sainthood, be that for singing, writing, painting (Van Gogh and Turner) and even playing the saxophone (Clarence Clemmons, who played with Brice Springsteen.)

The poem entitled St. Seamus, for the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, is a kind of praise and giving thanks psalm, and is an indication of how O’Donnell has written and organized her poems.

St. Seamus

For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells
and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,
lain down in the bog where dead men dwell,
grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.
I taste their music and savor it long
past the last line of the taut sonnet.
Its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,
blood of blessing, bread of the word,
feeding me full in language ancient
as Aran’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.

English will never be the same.
To make it ours is why you came.

There is much to plumb in this poem, not the least of which is the connection between art and faith, or how art expresses faith, and how faith is revealed in art.

The poems in the volume are not limited to saints; there is also one called “The Conversation,” which is almost like a news account of the one face-to-face meeting of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and the Polish-Lithuanian-American Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The two had corresponded for years: their one meeting was a in a restaurant in San Francisco in 1968, and it is imaginatively recreated by O’Donnell here, including these lines:

He made me Milosz, you Merton,
and neither of us home
and sent us on a pilgrimage to find it.
We have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.
The maker loves the maker and the made.

Other poems include O’Donnell’s responses to seeing Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sower with Setting Sun” on the feast day of St. Francis and an exhibition of paintings by J.M. W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

O’Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She’s previously published two chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Christian Century, Comstock Poetry Review, Potomac Review and Xavier Review, among many others. She’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Web Prize, and was finalist for the Foley Poetry Award, the Elixir First Book award and the Mulberry Poets & Writers Award.

And in Saint Sinatra, she’s given us the poetry of the saints, all of the saints, including those who are recognizably ourselves.
____

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— read a poem a day with us, become a better poet or teach others to become better poets.

How hard could it be?

I was reading about a poetry technique called cataloging. It seemed simple enough. Until I tried it. The technique uses word-repetition to create a sense of praise (for the object, concept, or beloved). Or sometimes to create a sense of magic or prophetic voice.

How hard could it be to repeat words and make a good catalog poem?

Whitman did it in Song of Myself…

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Robert Desnos did it in The Voice of Robert Desnos…

the one I love is not listening
the one I love does not hear
the one I love does not answer

David K. Wheeler did it in On Restlessness…

There was never a time that I knew everything.
There wasn’t a night I wanted you to lose sleep.
There are some words you can say with a blink.
There are nights I wake up curled on the floor.
There are appliances that refuse to operate.
There are solutions that don’t have a question.

But in the end, I could not write a catalog poem. Not to my satisfaction. So I wrote this poem instead…

Poetry 101: Cataloging

All day I have been tapping out words, trying to catalog
my love for you. I’ve been sketching where the type would go
and the images— Bratz, Tonkas, a red truck that takes off
without pushing, after just a bit of pre-winding against a warm oak floor.
I’ve been shaking words into phrases that could go under little squares
on catalog pages; squares of silken ties, underwear, tube socks
and, surprisingly, Martha Stewart pillows (throw, in all the latest
catalog colors; this year it’s yellow, which is far too bright
for how I feel… a catalog should never steal my love by pushing
the commercial sense of hue and shade on I-love-you; I tried those
too, you know— notebooks stamped I love you, with bubble hearts,
balloons, and ungodly purple butterflies). No matter how I listed,
squared, adjusted like a quintessential Sears, nothing seemed to finally do
what a catalog of broken lines should somehow, without measure, do.

Visit L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life. This post is a reprint from Seedlings in Stone.
___

Further Resources, for Teachers or Writer’s Groups:

How to Write a Catalog Poem
Put That on the List: Collaboratively Writing a Catalog Poem
Subscribe to Every Day Poems— read a poem a day with us, become a better poet or teach others to become better poets.

Nicholas Samaras received the award in the 1991 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for this volume of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker. Now 20 years old, it has aged well; its themes of exile, pilgrimage, separation and “in this world but not of it” are as current now as they were then, if not more so.

Perhaps these themes reflect his upbringing as the son of a leading Greek Orthodox bishop who moved his family from England to Massachusetts, or Samaras’ own life later in New York. Whatever the influence, his poems project a sense of distance and separation at the same time suggesting a quality of knowing exactly one’s place. In “Lost,” for example, Samaras places his couple in a dark woods, away from civilization, as the forest “thickens with night.” Yet when they awake early the next morning, it may still be dark, but they know their pilgrimage is resuming:

Lost

The one thing warned against
we have accomplished with remarkable ease.
The path dissolves to darkness.
The forest thickens with night as we fumble
with sweat-dampened matches to set a fire.
On the mountain-slope, wolves chuck their moon-song.
Wild boards rummage the underbrush.
They are far enough away for us to breathe.

