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Oct 062011
Today I received so many little love notes, I just had to let you know.
It happened behind the scenes, in my inbox. It was all about today’s Every Day Poem. One person expressed delight over seeing the photo he’d loved in our recent Rust Challenge. Another told me she was surprised and delighted to see that the featured poem had been penned by one of her writing group members, a best friend. And the last love note made me catch my breath; it said…
this morning in my quiet time i wrote to God and asked him to take me to the bottom line.
and then this arrives in my inbox.
Why poetry? Because of loves like these.
Signing Rumors photo, by Kelly Sauer. Used with permission. Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In October we’re exploring the question “Why Poetry?”
Sep 202011
It is a book on writing. But it is also more. Somebody said that somewhere. I think it may have been Deidra Riggs.
She is right. There are probably a few “mores” that Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing is about. But one that compelled me with an odd urgency was this: trying to deal with coming-of-age.
The struggle to grow up, to find one’s place in a world that has both beauty and suffering, is something I deal with a lot at my house. On the one hand, my Eldest is always telling me, “I don’t want to grow up.” On the other hand, my Littlest is always asking me, “What’s it like to be a grown-up?”
So for my Eldest I am always trying to coax her into courage, and for my Youngest I am always trying to hold her back, if only a little.
My dual nature is best captured in a poem I ran the other day in Every Day Poems: The Stolen Child. (The excerpt of the poem, below, is also fittingly the epigraph for Rumors of Water.)
Now I put it out here for you. Can you see how the poem embodies a struggle to grow up? Can you see how a parent might play either role: the faeries or the oatmeal chest? The poem is also, in its way, about Imagination versus Reality. Interestingly, they share certain qualities, both inspiring and frightening.
How about you? What does The Stolen Child evoke? Something more?
The Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Read the rest of The Stolen Child
Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In September we’re exploring the question “What is Poetry?”
Sep 012011
As I began sifting through possible poems for this month’s Every Day Poems, I got very excited about our new theme: What is Poetry?
Poetry is, of course, art put into lines. Lines that might rhyme or tap out a beat, and that take advantage of intriguing aspects of our language: image and sound wrapped up in metaphor, simile, and metonymy, to name a few devices.
Beyond this simple description of what-poetry-is, I like the goal of poet Major Jackson, “to be inside a poem and to be vulnerable and to make it art.” This suggests that the best poetry may be that which is infused with the human.
Mostly, as I gathered the month’s poems, I was struck by how poetry itself best answers the question, “What is poetry?” I found a host of answers tucked inside verse: poetry is a bowl, a net, a defense, a reach for the immortal.
As we explore this month’s theme together, I hope you’ll try to answer the question in your own “What is Poetry?” poems. If you do, please feel free to share your post links on our Facebook Wall, where, as a kind of beautiful cyber-graffiti, the links might stack up to form their own kind of poetry.
Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life. Photo by Kelly Sauer. Used with permission.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In September we’re exploring the theme: What is Poetry?
Aug 182011
It seems to go this way with James and I. One of us makes an off-hand remark, and before you know it, a poem talks back.
This time, I was teasing James about something, and I happened to say that maybe he was off in a closet somewhere, writing an article about sestinas. Never one to miss an opportunity, he wrote me a sonnet I am fondly calling the “Closet Cheetos Poem.”
As a side note, it must be revealed: all this fond Cheetos fodder began with Duane Scott.
Anyway.
I asked James if I could feature his sonnet at Every Day Poems, and he consented. Upon its delivery this morning, Claire Burge wrote to tell me she thought it was quite amusing. I’m glad, because that’s exactly what I thought. 
Read Good Neighbors, and maybe you’ll find a smile too.
Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In August we’re exploring sonnets.
Aug 092011
I’m not sure how he found me. But I ended up publishing his poem “Macular Degeneration” in Every Day Poems. I’m glad I did.
The poem wasn’t complicated, but it was very human. And this is part of how I choose poems to publish. Of course I love technical facility, but I do not publish poems that trot it out and forget the human touch.
Two of our Every Day subscribers wrote to me about the poem. Something about it reached into them, touched their humanity. One person shared her difficult memory-dreams with me as a result. The other said the poem was already printed and carefully saved; she wondered how old the poet was.
Kilian is eighty years old. He would be touched, I think, to know that his brief words held such human power for two special readers.
The poem ends…
Yesterday I was indestructible
eighteen, the sea
was deep; today
decaying in the shallows.
It doesn’t get much more human than that.
Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In August we’ll be exploring sonnets.
Jul 252011
I love these little notes I get behind the scenes, about Every Day Poems. It is like a fine, sweet secret that makes me smile.
