The best in poetry, (and poetic things), this week with Matthew Kreider.

1 Art

A book can make the floor drop from under my feet. Or make me want to get cozy on the couch. Joel Robison’s visual abstractions connect with me. His playful photographic work provides a beautiful scale and shape to the unseen and often ethereal relationship between books and their lovers.

This year the daffodils, tulips, and lilacs began blooming early in my neighborhood. But if you’re still waiting for the scent of your favorite flower to inspire you, perhaps a thoughtful bouquet from art history might do the trick. Here’s the ten best flower paintings, according to one critic at The Observer.

2 News

Small bookstores are bracing for yet another hit. That’s because “Google is ending the program which allows independent booksellers to sell Google e-books through their websites.” Executives are dropping Google’s eBookstore for Google Play to create a consolidated iTunes-like entity.

Breaking news? According to Highbrow Magazine, American poetry is galloping into a new golden age. Though the latest scene can be attributed to a rise in MFA programs, poetry is also wildly alive in the urban jungle. One street poet says, “You’d be surprised how many people stop for me to drop a poem. People just like poetry.” What’s your inside scoop on this scandalous claim?

3 Publishing

Just look at the media today. Can anyone blame my family for unhooking the television? Now that we’ve unplugged, it feels apocalyptic whenever we are subjected to a blitzkrieg of commercials at someone else’s home. Emma Gardner writes, “It sometimes feels as if we’re one more Pirates of the Caribbean sequel away from forgetting about Shakespeare entirely.” Andrew Rashbass, chief executive of The Economist Group, offers us an optimistic forecast, however. He believes society is witnessing the rise of the mass intelligent.

Rachelle Gardner is no Luddite. As an award-winning literary agent, she uses crazy stuff like the Internet. Gardner responds to a recent talky Wired article, sharing her wisdom about the industry’s evolving relationship with new media. She says,

“I’m excited about new technologies and expect to spend the rest of my career grappling with them on a daily basis. But in the hype and excitement over technology, sometimes I feel compelled to speak up for the unparalleled pleasure of simply… reading a book.”

4 Business

What’s your social media strategy? Every company has one whether they know it or not, according to Douglas Rushkoff. And it’s time for every poet, painter and computer programmer to read Technology, Art, and Why the Future of Branding Is Nonfiction.

Speaking of social media strategies, I’ve been on Twitter for only a little over a month, even though it’s been around for years. Embracing new tools can be difficult, especially when we’ve grown accustomed to the old ones. If you feel like you’re tweeting in the dark, read how to make Twitter and Socialoomph work for you.

5 Creativity

These days, even art seems to demand a high-speed connection. Dial-up won’t do. PBS Off Book explains how three digital powerhouses — Kickstarter, Creative Commons, and The Creators Project — influence the world of art. The video is only six minutes long, providing you have a good connection.

A poet might feel most at home in words. But for creativity to breathe, you need to find ways to prevent your primary craft from wholly defining who you are. Look for different outlets to express that primordial urge to make something new.

6 Write-It

I was inspired by Fleda Brown’s account of the creation of one of her poems.

“The poet was on stage, a long way from me—it was a big room—and I ended up watching the person doing sign language more than I was watching the poet. The sign language was its own poetry. I started thinking about how the poem must seem to the person signing, and how it must seem to the deaf person. How a poem changes into a different thing with each translation.”

Now I want to listen to sign language, too, hear how it might give voice to a poem.

Speaking of poems, why not give voice to your own Mirror, Mirror poem? I want to see what you see in that silver place.

7 Poems

When my wife and I fell in love, we ate a lot of gourmet jelly beans together via webcam. This is something lovers can do when they live in different countries. Somehow, pairing different flavors together in different ratios provided us with a sweet opportunity to explore and understand the nature of relationships. After reading Jelly Belly Warehouse Tour by Tania Runyan, I marvel once again at the ubiquitous presence of the humble jelly bean.

While a citrus-flavored jelly bean can be lots of fun, let’s not forget what happens when we peel away the skin of a real tangerine. Read “Exposed” by Maureen Doallas.

8 People

Maybe April Fool’s Day isn’t entirely pedestrian. Turns out, several literary greats have practiced the fine art of April Foolery. But they didn’t limit themselves to the first day of the month. Poe, Mencken, and Welles made use of the entire month. We still have a few weeks of April left. Have fun, everyone.

Wendell Berry, one of my favorite literary rock stars, doesn’t own a computer. Jack White, one of my favorite musical rock stars, doesn’t own a cell phone. While both of them are a type of social rebel, read why Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time. I still think if Wendell ever picked up a guitar, he could be a contender.

9 Education

Teens need poetry — and not just because it’s National Poetry Month. Shmoop stands out as a relevant and helpful poetry resource for teens. Imagine using Tim Burton to explain Emily Dickinson.

And what about the wee ones? PBS Kids offers practical advice for introducing children to the world of poetry. “Children will not gravitate to poetry, poetry must be brought to them,” says J. Patrick Lewis.

10 Sound n Motion

Poetry needed to find new recipes following the rise of Twitter. Poet Holly Bass says,

“I kind of make this analogy with cupcakes, so a long form poem would be like a layer cake and a Twitter poem is like a cupcake. So you still need all the same ingredients. You don’t skimp on the ingredients just because your end product is smaller.”

Listen to NPR’s “Muses and Metaphor” and hear how young bakers put together delicious Twitter poems.

Finally, during this National Poetry Month, The Englewood Review is celebrating the sound and voice of poetry. Here’s Langston Hughes reading two poems. They may not be Twitter poems, but they’re still pretty sweet.

Photos by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Matthew Kreider.

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

When I left vocational ministry several years ago, I took a job as a custom framer. The owner of the little downtown art shop was turning over the framing responsibilities to an employee for the first time, and she worried aloud at home about whether or not I would work out. Her daughter, then a first grader, took on her distress.

She often came into the store after school and sat where she could watch me work, always looking away if I caught her eye. Like a good manager’s apprentice, she quizzed her mother daily about my performance, wanting to be certain I measured up to expectations. I wondered if one day I’d return from lunch to receive a pink slip from a seven-year-old with a hand on one hip and a clipboard in the other.

I returned to my early framing days today when I imagined L.L. Barkat and her daughter sitting together in their dining room (sunset yellow) talking about this new editor they’d taken on. In my daydream, they would look at the draft I submitted on Voice and shake their heads. Sara would raise a fork full of rice and spicy lentils to her mouth and say, “I’m sure glad I’m not the Managing Editor. What are you going to do?”

