When was the last time you saw a list for The Top 10 Poems I Meant to Read and Never Did, The Year’s Worst Poetry Readings, or Five Poems I Wish I’d Written for My Kids? Even when listmania strikes at the end of the year, the odds are enormous that “Best of…” and “Worst of…” won’t feature poetry. It’s time for our own Unofficially Official List of Top Poetry Sites.

Academy of American Poets

This is a must-stop online, with its A-to-Z list of poets, thousands of poems, a huge audio archive, essays and interviews, and constantly expanding e-poetry resources.

American Life in Poetry

An initiative of U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, ALPoetry offers weekly a free, downloadable poem with commentary. It also boasts an archive of hundreds of poems that are frequently humorous, sometimes deeply moving, and always speak to place and what is uniquely American in spirit.

From the Fishouse

Emphasizing poetry as oral tradition, this site showcases poets with fewer than two published collections. What matters are not the names on the poems but the poems themselves, presented in their creators’ voices. With more than 500 audio files, the site offers users insights into how emerging poets think about and practice their craft.

Modern American Poetry Site

The serious student or teacher of poetry cannot go wrong with MAPS, which comprises more than 30,000 pages of online biographies, critical essays, syllabi, and images for more than 160 modern poets. For some poets, it’s the only source for scholarly commentary. Detailed analyses of poems and poetry-related ephemera are noteworthy.

MotionPoems

Not everyone can “get” a poem by reading it. MotionPoems animates words in ways that uncover meaning through wonderfully creative use of music and graphics.

PennSound

No site does a better job than PennSound of documenting, preserving, and making easily accessible historic and contemporary sound recordings you’ll find nowhere else.

Poets & Writers

I like how poets are singled out among the larger group of writers here. The trove of resources includes unparalleled databases of literary magazines, presses, agents, contests, writers’ tools, and readings and workshops. The “My P&W” community is active and supportive.

Poetry Foundation

Cheeky Harriet, the foundation’s blog, makes clear that poetry doesn’t equate to the stiff and stuffy. Notable site features include a Learning Lab, children’s poetry, podcasts, video, and selections from the estimable Poetry magazine. Poems are searchable by school/period, regions, and century and can be accessed using the latest technology.

Poetry International Web

Start in Afghanistan and end in Zimbabwe, but let PIW take you on your global poetry tour. You won’t need a passport to cross borders and listen to the many voices you’ll hear only in this international community. In addition to informative articles, audio/video recordings, and interviews, PIW offers thousands of poems in their original language and English translations.

Tweetspeak Poetry

New-Kid-on-the-Block TSP, while last on the list alphabetically, more than holds its own against the longer-established sites, offering an engaging blog with poetry reviews and essays on craft, accompanied by beautiful photography; an e-daily with unique monthly themes and art, Every Day Poems, that celebrates words’ power to move us, surprise us, or make us laugh; the award-winning T. S. Poetry Press; a newly launched store; and a supportive community that was among the first to use Twitter to write collaborative poetry.

Photo by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Maureen Doallas, author of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

In our last edition of the ‘The Poet,’ our wordsmith lost his poetic license and turned to journalism. Here he is on the new job…

The Poet Comic, by Sara Barkat, age 14.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

Seventeen poems were submitted for our February prompt of “red,” and they ranged from a mere hint of blush to an all-out fiery passion of RED. (I’m still fanning myself.)

They told stories; they played with colors; they were about love and faith and love lost and philosophy and coming of age and everything else red. Some poems were quiet; some were quite loud. Some were hopeful; others about dashed hope. Some were technically beautiful; others were warm and personal.

Every single poem was a joy to read, and I found myself moved in many different ways. Who would have thought that “red” evoked so many different emotions?

