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.

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.

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.

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.

Where would we be without resolutions? Accomplishments would be only accidents, stories incidents just strung along, music mere unending notes, and poetry but a jumble of words. Resolution puts all the pieces together like a completed puzzle.

John Milton’s famous sonnet, “On his blindness,” begins in puzzlement. The speaker (the poem is autobiographical; perhaps we dare say the poet) is pondering the account he will give when he stands before his God for the use he has made of his time and talents. But how unjust! He has suffered the loss of his eyesight—before even half his life is over!—and this God who will hold him to account is the one who wrested away the very tool of his trade—his vision. Understandably, the poet’s mood quickly worsens in the first half of the poem from puzzlement to dismay, even anger…

On His Blindness

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, a form consisting of an octave followed by a sestet; the octave presents the problem, and the sestet offers the resolution. The situation, as we’ve seen, is quite clear. What’s striking, though, is that the problem is presented in only seven (not eight) lines, not quite in accordance with the rules of the form. What happens in the last line of the octave?

The first half of line 8 declares that the poet asks his question “fondly.” In the seventeenth century, “fond” still retained its original meaning of “foolish.” Thus the poet acknowledges that his query is mere foolishness. Then, mid-line, a new sentence begins, offering the response to the poet’s imploration, given by “Patience,” personified. Patience’s answer, provided in the sestet, is essentially this: God doesn’t need your works. The entire world is under his authority, and countless others are accomplishing his business, but you, too, can serve “who only stand and wait.”

What a dramatic resolution! One of the greatest poets who ever lived worries that his poetry is not good enough to justify his life. Not only is he offered the reassurance that sometimes simply waiting—with Patience—is enough, but that reassurance comes “soon.”

If we recall rules of the form and go back to that break that is supposed to occur at the beginning of the sestet, in line 9, we find that the resolution starts, not there, but earlier in line 8. The resolution begins with Patience’s reply—or perhaps even with the speaker’s admission of his own foolishness. The expression of the problem is cut short according to the expectations of the sonnet form when the God of the poet breaks the rules in order to bring about resolution. With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, the picture is finally clear, and the poem resolves into a sense of peaceful assurance.

Post by Karen Swallow Prior.
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Further Resources, for Teachers or Writer’s Groups:

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

In Night of the Republic: Poems, poet Alan Shapiro loads his minds-eye camera with film (or, these days, a disk) and takes a series of detailed, rather stark photographs. His subjects are the common, everyday things we notice only when we need them but generally ignore: a car dealership, a gas station restroom, a park bench, a dry cleaner, a swimming pool, a museum, a doorbell, a funeral home.

Shapiro’s poetic photographs are sharp and clear; we’re not left guessing the subject. But they often lead in an unexpected direction, as common, everyday things can do. Consider “Barbershop,” which becomes a meditation on eternity:

Eternity is the spiral up the poles
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday’s Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting…

These are poems to be read two and three times, and then two or three times more, like photographs that need to be reexamined to see how new angles or shades or colors can change the created whole. In “Stone Church,” for example, the emphasis on the stone construction gives way to what happens inside:

…At night, high
over the tiny
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there’s greater
gravity inside
the grace that’s risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone’s resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it…

These photograph-like poems, or poetic photographs, are filled with quiet wonder. And like fine photographs, their meanings can keep changing. Night of the Republic is a stellar collection of poetry.

Shapiro, who has won several poetry awards, is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also publishing his first novel, Broadway Baby, in January.

‎”If the Super Bowl begs for nachos and dip, the WORD BOWL begs for wine, cheese, and the renegade Cheeto.”

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Resolution. Determination to follow some sort of action. Firmness of purpose or intent. The act of resolving, of transforming by a process, of disintegrating, of progressing from dissonance to consonance. In other words, poetry.

Every semester, I meet aspiring teenage writers in my creative writing class. Young writers who have stories to tell, poems to write, lives to change. And then they turn in their first poem, like a child bringing his mother a bouquet of dandelions. We read it together, evaluating technique, style, and form. Many of these beginning writers have a hard time seeing that their poems aren’t very poetic. They think if it’s intended to be a poem, and it looks like a poem, then it must be a poem. So what’s the problem?

A poem must have resolve, be resolute. A poem must have what one poet-friend calls a through-line, an overarching purpose or direction that provides enough bread crumbs for the reader to work his way through. A poem must be intentional in style, technique, sound, and rhythm. It must be crafted (not blurted), readable (not scan-able). Most importantly, a poem should make both you and me care–about the poem, the situation, our mutability, our journeys intersecting in this moment of the poem. A poem must hold enough mystery to make me reread it, enough imagery to keep me afloat in its own poetic ocean.

After hearing this, my students react one of two ways. There are those who steadfastly write and revise, eventually producing a semblance of a meaningful poem. These students sigh about the challenge the poem presented, and they didn’t think they had it in them. Then there are the dandelion poets, whose eyes gloss over, mumbling through disheartened lips about how they never realized how hard it was to write a poem. They rewrite by changing punctuation and line endings. Sadly, the poem dries up and blows away in the wind.

Maybe it’s not just a poem that must have resolve, but the poet as well. Because the poet holds the power to illuminate and the power to suffocate. As a poem begins to take form, the poet walks a fine line of crafting and allowing the poem to craft itself. It takes determination not to force your way or your answer into a poem; it takes humility to let the poem breathe and bloom. It takes staying power to plant a poem, water it, weed it, mow it, and water it again. Especially in the throes of winter.

I remember applying to an MFA program many years ago, and I was confident that my portfolio would stand out from the crowd, that I would be lauded with accolades, scholarships, and recognition. The form rejection letter crushed me, the dandelion poet. I didn’t write for months, and avoided poetry (reading and writing) for a year. I was too fragile. But the frostbite eventually thawed. I committed to hone my craft, to be a young writer and a wise writer, to create art rather than ego, to learn the art of poetry, the art of life.

And the poems? They’re still resolving.

Post by Joel Jacobson, of A Poetic Matter.

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