And her mother, forehead landing in the palm of her hand, would sigh and say, “I’m going to have to tell her it doesn’t sound like her.”

I once said something in conversation with L.L. that she gently broke into lines:

I am
nothing,
if not
the creator
of my own
ironies.

I proved it again today.

I spent a week thinking long, and too hard, about Voice, something I almost never do. I twisted myself into a rice-and-spicy-lentil knot, and wrote a piece that looks nothing like what you’re reading. Because what I wrote — about Voice — ironically didn’t sound like me. And the gently courageous Managing Editor dared to give it back to me and ask for the texture of my own voice.

For all my efforts to sound like myself this week, I find her words ringing true. Perhaps cultivating a writer’s voice can be more about nourishing those things that give life to it: passions and a sense of place.

The words of a region, a philosophy, a passion for French or French tea, come with their own sounds and rhythms and fragrances. If we read the Palestinian poet Darwish, for instance, we will find ourselves mouthing, jasmine, cloves, olives, veils. Whereas if we read a poet like Marcus Goodyear, we will find ourselves breathing to the staccato of cactus, cattle, tree poker. . . . Our voice will be better developed if we spend time with our passions. Learn the difference between a tangerine and a tangelo. Consider the variation in their blooms, and the place where their nectar beads. (p. 56)

I drove into the hills rolling to the west of my little town today for a visit I have each week with the Benedictine monks. I came back to banter with the Managing Editor about voice and baseball and the brothers and before long I started to remember how it is, most days, I sound.

The Brothers wore
home jerseys, resurrected
for a new Eastertide.
The priest behind the plate
hiked up gold vestments
and signaled
in trinitarian fashion
for a changeup.
The organist shook
off the sign and said
there is nothing new
under the liturgical sun,
delivering a breaking
ball at the knees.

_____________

We’re discussing chapters 9-13 of L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water today, considering a writer’s voice. What has helped you cultivate your voice? How has this been a challenge for you? How does nourishing your passions help you get a sense of your own voice?

Perhaps we can have fun with our spoken voice today. Did you hear Maureen Doallas read her candy poem last week? L.L. Barkat had her own 20 seconds of fame on NPR yesterday with her short piece for National Poetry Month. Maybe you would record a short piece or poem you’ve written. (You can record at SoundCloud or Vocaroo and share with us by dropping the link in the comments.)

My fame comes in the realm of chimpanzees, beans and monks playing baseball. Here’s my offering from the Brother’s Poem above, in my own voice.

And of course, if you’ve posted on the book this week, please be sure to drop your link in the comments for us as well. Join us again next Wednesday for chapters 14-20 on Habits and Structure.

Photo by Quasic. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Lyla Lindquist of A Different Story.

Still need the book? Check out our half-price sale and order today.

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

After a brief hiatus, we’re resuming with the poems from TweetSpeak’s recent Twitter poetry party – that had 29 people participating and one lurker. The prompts were taken from Caduceus: Poems by Sorina Higgins. The poet herself (@IambicAdmonit) was at the party.

And here are the next seven poems.

Tell Me More

By @lwlindquist, @memoriaarts, @VinaMist, @llbarkat, @EscapeIntoLife, @SimplyDarWrites, @renokingstweet, @PatriciaSpreng, @annkroeker, @IambicAdmonit, @chrisyokel, @RadBeliever, @jejpoet, @DianaBridge, @Doallas, @SandraHeskaKing, @matthewkreider, @dorphlthewise, @sethhaines, @mjpaulusjr, @leximagines, @LoveLifeLitGod, @ArelyStdenis, @shortcake0369, @kconwayireton, @lauralynn_brown, @secarey, @mmerubies, and @monicasharman. Lurking by @monicabrand. Edited by @gyoung9751.

A Grecian page

Is that us upon
a Grecian page?
Wise men retell tales
of nights long upon
a Grecian page.
I lick the page with fury
and fang. I bite the page
with all the darkness.
I spill it out, gashed
across the page,
repeated and repeated
and repeated, like
a perpetual beginning.

Warm to whispers

Lilac lips warm to whispers
like mist on morning blossoms,
shouting to be heard over
the din of bursting blooms.
Mist sugar coats my tongue
with memories of your bloom,
a virgin arch of bending pink,
hugging foot-long blossoms
and mirrored beginnings.
The mirrors line up an infinite march.
Vases, repeated. Faces, repeated.

Spun sugar

Hades has not reached his zenith
and the sugar spun blossoms
continue to live and melt our mouths
with sugar, each other. Oh how warm
your story makes me:
I am a stir stick, a sip, a sugar packet.
Every page, every again, every sugar
moment, I keep turning back to you.

Our ears turned deaf

No one can hear the rest; our ears turned
deaf and our hearts to frigid stone beneath
our chests. Dream the tips, spring the wheels,
open the curlers. I am here, a cycle, a story,
a line on the land.
Don’t let your heart fall heavy:
granite, rock, marble, stone. Pick it up.
Give it a throw. Break it over real things,
needful things.

She called my name

She called my name over the ages
and the stories told but never heard
the metaphor of my existence,
this uncurling bud of once-again.
Everyone loves with a different hand:
some with feathers, others with stone.

Madrona trees

Vancouver saw madrona trees
and mistook them for magnolias.
Every year, the same.
Every opening, once-upon-a-time.
Again.

Feathers

you drew your finger in sand,
cracking rock hard truths
with pink feather touches
upon quartz. Leap on the stage,
gather the flowers, shred
all the feathers to paper-thin blades.
Little pink feathers laying one
upon another make me smile.

Photograph by Joel Olives. Creative commons, via Flickr. 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 April we’re exploring the theme Candy.

My first attempts to write poetry ended the same—with me propped up in an iron bed at the old family farmhouse as I counted thirty-four college-ruled lines on a recycled blank page. Unaided by the chewed-to-bits pen in my hand, I felt utter defeat. An invisible rival conquered me for weeks, each time I tried to unravel the paradox of writing a poem.

Armed with a finance degree, I tackled poetry like an equation to be solved. I wrote a checklist of skills I thought necessary to create a verse and compared them to my own abilities. On paper, I listed familiar poetic devices such as simile and metaphor, imagery and symbols, meter and rhyme. My artistic repertoire lacked nothing, and yet, I sat on a notebook-strewn bed at the mercy of an empty page.