While I would like to highlight them all, our practice is to select one, and so I ended up looking to the frigid north and discovered passion burning, where “Canada burns like a cardinal against our snow.” Here is Matthew Kreider’s “Red Heat:”

Red Heat

on this day
in Winnipeg
even polar bears
watch us from Broadway,
and we sit and love
on these historic steps
leading up to our Hotel Fort Garry,
and hold, for a time,
icy bottles of cream soda and
the condensation and rings
drive us mad, with love,
and people hit their brakes
and honk at us,
smiling at your wedding dress,
here in the northern sunlight,
but then we had to leave it
in your parents’ basement, for a

time to cross

a country and then a sea
of wild rye and nodding needles
and the cold concrete
at the border station, with its
erect black uniforms, silver
sunglasses and
latex fingers and,
the prairie wind howls,
whips
at the bare skin of our heart,
raised today like a flag
between two countries.

Oh, Canada burns like a cardinal against our snow.

and so we roar and stomp
and leave one paw-print
of red
in our snow
and then go to bed
and wait for the visible
light to change
to faith, some smoldering,
infrared glow.

Here’s the complete list of poems in the order submitted. Note that four poems were posted directly on the T.S. Poetry Facebook page, so you might have to scroll down to find them.

Monica Sharman’s What It Feels Like
Glynn Young’s Red Mass
Tony Maude’s Red
Violet Nesdoly’s Adolescence
Nicole Monseu Wian’s Red
Maureen Doallas’s Looking for Meaning in Red
Jennifer Butler-Burton’s Does Red Mean Love
Connie Mace’s Red Speaks
Mary Harwell Sayler’s What Happened When I Searched My Poems with Red
Anna’s The Give-away
Grace Marcella Brodhurst-Davis Every Day Poems
G. M. Brodhurst-Davis’s Matador
Michelle Ortega’s Rouge/red
Matthew Kreider’s Red Heat
Susan Carlin’s e on the palette
Juliana Kim Shavin’s Red Elixir
Jody Ohlsen Collins’ Read Red
Cindee’s To Wrap You in Red

Photograph by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

I hadn’t seen Amy in years, but during a mini-reunion with old high school friends she asked about my poetry. “I still have the poem you wrote for me when my dad died,” she told me.

I didn’t remember writing the poem, but the idea that words, poetic words, would help connect me to a grieving friend sounded familiar. It’s how I still cope. Just last week as I was facing an anxious night myself, I pulled out a book of poetry a friend had given me. One after another I read through the verses.

Contrary to the stereotypical poet sequestered alone with a journal and a bottle of wine, poetry has always provided a way for me to reach out to others, to invite them into my life or join them in theirs.

When I was a teenager, I wrote love poems to God and shared them with my religious friends. I also wrote a love poem to the young man who was a student-teacher in our PE class for a semester—a schoolgirl crush exposed on paper. I wrote poems to read at church, and I wrote poems to my mom on special occasions.

My writing took a turn in college, when I had to force my words into AP style and inverted pyramids rather than using them to reach out to others. I abandoned poetic conversations for headlines and leads.

When I joined the staff of a daily newspaper, words became more work. I thought only of deadlines. As my job became increasingly about city council meetings and the local police blotter, I knew I couldn’t do it much longer.

I continued to think of words as work long after I stopped being paid a journalist’s salary and long before I cashed my first free-lance check. Play with words? Who had time for that? Connecting to people with words? It seemed provincial.

But occasionally, I would come across a poem that took my breath away. I would marvel, so few words to say so much. I heard poets reading what they’d birthed, and I felt connected to them through the rhythm and the rhymes.

One day, I heard Garrison Keillor reading poems on NPR in his Writer’s Almanac. It was like an infusion of blood into my anemic writer’s soul. I began listening to his poems every day, often stopping just to soak up the words, sometimes jotting down titles to pass along to a friend.

Even if I’m not writing poetry, I now know I have to hear it, I have to see it, I have to have it in regular doses or the other writing I’m doing begins to suffer.