I watch while Nikita sleeps, shudders awake
To a blind hour. Embers glimmer a dull red.
Our clothes are limp with smoke
and we prop a paper icon against a tree stump,
chant an ancient tongue to God, tell ourselves
this is the way of all pilgrims.
But oh, how our arms ache
from holding the carvings of our own ribs.

In “In the Wake of Exile,” this sense of separation and “separate-ness” is more explicit, as is the setting of the poem. One imagines a kind of prisoner being taking away from the familiar and the loving, or perhaps the pilgrim, who sleeps in a ship’s cabin that is much like a monk’s cell.

In the Wake of Exile

You have been in exile for two weeks.

Boarding the boat that takes you,
you are somewhere far off,
forgetting something,
stitching through a necklace of islands.
It is the journey you make in winter.
The moaning of engines, the heavy
Rumble below deck on a black-onyx sea.
You do not eat, and grow invisible.
Stripped of everything,
you sleep like this:
In a berth the size of your body,
your face stubbed into the lumpy pillow,
your left palm cradling
your bruised testicles.
The string of light fades in the hazy black.
The long beard you said goodbye to.
The long beard you know you are becoming.
The book you translate in your sleep.
On gaunt legs that feel unlike yours,
you leave the cabin and haunt the deck.
Stern-side, the waning moon
puddles in the froth of the wake.
Peer into darkness.
Write this star down.

These and the others in the collection are poems of pilgrimage and exile, where we are all strangers, to each other and to ourselves. Or as he concludes in the poem “When Grandfathers Leave,” when the patrons of a tavern finally return home, “Each stranger’s expression and / cheekbones, a mirror of mine.”

Hands of the Saddlemaker is a quiet volume, fully deserving of rereading and contemplation.

Related:

The TweetSpeak Poetry feature on Nick Samaras for National Poetry Month.

A short study of a poem from this volume, published at The Master’s Artist.

Artist of the Month feature at Image Journal.

Lately, I’ve been writing hard, more professionally than years past, which means also a bit more mechanically. Some words are needed, so I crank them out.

GoodWordEditing is one of my few places where I can still play. Play is so important.

I’ve thought of posts I could write this week: about the 22-30 rule of engaging readers, about the scene and plot things I’m learning in my own writing, about how to carve out writing time when you have a family and a career and a church and dogs that need someone to throw the frisbee, about how to use Twitter as a method of social note taking, even a spiritual analysis of Battlestar Galactica Resistance clips showing where that series does a good job of opening the door to think about faith and religion.

Except for Battlestar Galactica, those things don’t feel much like play to me. Even Battlestar doesn’t feel as playful when I’m analyzing it for scene structure, character motivation, and theme.

But poetry is so useless, it’s only good for play. The movement of a poem isn’t going to take me anywhere in particular. I’m just here swinging with the words. Up and back. Up and back. Or maybe kayaking around Serenity Island at one of our city parks. (Yes, I live in heaven.)

And earlier this morning, I finally found this poem. Or I should say it found me. People kept sending it to me. Quoting it back to me. And I realized it was time to climb on the swing, time to get in the boat again.

You can hear me read the poem out loud here.

Sometimes

Sometimes
images are
too intimate,
too desperate,
too honest.
Sometimes
reading is
a little death.
Sometimes
writing is too.

This post is a modified reprint from GoodWordEditing, the blog of Marcus Goodyear, author of Barbies at Communion: and Other Poems.

____

Further Resources, for Teachers and Writer’s Groups:

On Plato’s Thoughts About the Dangers of Poetry
Why Poetry?

Thanks to all who made Wordles! As I looked at the various word pictures, I was fascinated by unexpected combinations of words that were sitting near each other. They seemed to be begging for the chance to become poems. Like these words from Sandra’s Wordle:

Now find love
gentle sweet,
like blue expectations
attached to grace.

Or these words from Joanne’s Romantics Wordle…

Entirely wild
men poems, like
mountain things.

Or these from one of our T. S. Poetry Wordles…

Shovel burning,
holding Lord Neruda’s
house, milk, songs,
a pomegranate.

Want to try it? Poke through the participants’ links below and see if you can find some poems-in-waiting in their Wordles. Post your poem links to the T. S. Wall, by next Wednesday the 25th, for links and possible feature here at Tweetspeak.