A breakthrough occurred at an unlikely place, a desk in my father’s office as I paid stacks of bills. I calculated an incantation of numbers and fell into a trance-like state where I daydreamed a poem about a paperweight with wings. Not a prizewinner (or even publishable) but one I liked. It began: “Fly, fly paperweight / off the desk and away / from the calculator and numbers.”

The words resonated with me because I understood that I was the weight with wings—bogged down by a lifelong fear of change and the dark (I still sleep with a light on!). I had the ability to escape an office job I hated, but I wouldn’t. The metaphor’s wings proved useless in my real life, and the poem ended with a “thump.” Paperweight and poet plunged into darkness—the place I have always feared.

Once there, I found a person much darker and sadder than I ever knew. But I also discovered that exploration plus self-examination equals a silhouette of truth. So I’ve returned to the inner regions to fill notebooks with words, in my struggle to solve—through poetry—the unworkable puzzle of being alive…

Waiting on a bed with etched flowers,
I smell lavender sleep on your pillowcase.
And uncover a reason to dream.

Photo by Steve H. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Zachary Saloom.

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

I’m not normal. I’ve never developed a sweet tooth I couldn’t satisfy with something savory. I’m not one of the 52 percent of adult Americans who like chocolate best, and though I’m way over 18, I cannot admit to consuming 25 pounds of candy every year. I’ve been known to break open a bag of Candy Corn at Halloween, pop some Jelly Beans at Easter, but never touch Fairy Floss, better known as Cotton Candy. Still, I can appreciate why the Aztec considered chocolate an aphrodisiac. Just think of the sacrifices they made after experiencing that first rush of love!

Our National Chocolate Day has come and gone but it’s never too late to candy a few words in honor of National Poetry Month. Maybe the best thing about my contribution to the genre known as candy bar poems is this: it’s nonfat, guaranteed to be calorie-free.

Hershey’s Got No Baby Ruth

Hershey went looking
for his Peppermint Patty,
convinced only she could be
his LifeSaver. No Dum Dum,
he was ready, willing, and able
to go all the way to Mars and back
to bring home a little Bit-o-Honey.

He’d show her Good and Plenty,
climb the highest Almond Mounds,
gladly strip off a 100 Grand
to run a hand through her
Cotton Candy hair. He’d waited so
long, too long, to be her Atomic Fire Ball.

Patty’s tastes, alas, ran more
to 3 Musketeers and Lemonheads.
She loved them for their Whoppers,
the way their Chunky Singles’ bodies
would sway to the Charleston Chew nightly
at the Heath Bar. How they’d get down
and dirty doing Rolo’s famous Tootsie Roll!

But a Sugar Daddy Hershey refused
to be. He’d long ago tired of tending Peeps
After Eight, settling his Sweetarts’ Skittles,
giving his time to Smarties whose Snickers
behind his hard if hairy back left him a cold
and not so Jolly Rancher. To hit PayDay,
he’d have to dispense with these Hot Tamales.
Besides, it was true, what his mother
always said: You won’t find
your Mary Jane hanging with Mr. Goodbar!

So, no more Hot Lix at his side, Hershey
Jelly-Bellied up to the Symphony Bar,
ordered double Doves with a side of Twix,
noticed how even Junior Mints could mix
with Ghiradelli, their eyes intense, big
as DOTS, their figures slender as Twizzlers,
not one Sour Punch in the bunch.

No Airheads, no Goobers, no Nerds feeding
Nutrageous appetites. Just a room full
of sweet Almond Joys, cool Ricola singing her aria
to the sounds of Original Herb, and sunny-faced
Kit-Kat eyeing Nestle’s Crunch, his caramel arms
all rippling muscle. The Almond King himself
couldn’t want for more Amazin’ Fruit in one place.

Italian imports? They’re the best, Hershey overheard
her say, her voice dark as licorice. Turning, facing
her, feeling Perugina’s breathy, minty coolness
on his neck, he just knew. He couldn’t miss Starbursts
in her eyes, the way she wrapped herself around
his Butterfinger, covered him with Kisses,
all the while whispering, O Henry! Let’s just Take 5.

Photo by Jose Manuelerre. Creative Commons, via Flickr. 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 April we’re exploring the theme Candy.

The best in poetry (and poetic things), this week with Kimberlee Conway Ireton.

1 Art

Okay, so after looking at this collection of 15 writers’ bedrooms, I officially want to live in Emily Dickinson’s. I also wouldn’t mind spending a few nights (or more!) in Truman Capote’s simple red-and-white room or Virginia Woolf’s elegant apartment or even Henry David Thoreau’s rustic cabin on Walden Pond. But much as I love Flannery O’Connor, you couldn’t pay me money to sleep her god-awful green and gold boudoir.

Words can be an art form, of course, but what about last words? Touching and funny by turns, these famous (and not so famous) last words are well worth reading.

2 News

Poet Adrienne Rich died last week at the age of 82. Her lifelong vision was “the creation of a society without domination.” The New York Times offers two looks at Adrienne Rich’s life and her work.

Once the news broke, the Twittersphere lit up with Adrienne Rich posts, much to the astonishment of one poetry professor. All those tweets inspired the Tweetspeak staff to make a video tribute to Adrienne Rich, which you definitely want to watch. Trust me.

3 Publishing

Jane Friedman is one smart cookie. And generous, too. Friedman dishes on all things publishing. (And may I suggest following the rabbit trail of links inside that post, too?)

4 Reviews

In 2009, poet Craig Arnold disappeared while blogging and hiking his way through Japan, leaving behind bewildered and devastated fans, friends, family, and his partner of six years, Rebecca Lindenberg. Elissa Schappell reviews Lindenberg’s tribute to Arnold: Love: An Index is “an A-to-Z collection of poems that are passionate, plainspoken, elegiac, and lyric as they capture the moments of a life shared.” The excerpt Schappell includes is beautiful.

Caitlin Mackenzie writes a thoughtful and glowing review of Becca J.R. Lachman’s first book of poetry: “This is what the reader discovers in The Apple Speaks: the sore muscles of one thoughtfully and intentionally tending new soil.”

5 Creativity

If you want to be creative, apparently there are creativity rules. Just a few. And not all of them are intuitive.

A.G. Harmon waxes eloquent about the role of the artist in the creation of art:

At least from the religious artist’s perspective, is the agent/artist not himself an extension—albeit the most important and complex extension—of the process?

To mix in yet another metaphor: the violin may rest on the artist’s shoulder, but on whose shoulder does the artist rest? Who plays him?