And poetry still connects me to others. I met a distant cousin for the first time on Saturday, her binder full of poems nestled in her giant backpack. As we sat waiting for lunch, I read a few of her poems, each tucked carefully in plastic sheet protectors, the paper kept safe… while her heart fell open before me in those words.

Photo by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Charity Singleton, of Wide Open Spaces.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

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This week at Every Day Poems, we featured a simple poem from Best American Poetry’s David Lehman. Just a little radio ritual.

Our dear Photo Features Editor, Claire Burge, wrote to tell me she feels this way about leaving a lamp on.

How about you? Anything you feel this way about? Maybe could write your own “radio ritual” poem?

Photo by VisualPanic. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

1 Art

I’m not one for baths, not even with bubbles, a book, and some bubbly, but Vanessa Mancini takes reading in the tub to a whole new level: she’s made a bathtub out of books. It’s not finished yet, but when it is, she’ll be able to bathe in books. Even I might be tempted to step into that bath.

A book-bathtub is one kind of sculpture. Guy Laramee makes another kind: he carves books into mountains and valleys and caves. (Oh my!) Seriously, these are pretty dang amazing. Who knew a book has a literal topography as well as its metaphorical one? I mean, who besides Guy Laramee?

2 News

Do you write poetry? Have you got a tattoo? If you answered yes to both those questions, here’s an opportunity just for you: blogger Bill Cohen is featuring a tattooed poet every day on his blog during National Poetry Month.

I think tattoos are a little scary. All those needles. But it’s far more frightening that there are places in the world where poetry can get you arrested. Chinese poet Zhu Yufu has served nine years in prison for “subversion of state power” and “obstructing official business.” His poem, “It’s Time,” which he posted online, got him arrested again and sentenced to seven more years in prison on charges of inciting subversion.

3 Publishing

Joshua Edwards, founder of Canarium Books, a small poetry press run in conjunction with the University of Michigan’s MFA program, answered a few questions about his take on the future of his press and of publishing in general. My favorite line:

“The physical book will become a fetish object that only poets and collectors care about. Either that or everyone who survives the apocalypse will be writing poems with berry ink on animal skins in the waste land, to let everyone know, with great lyric verve, that the future has already come and gone.”

Long live lyric verve!

If you like your books old school, like I do (you know, with paper and ink), then you might fall for this small Canadian press that turns out books that are labors of love and works of art.

If you’re more into newfangled book technology, you might be interested in knowing that Apple has added to their iBookstore some fun new features for publishers.

4 Reviews

I don’t write much poetry, and when I do, it’s almost always in the privacy of my journal (which shall be burned upon my death). But reading L.L. Barkat’s thoughtful review of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, I found myself wondering about those lines I’ve scribbled privately, wondering about that word line and all the ways we use it, all the ways poets use it, about the way you can take a piece of prose
and turn it
into a poem just
by breaking
the line.

You might also want to check out Aaron Belz’s review of Billy Collins’s most recent book of poems, which is as much a defense and a eulogy of Collins as it is a review of Horoscopes for the Dead.

5 Creativity

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but good love poetry lives forever. Why is that? David Orr has some ideas, which are very much worth reading, especially because, at the end, you get to read Lee Ann Brown’s love poem “After Sappho,” which Orr quotes in its lovely four line entirety.

Someone I know “loves” Kevin Young’s poetry. True confessions: I’d never heard of Kevin Young till I read this article, which didn’t really tell me much about him, except that he’s phenomenally prolific and playful to the point of funny. But that right there? That was enough to get me to go read a poem or two. I’m so glad I did.

6 Write-It

Are you familiar with the New York School poets? Whether you know them or not, you can still write a poem like they did. All you need is the recipe.

If you’re not in the mood to get all John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, you could check out some of these poetry writing prompts instead. Word to the wise: don’t read through all of them. The first two (or three, if you’re the kind that really needs options) provide plenty of grist to get the the old creativity wheel in your imagination turning.