Find Your Poems-In-Waiting at…

Sandra’s Year in Poetry Wordle
Nancy’s Revelations Wordle
Joanne’s Romantics Wordle
Stephie’s Purple Heart
T. S. Poetry Press’s White Wordle and Black Wordle
Karin’s One Shot Wordle
L.L.’s InsideOut Wordle
MaryAnn’s Collected Poems Wordle
Marcus’s Barbies Wordle
Deidra’s Writer’s Block Wordle
Octavia’s Winter Sundays (also featured above at Tweetspeak)

Visit L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.

This past week, at T. S. Poetry Press Facebook, we asked for help to make a poetic Wordle. People answered three questions, which we used as grist:

1. one of your favorite poets?
2. one of your favorite poetry books?
3. one of your favorite lines from a poem?

How about you? Would you consider Wordling, using some kind of poetic grist? What would you use?

If you decide to try it out, post your Wordle on your blog, with an explanation of what kinds of material you used to create it. Then share your Wordle with us by next Wednesday, May 18th, for definite links and possible feature here at Tweetspeak Poetry. Just drop your link on the T. S. Wall.

So many ways to play with words… :)

Visit L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.

When I was little, my mother would read stories to me from an oversized yet relatively thin edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It had a green cloth cover, and I remember it specifically because I still have it. (It’s also decorated with writing in crayon, but that’s another story.)

One of my favorite stories was “Hansel and Gretel.” Now I know a lot of right-thinking people frown on fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” but it made good sense to me then, and still makes good sense to me now. Two children get lost in the woods, find a gingerbread house, do what any hungry child would do and eat a piece, and get imprisoned by the wicked witch, who plans on doing what wicked witches always do, and that’s to eat them. Hansel is kept in a cage to fatten him up, and Gretel is worked to the bone, until she eventually seizes the opportunity to push the witch into the oven. Yes! Good triumphs over evil! The wicked witch is burned to a crisp!

Poet Ava Levall Haymon has taken the story of Hansel and Gretel and turned it into an extraordinary series of poems in Why the House is Made of Gingerbread: Poems. Together, the poems form a significant retelling of the story, but one that remains true to the original. It is the story of Gretel, and contemporary housewife and mother, who finds herself absorbed into the fairy tale and living the story of the child Gretel.

Haymon weaves an amazing tale, and the transition to the fairy tale starts gradually. From the poem “Autobiography:”

Gretel’s attention disengages from her driving
and she is the young girl in the dark
beside Hansel’s cage, legs aching from standing
since before dawn. Gretel squeezes
the wheel, shoulders tight, longing

to trade places with her brother,
for his ignorance of minding the fire,
hauling water with bruised fingers,
his freedom from the danger of failure – one slip
of the girl’s memory in a recipe, one broken dish

and there’s no story, just another couple of kids
who never came home. A ruckus breaks out
in the back seat, and Gretel shudders back
into the present, driving kids to school.
She presses the brake hard: That didn’t happen!

But it did happen and it does happen, and soon she finds herself the original Gretel, captive with her brother by the witch, with their doom creeping ever closer. From “The Witch Has Told You a Story:”

You are food.
You are here for me
to eat. Fatten up,
and I will like you better.

Your brother will be first,
You must wait your turn.
Feed him yourself, you will
Learn to do it. You will take him

Eggs with yellow sauce, muffins
Torn apart and leaking butter, friend meats
Late in the morning, and always sweets
In a sticky parade from the kitchen…

Haymon guides her Gretel into a gradual identification with her captor, wnile her brother turns into something fattened up for dinner. But the story is told true to the original, and it’s the witch who meets her doom, even if Gretel will carry some of that witch with her, and back into her real housewife life.

Haymon, who teaches poetry writing and directs a writer’s retreat in New Mexico, is the author of two previous collections, Kitchen Heat and The Strict Economy of Fire. In Why the House is Made of Gingerbread, she has creatively translated a fairy tale into both a faithful and imaginative retelling and a modern story, its own fairy tale.

In 2009, we reviewed here a chapbook published by poet John Estes entitled Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon. In the review we said that Estes effectively evoked a sense of both the literary and everyday reality. That same characteristic is true of his first collection of poems, Kingdom Come: Poems, published by CR Press, but even more so: Estes is refining his art, honing and polishing his poems to create a mirrored reflection of ourselves.

The poems are structured in four sections and an interlude: “in which love and art seek their measure;” ”in which he marries;” “in which a child is conceived and born;” the interlude called “Home Cosmographies;” and “in which they seek the measure of art and love.” This structure is important, suggesting both a circular movement and well as development and growth, a filling out of a life that is young and new and beginning to mature.