John Estes makes a similar claim when he speaks of Annunciation and angels and icons:

One particular icon of St. John shows him …doing his writer/Theologian bit while a tiny angel perches on his shoulder….[perhaps] another instance of an angel asking the question: Will you receive this thing? An invitation, nothing more, to what might happen.

And speaking of invitations…

6 Write-It

You all know it’s National Poetry Month, of course, but did you also know it’s National Poetry Writing Month? That’s right. NaPoWriMo is a real thing. And every day this month, they’ve got a poetry prompt. The day three prompt (that would have been Tuesday’s) was to write an epithalamium. (You remember word from my last post, right?)

If you’re feeling ambitious, you might try your hand at writing a one-act verse play.

7 Poems

Spring has sprung. And Robert Frost reminds us that it won’t last long. So stay present.

The writing of poetry is, among other things, an attempt to stay present, to pay attention to the moment at hand. Dave Malone’s “White” captures one such moment:

White

The night you wore your white blouse
into the barn where cloggers yanked up dust
to their knees, all the corn farmers pulled at pressed shirts
behind bib overalls to breathe, overcome by a similar
feeling they knew in their muscled backs
when pressed against church pews
their grandaddies made before the only real War.

Read the rest of “White.”

8 People

John Wooden, UCLA’s famed basketball coach, was also a lover of poetry—as in, he read it, he quoted it to his players, and he wrote it, too. At the end of the month of Madness, Catherine Woodard wrote a beautiful tribute to John Wooden as both coach and poet. If you watch the videos, make sure you have Kleenex handy.

C.S. Lewis received thousands of letters from children around the English-speaking world, and he wrote every last one of those children a personal letter in response. (And I have trouble replying to Tweets and status updates?)

9 Education

This poetry smackdown held me riveted. If you read it, I encourage you to take the time to study the poems and think about which one is better and why. I’d love to hear if you came out on the side of poetry or pop. For my part, I’m not telling which side I fell on.

And just for fun, try some onomatopoeia—in French! Or German! Or Arabic! It’ll educate your ears. And how a word sounds is as important as what it means. Well, if you’re a poet, it is.

10 Sound n Motion

I’ve never been to New York City. Don’t kill me, but I’ve never actually wanted to go there. In fact, I’ve pretty stridently not wanted to. But now there’s a cool new audio-poetry-history-walking tour of the East Village that sounds so completely and utterly, well, cool, that it’s making me rethink my I’d-rather-have-another-periodontal-surgery-than-go-to-New-York opinion. Now, perhaps, I’d just rather get a filling.

Honestly, the only way I’ll probably ever get to New York City is if I have to fly through it on my way to England. Last week, Matthew highlighted some of the world’s coolest bookstores. One of those, Barter Books in the north of England, lives in an old Victorian railway station. If that’s not swoony enough, it’s also home to an iconic (and long lost) World War II propaganda poster. Now, where’s my plane ticket?

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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

At the beginning of March, the beautiful Laura Boggess made an offer. Post a Mug Shot for Tweetspeak, and she’d give the top entrant a custom mug (custom poem to be written by yours truly, L.L.).

The competition became… fierce. Okay, fiercely amusing—with one mug actually going on a road trip, where it modeled with a bear, a bird, and a beer man. (See the dedicated montage below, honoring Sandra Heska King’s road-trippin’ mug.)

As it turned out, the judging process also became fierce. I thought it sounded simple enough. I wanted the process to be fair (which meant I couldn’t be a judge, since I know the participants), so I gave my girls the parameters:

1. each girl: pick your top 3 choices, with attention to creativity, beauty, and presence (the original charge was to capture one’s reflection in the mug, or to overshadow it somehow)

2. put the six finalists into a hat (well, not the finalists, but their representative slips of paper)

3. pull out the winner

Glitch number one: “I can’t choose three!”

Mom fix: “Well, all right, choose your top four.”

Glitch number two: “Not fair! One of hers is more likely to win because she put in more choices!” [darn, why did I teach them about probability?]

Mom fix: “Put yours in the hat and choose. Then she can put hers in the hat and choose. Then we’ll put the final two in the hat and choose.” [Phew! Negotiating this process requires a degree in diplomacy.]

Glitch number three: “I feel sad. I want them all to win.”

Mom semi-fix: “There can only be one Top Entrant. That’s the rules. Okay, but we can have six Runners Up.”

And so it is.

Reno K. Lawrence was chosen as the Top Entrant, for which he will receive this custom poem on a Tweetspeak mug…

Word Man

He collects the eclectic—
lavender hey-dilly,
scent of dew kisses,
a soft lowing, a ringing,
from morning’s blue, blue bells.

(Bluebonnets photo by Reno)

The six Runners Up will receive their choice of a new Every Day Poems subscription for themselves or a friend, or a 1/2 price coupon of their choice, for themselves or a friend.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our project!

All Project Participants

Reno K Lawrence, Top Entrant
Darlene, runner up
Genevieve Thul
Karin Fendick
Kimberlee Conway Ireton, runner up
Jennifer Lee
Sandra Heska King, runner up
Monica Sharman
Susan Etole
Tania Runyan, runner up
Matthew Kreider, runner up
Emily Wierenga, runner up

Sandra’s Road Trippin’ Mug

Visit our store now and find a great gift for Mother’s Day (or any old day), under $15.

Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Our poetic prompt for March was angels – and six of us submitted poems.

Monica Sharman discovers two angels – perhaps? – while running up the Centennial Trail. Sherri Southern theorizes that men might have come from fallen angels – and we’ve forgotten that once “we had wings upon our back.”

Megan Willome is adopted by two angels that seem to bark (Terrier angels / with a splash of dachshund and a spit of Jack Russell), and eat everyone’s broccoli.

Jody Ohlsen Collins and I both found inspiration in Gabriel the Archangel (mentioned three times in the Bible – if you know the three places you can note it in the comments) (and no cheating by looking it up in a concordance or Bible dictionary). I have him singing, while Jody has him playing an oboe.

I love the images of Gabriel in Jody’s poem: messenger, light bringer, holding one’s face to the sun. And I love the images of “brick-walled lies” and “stone-cold pain.”

The reference to “Mirricone” in the poem is to Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer and conductor who has written the scores for more than 20 award-winning films and spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He’s also composed classical works, including ones for the oboe.

Listen to Gabriel’s music.