And if you’re up for a real challenge, consider this: How long can you write without saying “I”? Me, self-involved navel-gazer that I am, not a single sentence. Maybe you can do better?

7 Poems

What would Cinderella’s fairy godmother say when she had to go out into yet another night to grant yet another wish? What would Anne Boleyn say to Henry VIII? What would a retired minister, suffering from Alzheimer’s, say when he returns to the first home he ever knew? These are just a few of the two dozen persona poems published by Poemeleon.

In a completely different take on persona, Bradley J. Moore has recorded his encounter with the Poetry Boss:

Order

The Poetry Boss came to my door
carrying a stick and a box of pens.
“Well?” she asked, kicking the snow from her boots.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?”

continue reading

8 People

Last week, Rita Dove received a National Medal of the Arts. She also got groovy to a country tune, which gave a whole new meaning to poetry in motion. Ah, my kingdom for more dancing poets.

In a bit of sad news, poet Mary Oliver is seriously ill. Her friends have created a “Dear Mary” blog where Oliver’s fans and well-wishers can write her a short note of encouragement during this difficult time.

9 Education

Venture capitalist and rap fan Ben Horowitz believes rap lyrics can teach entrepreneurs and executives how to be better at business:

“All the management books are like, ‘This is how you set objectives, this is how you set up an org chart,’ but that’s all the easy part of management. The hard part is how you feel. Rap helps me connect emotionally.”

Maybe he should try writing poetry?

10 Sound ‘n Motion

I’m clearly out of the loop here: I had no idea that Paradise Lost was heading for the silver screen until I learned that it wasn’t. Apparently, $94 million isn’t enough to make Milton a movie.

To mollify your melancholy over the Milton movie muddle, I leave you with this: a whole host of poets reading their own words (or someone else’s) and Mary Oliver reading “Sunflowers,” one of my (many) favorite of her poems. Who can be sad when sunflowers still turn their faces to the sky?

Photos by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Kimberlee Conway Ireton, author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

I read Keats upside down.

It’s not me; it’s the book. Random House bound it that way several decades ago.

But then again, maybe it is me. I’m the kind of person you’d more likely find reading The Contractors’ Blue Book than Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual. And if I’m skimming through Findings, odds are good it’s a medical exam, not Wendell Berry.

I’ve inhabited the prairie dog trailer park of the corporate cubicle, working on the front line and in management for both global and regional companies. Those companies are now my clients. I’m a property and casualty insurance claim adjuster, most at home in the world of tape measures and spreadsheets, contracts and case law. Objective evidence and quantifiable data rule the day. Such abstract conveyors of truth as poetry and art enter the conversation only if the house fire consumes them.

So I’m happy to wink and hold the volume of poems upside down, hoping no one takes too seriously that I enjoy reading and writing poetry myself.

It seems, though, that others far wiser than I have discovered poetry’s needful but long overlooked place in the cubicle and the board room, perhaps a key to restoring the frayed connection between work and the soul of the worker. Or, as David Whyte explains, to “reconcile the left-hand ledger sheet of the soul with the right-hand ledger sheet of the corporate world, a kind of double-entry bookkeeping that can bring together two opposing sides of ourselves normally split by the pressures of work.”

It is with that hope for reconciliation of business and the soul that we invite you to join us for an upcoming four-week discussion of Whyte’s book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. We’ll discover what the confrontation between Beowulf, a 6th century consultant, and Grendel’s mother can still say to us today in the midst of the challenges of 21st century business. And we’ll let Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot and others speak to us of knowledge, fear, failure and success.

Meet us here on March 7 for chapters 1 and 2. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Photo and post by Lyla Lindquist, from A Different Story.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

The Poet, by Sara Barkat, age 14.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

It’s interesting how the brain makes connections.

We’ve been celebrating the color red here this month at Tweetspeak, so red has been a bit on my mind. Valentine’s Day has something to do with the color red, not to mention that February is National Heart Month in the United States.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to see a movie. It was chilly, she pulled the hood of her coat up, and my brain went head, hood, red, cape, and it was on to grandmother’s house we go.