It’s fascinating to see how Estes combines images and even realities, using each to highlight and frame the other. In “A List of What is Found,” for example, he tells a story of traveling to Kansas to conduct an inventory of a bookstore, an inventory framed by an old train rail bed and which in turns frames what’s on the news:

A List of What Is Found

The old Burlington
Northern rail bed touches
the southern edge
of the yard
not a hundred feet
from where we’re staying—
a ghostly, trackless
river of gray gravel
embowered by cottonwood
and hedge, thickened
with pines and red cedar.
Our hosts tell us—
as two wrens zip around
rebuilding their
poorly placed
nest the Doberman
ate babies-and-all—
how an easterly wind would
blow the approaching
rumble off and so a throbbing
hulk of diesel engine
towing 100+ coal cars
could suddenly darken
their back deck,
a paracletic comfort
(in retrospect, at least)
abandoned for a bike trail.

I’ve come to Kansas
to do a job,
to inventory a store of books—
the endangered kind
housed in old Victorians
where light switches
hide behind Kierkegaard
and the bathroom is
a stockroom stockpiling
stacks of bargain-buy lectures
on Aquinas on Aristotle,
titles they account for
in years per turn
not turns per year—
which means forsaking books
to better address
the shelf-worn menace
of our bourgeois
contentment.
An old copy of Thoreau
sits on the stand
calling out alongside
other diluted (i.e., textual)
libidinal oppositions:
bloodless
and rational words
of institution
that mock a project’s
scope and scale
but safeguard a life,
so designed, of convention.

On the news:
in the desert outskirts
of an Iraqi town,
the so-called Triangle of Death,
a patrol is ambushed:
five dead—
3389, 3390, 3391, 3392, 3393—
three unaccounted for.
Our host descends
to remind us over 3000 die
worldwide each day
in car crashes.

Estes write from his own experience, and that experience is easily recognizable – the husband, the father, the handyman, the house repairman, the guy dealing hail damage to his roof and car or taking out an insurance policy on his child. In “This Poem is Carbon Neutral,” Estes addresses what it means to be a neighbor, suggesting a kind of trade-off akin to Frost and his “good friends make good neighbors:”

This Poem Is Carbon Neutral

Across the street they think
we’re eco-Kool-Aid drinkers: we sort glass and plastics
into blue bags, organics into clear ones, stuff
paper into paper sacks then treat
everything else like garbage.

But he thinks I’m a good neighbor,
and since we mend no fences I stop short of thinking
he’s like Frost’s old-stone savage
despite the Pall Malls
billowing with grandkids in the backseat,
windows up, despite the herbicide
and fungicide and fertilizer
liberally broadcast fall and spring. We wave
and shout news across the way though I suspect
he’s deaf.

Otherwise our lifeworlds
barely intersect, our privacies mutually assured
except for now and again
when an egg is borrowed, or if the wind litters
his greensward with my recycling—
a magazine blow-in card or a pitched draft
or a crumpled receipt.
Once they walked across to inspect
then carried back a worn-out bookshelf we’d discarded.

Now and again I pop their cat
with a pellet gun to chase him off our feeders.
But when the trash trucks come
each Monday,
doing their slow-maw grinding action-non-action thing
and one truck stops for him
and one truck stops for me, we offset,
we reset, we’re zero-sum.

Several of the poems were previously published in publications like Southern Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, American Poetry Journal, Dos Passos Review, New Delta Review and New Orleans Review, among several others, as well as from an earlier chapbook entitled Swerve, which was published as a National Chapbook Fellowship of the Poetry Society of America and C.K. Williams. Together, these poems form a deeply satisfying and outstanding collection.

The poems of Kingdom Come are polished, almost chiseled to refinement, painstakingly written to use exactly the right word, the right line, the right idea. Estes is clear about what he is doing; as he says in “Object Permanance,” “What’s a poem / for, anyway, if not to make the empty / spaces habitable?” And his poems make the empty spaces habitable, the empty spaces that are everyday life.

You can find John Estes’ web site here. He is an assistant professor of English and driector of Creative Writing at Malone University in Ohio.

Theron Kennedy at Inside Theron’s Head 2.0 and Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper found two cool online poetry resources.

Kennedy tweeted a link to 32 Poems, which is sharing 215 favorite poetry books by 43 poets in 30 days. 32 Poems borrowed the idea from someone else, and adapted it for National Poetry Month.

Maureen Doallas discovered that The Poetry Foundation has made every issue of Poetry Magazine since 1912 accessible online. And it’s searchable by poet, poem and keyword.

And if you ever wondered who have been poets laureate of the United States, here’s the list (with links) at Info Please.