If Gabriel had an oboe

If Gabriel had an oboe,
as Morricone thought he might,
he’d summon me low and soft
as he did,
wooing me with ways and words
piercing my heart as he did.
Angel–messenger
bearing, declaring,
the words in my hearing
to heal the piercing, release the flood
held back by brick-walled lies and
stone-cold pain.
Angel–light bringer
he’d hold my face
towards the sun,
as he did
and speak loudly over me
‘freedom!’
making me
this time
the Messenger.

All participants in the March poetry prompt:

Monica Sharman: While Running Up Centennial Trial

Megan Willome: Angel, Fourth Class

Jody Ohlsen Collins: If Gabriel Had an Oboe

Glynn Young: Gabriel’s Song

Sherri Southern: We’re the Fallen Angels

Ann Wachter: Spirit Guide

Photograph by Justyna. Creative Commons, via Flickr. 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 April we’re exploring the theme Candy.

This weekend, I shared a TED Talk retweet that caused Matthew Kreider to quip, “Tweets worth spreading, huh?”

Anyone who remembers the advent of our Twitter poetry parties, indeed the whole of Tweetspeak’s existence, knows that jokes are where ideas are born. Matthew’s quip made perfect sense to me. Especially if we paired it with TED Talks, with a fun nod to their name.

Suddenly, EDT—Everyday Tweets: Tweets worth spreading—was born.

Our first Everyday Tweets is a tribute to poet Adrienne Rich. With thanks to Brooke Campbell, for the use of her music. To my daughters, for their Powerpoint and iMovie help. And to the people on Twitter, who didn’t tweet for fame, but have now—in small measure—attracted it…

@SGardinier, @dregyst, @_Midtowngirl, @Lizzie_Shines, @bcook1132, @allisondipity, @emilymeier1, @saralueth, @upthestaircase, @izhie_kifauziah, @CoraHenderson, @Zeepix, @cretzlaff, @katewarren, @citylightsnc, @JessiProbus, @MarkHarrisNYC, @MarthaPlimpton, @lawrenceschimel, @randomhouse, @PoetryFound, @poetshouse, @BestAmPo, @lemead, @nprbooks, @CristDomingo, @denizkuypers, @poetrySantaCruz

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 April we’re exploring the theme Candy.

Get me at a cocktail party. Get me talking about writing poetry. Get me talking about what made the difference.

Just a phone call.

In the spring of 1992—now, twenty years ago.

“What are you doin’, Malone?” in North Dakota vowels from the old Scandinavians, the voice of my undergrad mentor, Dex Westrum.

“Oh,” I said, then answered. I trailed the long phone line out to the sprawling porch of an old Victorian in seedy, downtown Albuquerque.

“That’s bull shit. You need to get your ass out of there. You’re going to apply to Indiana State for graduate school. There’s a poet, Matt Brennan, you need to study with.”

Spring had already lifted the snowcaps from the Sandias.

“Dex, it’s already April.”

“Malone,” he started. It wasn’t long before I dragged the phone cord back through the screen door, past the paws of my roommate’s cat and the stench of beer and enchiladas in the kitchen, and into its cradle.

With his PhD education, couldn’t Dex intuit my grand, poetic life? I was metropolitan. I lived with two girls. I drank jugs of wine with my buddy James, listened to Tom Waits, and wrote necessary, dark, nihilistic, existential poems. And I had proof. A smattering of them had been published in several not-so-terribly-awful literary mags.

In the cockroach-infested Victorian, beneath the giant transplanted oaks that shaded our lawn, and below those mountains and inside that city of light, I couldn’t shake Dex’s words.

In July, I sold my reliable, white Toyota Tercel, packed up an ugly yellow Ryder truck with a bike for transport at school, and I drove two days to Terre Haute, Indiana.

The last week of August, a fellow grad student held a party for the burgeoning new class of TAs, nearly thirty of us, representing the halcyon days of English graduate study at ISU. The classy brunette gal from the Upper Peninsula Michigan snapped a photo of me. I wear what I did in Albuquerque: white T-shirt, blue jeans, and big black boots. Instead of red wine, I hold a glass of white. From behind my looming 50′s style eyeglasses, I stare off-camera. A slight smile.

The young man can’t know what I know. That he toasts a crossroads. And cheers a wake.

Photo of Dex Westrum, 1988. Post by Dave Malone, author of Under the Sycamore.

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

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we’ve got a special offer starting today, through April only:

Get a secret coupon for 50% off any TS Poetry Press title of your choice (unlimited copies—great for bookclubs or gifts!).

There are 2 cool ways to get the secret half-price coupon:

1. Buy a year of Every Day Poems for yourself, a friend, or a student. Just $2.99.

OR

2. Become a TSPoetry Store Affiliate, by adding our widget to your site. You can even earn referral fees, if you set up an Affiliate account by emailing affiliatesales@cafepress.com, though it’s fine with us if you just display the widget.

To become an Affiliate:

• email affiliatesales@cafepress.com to set up a financial account, if you want to earn referral fees
• go to the widget-creation page, click “I have a website and want a fun widget”
• a green box will pop up; choose to feature “by store”
• a white box will pop up; type in our name tspoetry
• pick a widget size and colors
• click “Create Code” (be sure to click it, even if you already see code in box, so it will capture your color and size choices)

After you either buy a year of Every Day Poems or become a TS Store Affiliate, email us at halfprice@tspoetry.com. Include:

1. the name of the person for whom you bought Every Day Poems

OR

the link to the site where you added the TS Store widget

2. Tell us your book choice. We’ll send you a reusable 50% off coupon for unlimited copies of the book of your choice, good until April 30th.

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 April we’ll exploring the theme Candy.

In a book my son likes, The Holy Monks of Mt. Athos, each page depicts a different facet of the Athonite life. “High above the deep blue sea / upon a mountaintop in Greece…” it begins, and from there, in lovely impressionistic images, it ranges from food-gathering to craftwork to other liturgies of work and prayer.

His favorite is the scene at table, with Rublev’s angels of the Trinity overlooking the Trapeza, where the abbot oversees a feast of fish and daily bread (but no ouzo, alas). But the book has a flaw. It’s on the page of “Still other Holy Monks / draw and paint the Holy Icons.” Maybe you see the problem: icons, of course, are not drawn. They are not painted. An icon is written.

Yeah, I know: it’s a kid’s book, but it’s a surprising error for a book that credits a theological advisor, especially considering the centrality of the iconographic tradition to the monks’ Orthodox faith. A monk will insist an icon is not art, at least not in any conventional sense. To say that an icon is written is to say the icon writer seeks fidelity to a received image, to the icon’s prototype, to the saint whose image is revealed and present. The icon writer listens, which is why one fasts and prays, and does not draw and paint, when making an icon.