Then I took a walk Saturday morning, a two-mile roundtrip from our house to the center of our St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. And head-hood-cape-red kept playing in my mind. All it took was a red convertible (with the top up; it is February, after all) to drive by, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Red Whistles at the Wolf

Red, Red’s riding in the hood
scarf on her head
lady looking good

Red, Red’s driving in the hood
convertible blush
lady’s in a rush

Lipsticked red
sunglasses red
tight dress red
retro retro red red red

Red, Red’s cruising in the hood
white hubcapped wheels
bringing those meals

Red, Red’s speeding in the hood
in her redfinned missle
gives the wolf a whistle

Red, Red’s roaring in the hood
wolf takes a jump
becomes a speed bump

Red, Red’s slowing in the hood
wolf’s now dead
don’t mess with Red

Photograph: 1960 Red Chrysler Imperial Convertible (The Imperial Club). This is similar to the car Red was driving when she whistled at the wolf. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

I have no business writing poetry.

I am a corporate executive whose days are filled with calculus and quantifications, trading and transactions. Truth is, I had always been drawn to artistic endeavors, but the harsh realities of grown-up life herded me into more practical enterprise, eventually revealing gifts in business administration that I never knew existed.

Business can be creative, too. The process of developing something from nothing, envisioning growth and expansion, putting a group of complex variables into a pot and stirring them up to see what comes out the other side – it can be rewarding.

But, for me, it has never been enough.

I have a playlist on my ipod called, “Songs That Kill Me.” It’s a little bit of Kathleen Edwards and Damien Rice and Kate Bush and Ani DiFranco, artists who have this uncanny ability to package up the accumulated detritus of their inner lives – the suffering and chaos and hopefulness – into a perfectly haunting blend of words and instrumentation.

This music routinely chokes me or shakes me or brings me to my knees in a heap, leaving me with a desperate longing for, well, I don’t know what—other than an aching recognition of truth and beauty that exists far beyond the routine inputs and outputs of my business life. It compels me to reach for something more.

I listen to those songs, and they go miles and miles beneath the surface, latching their thick, layered, sticky hooks into the rich soil of unexplored terrain, claiming new territory, staking their flags. Perhaps this is the mapping of my soul.

So I hold up a mirror – something to reflect back my own version of that which I cannot name.

Nature must have her way, and this urgent necessity for artistic expression refuses to remain bottled up. I started writing. Lyrics first, when I was young. Then prose, and now, poetry. I never expected it be all that good, or perfect, or marketable.

It just is.

It’s just me.

The words I write have become a sort of marker for the landscape of my psyche; a tag to locate a piece of myself at some invisible subterranean level, so that I’ll know how to find my way back if ever I am lost.

And who knows? Like those songs on my playlist, maybe they can become a marker for someone else’s soul, too.

Photo by Dsevilla. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Bradley J. Moore, of And the Other Thing Is.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

I am tempted to review A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, with a single line.

If I could do this, what line would I choose? Perhaps something from one of my recent stream-of-consciousness reflections…

Do the shells still hear the sea, though they are in pieces? How deep does the hearing of the sea enter into bone?

Either of these lines would say it all for me. Or be only a beginning. Either line would stand alone, yet it would beg to stand together with more thoughts, poured out from the wider stream, or sea, if you will.

This is the dilemma, or perhaps the dynamic, that the poets in A Broken Thing have addressed, wittingly or unwittingly: finiteness and the infinite, singularity and plurality, isolation and community. A line stands alone. But no, a line stands together with other lines and the poem as a whole. A line is a piece of the shell. But no, a line is the whole shell and it echoes the sea in which it first found its life. A line is a bone, compact and hard and bounding, but no, it has absorbed an eternity of salt-water that will not be confined.