Sometimes people want to tell me about how a poem made them laugh, or gave them strength, or surprised them. I delight to read these correspondences. Maybe it’s that people have taken the extra effort to write, when they could just have well moved into their day with a poem in their pocket— end of story.
Today, I got a wonderful chuckle when I opened an email that must have been sent yesterday— an off day for the Every Day. (We don’t deliver on weekends. It gives people a chance to catch up on their poems from the week. And it’s just… nice to have two days off.)
Anyway, this note was from NanceMarie. She subscribed on Friday, after our day’s delivery, and by Sunday she’d sent this…
llb
so, is it really every day?
or just monday thru friday?
still waiting…kinda patiently…well, not really at all patiently.
nr
There is something about Nance’s way with words that always makes me smile, even laugh out loud. So I asked her, “Can I run these words at Tweetspeak?” And she kindly said…
what ever you want. you have my (as camel would say) “permish.”
got my first everyday today yea!
Now that is the kind of poetry-love that makes me want to keep doing the Every Day. It’s a yea that makes my day.
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Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In July we’re exploring sestinas.
Jul 152011
One of the things I love about doing Every Day Poems is the way it brings various parts of my life together.
This morning, Claire Burge wrote to thank me for running her photo with today’s poem, and I wrote back, “Thank YOU for letting me use it.”
Claire is our photo editor for The High Calling, but she was first a friend. And now I feel like we are creative collaborators, simply by virtue of her willingness to let me say, “I’ve got this poem. I wonder, have you got a photo?”
Since Claire is originally from South Africa, and I had a poem set there, of course I had to ask, “Claire, do you happen to…” She did. I had a hard time choosing from the selections she sent. Somehow this one seemed perfect for a poem called “The Looking.” Don’t you think?
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Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In July we’ll be exploring sestinas.
Jul 142011
This morning, Megan Willome wrote to me about today’s Every Day Poems selection.
“An ode to fly fishing, perhaps?” she asked, and finished by saying she knew there was more to the poem but these were the lines that drew her.
I have been thinking about this all morning. I began by writing back to Megan, to say that somehow I had focused on the fishing when I first read the poem, but today, receiving it in my inbox, I had seen the sleep instead. I also said that I was compelled by “the thought that maybe it was Mare who was fishing, or the poet herself.”
This did not come on the first reading, or the second, or the third… and so on. I think I must have read the poem ten times before saying this to Megan.
Now, writing this, I am struck by the word “lines” in the poem and in fact am more convinced than ever that the piece is about poets as much as it is about Mare’s lover.
Or maybe the poem is about the reader. After all, who does the poet catch with her line, but you and me, while we are unsuspecting? And who does the poet draw, but us, sleeping? When we finally wake, we become the trout, caught and compelled.
Megan wrote back to me and said, “A good poem does that—offers multiple gifts upon multiple readings.” Yes.
Poem by Anne M. Doe Overstreet. From her new collection, Delicate Machinery Suspended.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems? Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In July we’re exploring sestinas. Upcoming months’ themes include resolutions, the color red, and roses. But in August we’re exploring sonnets!
Jun 272011
The first time I wrote a sestina, it was a matter of pride. I was a poet, but I didn’t particularly like writing in form.
One day my twelve-year-old daughter sneaked my Norton Anthology, The Making of a Poem. Within a few days, she had experimented with writing sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, and… sestinas. Of course I was proud. But not just about her poem. I admit, I felt challenged. Was I going to let my twelve-year-old write sestinas without trying them myself?
I figured if I was going to try the form out, I might as well start in Pittsburgh. The city certainly offered a lot of sights on a Saturday morning. It seemed perfect for the rolling form of this 39-line poem (6 stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by a wrap-up 3-line stanza; the end words of the first stanza repeat throughout the entire poem, according to a set pattern).
The sestina, like a song, helps us say what we want to say without really saying it; because it’s almost impossible to tell a story in a sestina, we tell our deep impressions and emotions instead. These emotions build and build through the repetitions of the end words, and we’re left holding something that feels like it might not be words at all, but perhaps just the whispering wind or a double rainbow.
Starting in July, at Every Day Poems, we’ll be exploring sestinas. And we’re really excited about some of the upcoming featured poets, including David Lehman of The Best American Poetry and James Cummins, Curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection. We also hope that you’ll try a sestina on for size. Even if you do it just as a matter of pride.
Here’s the basic pattern. The first 6 stanzas are each 6 lines. End words repeat according to the letter order below:
1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. last stanza, 3 lines (first repetition can go around the middle of the line, last at the end):
B-E
D-C
F-A
Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.
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Further Resources, for Teachers or Writer’s Groups:
Poetic Form: Sestina
Writing a Sestina
Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In July we’ll be exploring sestinas.
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