The Annunciation, the visitation of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary celebrated on March 25th, is often misremembered in the popular imagination. The scene is not, in fact, an announcement. There are no trumpets, no commands, no decrees. The angel’s mission is not a typical angelic mission: to rescue, to do mischief, or to deliver a message. It is, simply, to ask a question: Will you receive this thing? The angel’s intentions are unknown, yet this young girl must respond, to intuit best how to answer the one, maybe the only, true question: Will you receive this thing?

One particular icon of St. John shows him ostensibly at work doing his writer/Theologian bit while a tiny angel perches on his shoulder. Now the ancients did not have a naive sense of inspiration, did not believe, as some do today, that to believe a text is inspired is to believe it’s dictated. So I don’t at all read the scene as an angel whispering into St. John’s ear the secrets of heaven and earth. Old Testament Angels of the Lord were as likely to be interpreted as the unincarnated word as independent entities. So here might be another instance of an angel asking the question: Will you receive this thing? An invitation, nothing more, to what might happen. She said yes.

Every angel terrifies, Rilke reminds us, and one is poorly served to imagine angels as Hallmark does, without their swords. They are neither friendly nor safe. Jewish tradition holds that Gabriel led the slaughter of Sennacherib’s army (Herodotus claims field mice were to blame. Take your pick.). Death itself is figured as an angel, and the Angel of Death, according to sacred texts, has 903 options when it comes to offing us. Only a lucky few escape this life by divine kiss.

Rilke also famously said, upon quitting therapy, that he did not want to chase away his demons lest his angels flee him too. The writer cannot be afraid of visitations, must be free to test, to hang out with, to take for a spin, to get to know, the stranger. Because they show up unannounced, the work is to ready yourself for what you are most definitely unprepared to handle. The writer’s practice consists, in part, in this: maintaining a space that permits assent to what arrives.

Post by John Estes, author of Kingdom Come.

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

The best in poetry, (and poetic things), this week with Matthew Kreider.

1 Art

When I was a boy, I often accompanied my grandfather on visits to his favorite used bookstore. The store was a mess. The floors creaked. The air had a musty, cluttered smell. I loved every bookish bit of it. Over the years, I’ve returned to that store many times in my imagination. But after walking through this gallery of the 20 coolest bookstores in the world, I think it’s time to book some airline tickets.

As much as I’d like to tour the bookstores of the world, it’s not exactly practical right now. I have two small children. But something like a new bookshelf? That’s something I can justify. So I found myself strolling through bookshelf heaven. Some shelves are pure art.

2 News

President Obama commands thousands of followers on Pinterest. All it took was a few recent pins and his numbers began to soar. Social media sites provide a relatively safe space to graze with the herd. But Obama’s presence on Pinterest highlights the different plans people have for using their media space in 2012. At this time officials with T.S. Poetry Press are not at liberty to comment on the President’s potential appearance at a future Tweetspeak Twitter party.

Once again, New York City subway commuters can feast their eyes on poetry. That’s because the Poetry in Motion initiative is back in service this week after a four-year break. Organizers of the program plan to post new poems every three months.

3 Publishing

Are you currently writing or planning to write a book? Is it smart to target as broad an audience as possible? No. Jane Friedman advises to clearly visualize your prospective reader(s).

So, your grandmother thinks Kindle is a travesty? It’s okay. This technology is fundamentally altering the daily diets of a whole new generation of writers. How do you explain to your grandmother that Kindle is changing the structure of plots? Could poetry be the next victim or beneficiary?

4 Business

I’ve never played Farmville. Nor Mafia Wars. I was shocked when I read The 4 Secrets of the Social Gaming Model. People spend thousands of dollars every month playing with this stuff. Zynga has certainly created something powerful. Writers and publishers might do well to meditate on this interesting model.

How much are you worth in cyberspace? Andrew Sullivan spills the beans about Your Digital Self Worth. “User profiles — slices of our digital selves — are sold in large chunks, i.e. at least 10,000 in a batch. On the high end, they go for $0.005 per profile, according to advertising-industry sources.”  But now consider your worth from an advertising perspective.

5 Creativity

If furniture could talk, I’d sit in an Eames lounge chair, heels resting on the soft leather ottoman. Wearing an impeccably tailored Don Draper suit, I’d chit-chat with Charles and Ray Eames, listening to them articulate the luscious and understated curves which sparked an organic, mid-century revolution in form and function. Shake and pour a dry martini and listen to Charles Eames discuss his thoughts on good design.

Some days just aren’t creative days for me. Sometimes my brain feels like a half-empty carton of eggs. Six self-contained thoughts just sit there, without doing a thing. Leonardo Da Vinci might be the inspiration I need to help me make a good, healthy mess. According to an article at Psychology Today, “Leonardo da Vinci was the first creative thinker who talked and wrote about the importance of introducing random and chance events to produce variation in his thinking patterns.” Michael Michalko offers techniques to exercise your creativity. Just see what your eggs can do.

6 Write-It

It’s time to leave your house and enter your tool shed. Writing is a hard craft, and we need regular practice at measuring and cutting the wood. We need to get familiar with the different grains and smells. Draft is a feature at The New York Times that helps writers practice good craftsmanship. Be prepared to study both the shape of a sentence and the form a tweet. You’ll find endless Saturdays of enjoyment here.

In the afternoons, Hemingway visited the Musée du Luxembourg and fed on sandwiches and Cézanne. Writing is just as visual as painting. Here’s a lunch menu for you to try. Explore a writing prompt inspired by Hemingway’s Brush Strokes.

7 Poems

I thought it was cool when the U.S. Mint began featuring the states on its quarters. But when I found this mix of poet laureates from across the country, I knew I found something much more valuable. State Poets Laureate offers a collection of place poems. “Our process involved a shared document, a short time line, and magic within and between the lines.” Here’s a piece from my state. Can you guess it?

Though a blizzard of December rain drowns
veterans’ late homecomings, assembly lines of aunts
still pinch the half-moon rims of pierogies,
wrap tamales by the hundred in corn-shuck jackets,
or ladle cheesy macaroni into waiting pans.

I remember exactly where I was sitting when I first stumbled across the writing of Lyla Lindquist. Her clear-eyed insights and her focused voice had me hooked immediately. If this is your first introduction, please take note of your present location and read Lindquist’s “The Adjustor Explains Her Delinquency”.