If I seem to be wandering in poetic thoughts, when I am supposed to be reviewing a book, then this is an accurate and important appraisal, because A Broken Thing will do just this: make you think, and think again, and argue with yourself, and agree with (and then argue with) more than seventy poets, on the issue of the line in poetry. Like the sea, with its constant movement, your thoughts will ebb, flow, crash, eat away at shores and build them; you will need more than a day, or even a month, for this reality.

When I come across a book as provocative as A Broken Thing, I know I will recommend it, but the question is… to whom, and in what context. In the case of this book, I find myself asking who has the mental stamina, the philosophical bent, and the luxury of time to read and appreciate something this dense, thoughtful, and poetic. Surely not a student, unless that student is allowed to take a long time to pore over the words. It would be pure malice to assign this as a required text with a vigorous reading schedule. In the interest of finishing on time, the student would constantly need to fight the invitation to stop and consider…

By brief moments… a life can appear

I want the line-break to tell me…where a speaker butts up against silence*

And so it continues, until you feel your mind might implode with the myriad thoughts that agitate and generate, foil and unfold. From dividing political assertions (the line is “a gendered and fascist reliquary containing the careers of Pound, Eliot…”) to unifying one-world assertions (“this connection of everything with lines”), you will find that you cannot settle in one place. And while you might find some good advice on how to construct a more effective line, you will not necessarily feel you’ve made any decision on the effect or nature of a line.

“The line in digital poetry is not broken”; Stephanie Strickland begins her essay with this line, somehow oddly embodying the dynamic with which we began. She makes an assertion in one direction—wholeness; yet, visually, her assertion contains a contradiction. One cannot help but notice: the claim stands so lonely at the top of the page. Ultimately, her opening holds the finite and the infinite in tension. It suggests singularity and plurality, isolation and community, all at once, if that were possible.

I could continue sharing from Strickland’s essay or from the book as a whole. I could go on. There are more lines worth quoting, more thoughts worth turning over in the palm. Yet this issue of making decisions, to trust in the finite—a seemingly bounded set of words—to say what is beyond, suddenly confronts me. I am back to my initial temptation: shall I say what I need to say here in a single line?

If the shells still hear the sea though they are in pieces, a single line might do.
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*Quotes, in order of appearance, are from the following essayists in A Broken Thing: Kazim Ali, Marianne Boruch, Cynthia Hogue, Christine Hume, John O. Espinoza, Gabriel Gudding, Ibid, Cynthia Hogue. This is a reprint of a review of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, first published at Englewood Review of Books.

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

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

Thanks to Glynn Young for sharing this from Chris Galford’s blog.

Too fun not to showcase here. :)

Johnny: In time you’ll see that this is the best thing, Loretta.
Loretta: In time you’ll drop dead, and I’ll come to your funeral in a red dress!

— Loretta Castorini to Johnny Cammareri after he breaks off their engagement. From Moonstruck, by John Patrick Shanley



Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

— Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”



Rose, where did you get that Red?

— Chip Wareing, Fifth Grade, PS 61, New York City

Red has been roiling around in my head the past two weeks, and it’s no wonder. It’s February: heart-month, love-month, Valentine’s month, all abstractions given visual power through association with that most vibrant of colors.

February Red (or Feb Red, for short) is a paradox. It makes sense that here, “in the bleak mid-winter,” against the backdrop of gray skies, bony branches, and dun snow, we crave this color. The eye delights in the flash of the cardinal amid the oak’s “bare ruined choirs,” the reckless poinsettia blooming long past Christmas, the red of the horizon as “sunset fadeth in the west.” Our winter hearts are starved for red, and we consume it greedily.

Red speaks to us directly, without the agency of words. The most incarnational of hues, it is the stuff we’re made of. Elizabeth Bishop, in “The Fish,” after she captures her prize, imagines “the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails,” knowing they are the colors of her own. Red, she nearly says, is the language of the flesh.

Red is Power, the nerve and the verve to speak your mind. The soprano of the opera, the first violin of the orchestra, the Madonna of the feste, the lead in the play, the star of Broadway—red is the One who won’t be ignored, the One who insists she not be missed.

Red has a voice: “Beware anger, passion, warfare.” As Sylvia warns (with her fiery red hair) rising from the gray ashes, “I eat men like air.” Red is the release of energy that can create or destroy, and there is a strange beauty even in its destruction. (I think of the famous beginning of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—the powerful images of the green jungle exploding in clouds of red fury against the turquoise sky as Jim Morrison sings ominously, “This is the end.”)

Red is the explosion of life that gives the lie to death; thus, Loretta’s threat to do the deed: wear a red dress to her former boyfriend’s funeral. What better way to say “I’m very much alive and very glad you’re dead” without ever speaking a word?

Red is Miracle, talisman and charm. I think of the celebrated “girl in the red coat” in the film Schindler’s List—an innocent child who is the only bit of color in a world of black and white. She is the life force the Nazis are bent on destroying, her red coat marking her as keeper of the sacred flame. The viewer’s (red) heart aches for her survival, knowing it is bound up with our own.

Red is Desire. Thus the schoolboy’s urgent question,“Rose, where did you get that Red?” He longs for a piece of that beauty (don’t we all?) and needs to know where in the world he can find it.

The Rose, of course, stays silent—
his question hanging in the air—
speaking our desire,
staving off despair.
(Think Loretta’s red dress.)
(Think Sylvia’s red hair.)

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems Photo by Noukka Signe. Creative Commons, via Flickr.
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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

Here at T. S. Poetry, nothing could make us happier than when a person discovers poems. Reading them, or writing them. Or both.

I’ve known Lyla for several years, online. Then, this Fall, we actually met at a Writer’s Retreat (where we laughed quite a lot, and I learned more about her life as an insurance adjustor). Through it all, Lyla has kindly put up with my teasing about poetry. Until now.

Now, inexplicably, Lyla has embraced the teasing as the serious thing it is: an invitation to go deeper, to travel a new kind of word-road.

Thinking back, I can’t remember exactly where it began. Maybe I said something about Lyla’s prose sounding poetic. Maybe it was a crazy night on Facebook when I began to see her lines as lines of poetry. (Lyla can tell us, and perhaps she will, if she can recall.)

In any case, she’s accepted the invitation. It’s just a playground, she says. And, honestly, we hope it remains a playground. Because playing with words can be so fun and healing—especially playing with poetic words, because they get right to the heart of things with succinct images, sounds, and rhythms.

Welcome, Lyla. We are so pleased to be sharing the journey (or the playground) with you now.

the beginning

is like the fine ground
edge of a kitchen cleaver
honed sharp by a housewife’s
desperation…

continue reading ‘the beginning’ poem

Photo by Lyla. Used with permission. Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

It was another Twitter poetry party, and the poetic lines just glistened. Here are the first seven poems of our recent TweetSpeak Poetry-sponsored meet-up/mash-up poetry slam.

Lace Under the Stars

By @llbarkat, @ericswalberg, @Doallas, @lauraboggess, @jejpoet, @mmerubies, @monicasharman, @SandraHeskaKing, @kellysauer, @dukeslee, @pathoftreasure, and @chrisyokel. Lurking by @monicabrand (who guessed the source for the prompts – Macbeth by William Shakespeare). Edited by @gyoung9751.

Liquid color in my arms

Gin, wine, vodka, what’s your
liquid color in my arms,
distilling drops of warm light?
I listen to a voice sing whiskey
and gin, thinking about you
growing up back then.
Warm light, warm gin,
warm voice at the window,
the sun gins his reflection
his high-frequency color pours
through into a silvered net,
its liquid heat and red translucence
warms the belly through.
The moon shines
beyond the sunset.