8 People

Alice Walker is a wise poet who knows about change. “All the changes in life draw poetry from us, those of us who are in touch with it. It’s direct even sometimes when you have to turn it upside down to understand it. There’s still something embedded in it that directness [that leads] to the heart. Especially in times of revolution and times of great upheaval and change.” Read this interview with Alice Walker. You’ll find yourself focused on the heart of the matter.

Politicians and poets make strange bedfellows. One writer and English professor writes, “In utopia, we won’t occupy Wall Street, we are Wall Street.” When I find yummy nuggets like that, I’m convinced politicians and poets should hang out more often. Rub shoulders and butt heads in this interview with Charles Bernstein.

9 Education

Beauty is a fine teacher. Allison Backous gives an honest reflection on her experience in teaching writing workshops at a community college. She concludes that beauty is evangelistic. “What I tried to do was look for beauty with the people who needed it most,” she writes.

Institutionalized education and poetry often find themselves embroiled in conflicts. A Cambridge University student was suspended for seven terms recently after using poetry, not profanity, during a protest against an education minister. The PhD student’s poem included these lines: “You are a man who believes in the market and in the power of competition to drive up quality. But look to the world around you: your gods have failed.” Other protestors caught on and began chanting lines from the poem.

10 Sound n Motion

Artists will do anything to gain perspective. Musician Andrew Bird chose to hunker down with a mission in western Illinois. “Let’s see what happens when I stop listening to records, move out in the middle of nowhere, and have the space to experiment.” Hear a fresh perspective take shape on Andrew Bird’s new album, Break It Yourself.

Finally, here’s a dose of unusual perspective for all of us: Billy Collins does a poetry TED Talk.

Photos by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Matthew Kreider.

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

A few years ago, I was asked to train a mixed group of a dozen or so new staff in an expanding claim office. About half were experienced adjusters hired from other insurance companies. Skilled negotiators and problem solvers, they needed only to learn the company’s IT systems and procedures.

The rest were promotions from within the company’s own “fast track” unit, handling straightforward fender benders. They were masters of procedures and technology, but needed to learn the nuances of coverage, liability and valuing things with no price tags, like arms and legs, time and companionship.

Throughout the week, I felt crushed by the fortress of the Claims Procedural Manual that hemmed in these young upstarts. They succeeded on the conveyor belt of claim handling because they steadfastly followed a scripted code of “if-then.” Within precisely metered scenarios, they knew exactly when to say yes and when to say no. They could rattle off the approved vendors for any city in the nation. The multiplier to depreciate a Toyota’s headlight sat ready at the tip of their tightly lashed tongues.

But they couldn’t stray from the prescription even when following it would prove disastrous. Loosed from their strict robotic tethers, they froze at the one thing a successful adjuster (or a successful anyone, for that matter) must be able to do: the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. As Anne Sexton wrote,

But suicides have a special language
Like carpenters they want to know which tools
They never ask why build.

They’d been squeezed through management’s portal of rigid procedures until the core claims principle — Pay what we owe: not a penny more, not a penny less — was less an undergirding philosophy than an exact dollar amount calculated by simple algebra.

In the final chapters of The Heart Aroused, David Whyte follows Coleridge’s haunting vision of a flock of starlings in our unending quest for order amid chaos.

The starlings drove along like smoke . . . misty . . . without volition — now a circular area inclined in an arc — now a globe, now . . . a complete orb into an ellipse . . . and still it expands and condenses, some moments glimmering and shivering, dim and shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening! (p. 216)

According to Whyte, the flock, “a powerful personality without a solid identity,” might describe the modern corporate workplace, always shifting and changing in the face of volatile markets, continuous improvement, and breakneck technology. Our kneejerk response to the chaos may be to yank and stretch it into clean linear order. But he calls us instead to embrace the vital intertwining of chaos and order, and more, to live in the boundary waters flowing between the two.

Computer modeling shows that scenes such as Coleridge’s glorious starlings do not appear from regulated efforts to “form a flock” but from accumulated individual action surging within a few simple parameters. This beautifully (un)orchestrated movement is the result of interrelated parts responding to the shifts of others.

Allowing the science of complexity — and the poetic tradition — to play out naturally in the maze of our cubicle floors is to “fold meaning into the simplest elements and allow complexity to emerge from their natural self-generation.”

Within our organizations, Whyte says, we strangle innovation and creativity, ordering complexity away through repressive rules and protocols.

It is astonishing to witness the human ability to . . . take on every possible kind of experience in an ordered, burdensome way, as if we could not countenance the possibility of standing upright for a single moment, freed from the extra weight of the structures we love to carry with us. A simple love for the purity of the piano becomes a schedule of lessons we can no longer fit into our schedule. A step toward a subject for which we have a passion becomes a costly exercise in college fees and course requirements . . .” (p. 254)

Whyte wants me to believe my trainees were not “herbivorous animals about to stampede out of control unless you are constantly riding the herd.” Given a clear set of boundaries coupled with freedom to adapt and imagine, perhaps they could look like a spectacular flock of starlings on the move. Wordsworth wrote,

There is a dark invisible workmanship
that reconciles discordant elements
and makes them move in one society.

I almost get the idea he wants us to trust folks.

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Is such trust reasonable? Is it even possible? What do you think? We conclude our discussion of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul today. Our new book club begins April 4th, featuring Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing. Come along?

Photo by Sandra Heska King. Used with permission. Post by Lyla Lindquist of 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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

OK, it’s an age thing. Some people hear “Tell Me More,” and they think of the program on National Public Radio. I hear “Tell Me More,” and I think of a song (not the Billie Holliday song; I don’t go that far back). The song isn’t called “Tell Me More,” but that’s the refrain/chorus/most memorable/only audible line in it.

Last Thursday night, some 29 people decided to “tell me more” and participated in Twitter poetry party. Some interesting side notes: we had one self-described lurker; @Doallas brought a fan following with her, with some 10 (!) people retweeting her tweets; one participant signed up on Twitter just to be part of the party; one showed up in cracked curlers (I don’t comment – I merely report); two participants couldn’t abide the suspense of waiting and launched into their own unprompted exchange.

The prompts were taken from Caduceus: Poems by Sorina Higgins. The poet herself (@IambicAdmonit) was at the party. And it was one rockin’ room (which is why I was reminded of that movie).