Eternal questions

What’s your splicing frequency?
Can you separate a seed
as small as thyme’s?
The seeds of thyme spark regret.
We plant these seeds and they grow
into children and who are we then?
Them or us? Is the farmer his farm?
The singer his song?
The farmer borne to the wind
rides on an evening gin,
a tonic to regret.

The moon shines always

The moon shines always,
when I’m in your arms.
We spin our rhymes
on the world wide web
of verse and song,
typing and singing
all night long. What
fruit is borne in every
second wind?
Regret we drown in gin.

The last sober leaf

We spin to the last sober leaf as
the leaf’s shadow turns in the sun.
I turn the leaf, a finger unfurled,
stretching to touch what has withdrawn.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll turn over
a new leaf. Or instead I’ll prop up
the old one and hide in the weeds.

The leaf is browning

The leaf is browning, not budding,
forgotten the unfurling, forgotten
the stretch, forgotten the bud.
The leaves shed their green dresses,
dawned red ones, then yellow,
then they dried up and danced away.
Left with cold and empty trees,
I wonder if spring will really come.
Am I waiting on nothing?
The forgotten things turn, the
browning leaves fall, the leaf turns
and for a moment, we remember.

The first spring

The ecstasy of that first spring
into your embrace shadowed
my bud while I shed my green dress.
Our breath gold-rimmed and gold
running through our veins,
we stand no chance to catch time
as a breath, shallowing, things forgotten.

You have forgotten more than I will
ever experience. Your brain spins
webs I can only imagine. You are
high above me, and I dream that I am
waiting on the forgotten. I step light
into brown falling. Am I nothing
in waiting, in leaving behind
my origin? You could love me,
a skirt blowing in the breeze.

Under the cool surface

We slip under the cool surface.
I don’t like the taste of alcohol,
but I like the sounds of the names.
I like saying Mimosa and Tall
Gin Fizz and Sex on the Beach.

Withdraw me.
Tilt the glass.
Empty our yesterdays.

Photo by Kelly Sauer. Used with permission.

When I think of red, I think of Rothko.

One afternoon in a cottage above the Missouri River, I sat with a friend and blathered about poetry. She listened closely. She realized I was talking about words like a painter might talk about primary colors.

“Do you know Mark Rothko’s work?” she asked.

“Not really,” I answered.

Friendly bikers could be heard below on the Katy Trail. A cool wind marched through the screened-in porch and brought cow smell and lilac. I got on Google and quickly became entranced by Rothko’s No. 15, Untitled.

Red and gold.

This introduction to Rothko spurred me to a flurry of inspiration that would culminate in a literary triptych (three sections of 15 poems). Rothko’s powerful choices of red, gold, yellow, are prominent in the resulting 45-poem swath.

For me, the painting cannot be separated from the poems. Rothko might concur, for he said, “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”

Sensitive and inspired, I slung a new layer of oil on top of Rothko’s canvas—romantic stories set in the natural and cultural landscape of my home in the Ozarks. Was the painting ultimately quickened by my activity? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I was surely quickened, as I came home to red.

6 | Rothko’s Reds

We are joined at the hipbones
like Rothko’s reds. Slight spaces
between like woman man skin
sticking, unsticking—blotchy fuzz
Rothko wrists into the painting.
No matter how you triangulate the canvas,
you see us. Naked pulsing red mists—
no boundaries on land,
pond, and autumn gold field.

Post by Dave Malone, author of Under the Sycamore.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

It seemed like it was time to do this.

We’ve had requests from readers who want to support us. And we have artists we love and want to promote.

So here it is. A way to support T. S. Poetry, and love beautiful art, all in one visit. Do let us know if you have special requests and feedback. It’s important to us…

The new T. S. Poetry Store

Coming soon, Red. That’s our theme for the month of February. We’ll have posts from two different poets here at Tweetspeak, and we’ll have a whole lot of Red poems at Every Day Poems.

In the meantime, here’s an interview at Redbud Writer’s Guild, all about writing. (What color is *your* writing? :) )

Photo by Kelly Sauer. Used with permission.