Tell Me More

By @lwlindquist, @memoriaarts, @VinaMist, @llbarkat, @EscapeIntoLife, @SimplyDarWrites, @renokingstweet, @PatriciaSpreng, @annkroeker, @IambicAdmonit, @chrisyokel, @RadBeliever, @jejpoet, @DianaBridge, @Doallas, @SandraHeskaKing, @matthewkreider, @dorphlthewise, @sethhaines, @mjpaulusjr, @leximagines, @LoveLifeLitGod, @ArelyStdenis, @shortcake0369, @kconwayireton, @lauralynn_brown, @secarey, @mmerubies, and @monicasharman. Lurking by @monicabrand. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Potomac Pink

That blaze of pink
so unlike the blossoms
falling along the Potomac;
power melts into pink,
pink melts into power.

Pinkless Dakota

No pink tractors
on the Dakota gravel
tonight.

School Rules

School rules to twist and fool:
only wear colors, and only hair colors
that nature has made
flamingos arrayed!

Pink Horsepower

Let’s speed baby
in that Pink Limo
Oh she’s a beauty
a pink beauty!
Ride the pink pony.
And the limo whispers
to the pony,
“I am, I say.”

The pony opens her eyes,
like miniature wings,
with little pink gums,
little pink tongue
whispering, pink,
the color of not knowing
what to say and,
not knowing what to say,

the color of pink shadows.
I am cherry,
I am pony blossoms,
I am feather blooms
My little heel-wings are not
made of feathers
but pointed to crush
the blooms your lips make.

Cherry blossoms

Cherry blossoms drift
from mythological boughs,
boughs I saved for you.
Flaming bushes of autumn
whisper “I am, I am”
to my doubtful, stuttering heart.

Shadows cover the finger-thin trees
with identity crises, with little green lies:
tender stroking of fragile branches,
pink blossoms bursting free,
arms raised in worship,
sugar spun blossoms
bursting at the seams.

Little tongue with your spun
blossoms,
come spin yourself on me;
My finger-thin lies can only
clutch the shadows,
not the real green thing.

Light as honey

I am light as honey
I am speech like bees.
Sing to me, fly with me.
I am curves, I am blush
honey, a sung myth.

Metaphors

Ice in the springtime?
Just in my bones.
Wait for the opening.
The stamens can thaw you,
can sing in your marrow.

Jeweled shadows float long
caress the branches
of our metaphors fragile
beneath the wait
of our expectations.

Warming to gentle touches,
I am a metaphor spun
a myth newly,
I am true,
a make-believe.

Photograph by Joel Olives. Creative commons, via Flickr. 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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

When we heard about NPR Tell Me More’s Muses and Metaphors call for Twitter poetry, of course we couldn’t resist sending all our best company vehicles, to offer Michel Martin and poet Holly Bass a ride to our own Twitter poetry party last night.

Twitter just celebrated its sixth birthday, which means we’ve been Twitter-poetry-partying for half of the social-media giant’s life. It’s fun to remember that we were one of the first to celebrate Twitter’s poetic capabilities. Since then, of course, poetry has become a popular Twitter pastime. So popular that, yes, NPR is calling for Twitter poems. And you might just write them, even if you aren’t at one of our parties. Bon voyage!

First, we sent the hot pink limo.

Then, we sent the hot pink John Deere.

Then, we sent the hot air balloons (yes, one in hot pink).

And of course we finally had to send the steamin’ pink motorcycle too.

Thanks to everyone who hitched a ride. Watch this space for the reweaving of the tweets into larger poems!

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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

As promised Tuesday, here are the last six poems from our recent Twitter poetry party. The tweets that became this final group of poems were prompted by references to salt, chains – and an unexpected, unprompted toast.  All the prompts were taken from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda.

As I noted Tuesday, editing the tweets into poems is work — but it’s fun work. You take a mass of material, wade (or dive) into it, find what fits together, and then sort it. From there you work it over, sometimes more than once or twice, trying to retain the sense (and sensibility) of the original tweets but also trying to combine them all into something understandable.

If you haven’t participated in one of the TweetSpeak Twitter Poetry parties, you should. You’re even allowed to lurk and observe what’s going on. You will occasionally see a confused tweet or two enter the picture, with someone asking what is going on with all these crazy tweets. And some people (non-participants) are occasionally so taken with individual lines that they will retweet them — which is fun if a bit confusing for the editor (“Wait! Someone tweeted that already! Where did that come from? Does it fit? Maybe repetition would be good.”) Yes, we improvise.

Fields of Red

By @llbarkat, @sethhaines, @chrisyokel, @lauraboggess, @mmerubies, @annkroeker, @meganwillome, @lwlindquist, @gmthul and @morningglorydlc. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Salt

Salt spills on grass, on ants, on words.
It seasons. It kills. and yet, it preserves,
this salty rain.
Salt wonders, how long?
Salt is tears, is pain, is the worst sort
of seasoning for a heart hungry for love.
Salt is a question, is it not? Each crystal
a wondering.
Salt is a statement, crystalline and defined.
A statement, yes. Like this: Love I you.
And a question: love you I?
Crystallize my love; let every molecule
cling to your morsels.

Pepper is exclamatory, the grand punctuation.

Chains

Chain link by chain link fence
she told me it is a necklace made
of stars but really it’s iron bars
they try to hold me

Chain by chain, the children ring,
around the roses drunk on scarlet.
Pretty bracelet barbed wire tattoos
me black with pain, wrists clasped
too hard, cannot get away.

Hold me, try. With bars.
I will plant them like seeds,
and they will begin vining.

And the golden threads fell.
And the ambrosia drained
from my soul.
Ambrosia and goddesses,
carcasses and madmen.
Only here would you chain
them together with golden
wire. Chain the golden wire,
lift the carcasses. Shout,
“Love, love. It must have
no season!”

Goddess Trapped

Goddess trapped, cage bars
growing up from stony earth
barren womb of rocks;
wounds scraped raw, held open
by dirty nails, salt poured direct,
heart screams, silver cold corpse
of who she was, spirit stands up
freed from iron bars, rib cage that
held heart hostage from soul is
broken.

Let the screams punctuate.
Let us be done.

We hold the cup together

Hostages no more, we hold the cup
together. I bring the salt, you bring
the honey. And we free our love.

Wild honey bees sprinkled
by a sweet girl lover, words
dripped from wet fingers
and soft mouth, cat curled
asleep by the door. Honey
flows freely, feeds my hunger,
sweetens the sounds. Underwater
grains are always trembling.

I will bring you water,
if you will bring a crystal cup.
And tilt it to my hand.
This trembling cup of sunrise
Wavers, swilling on the brink,
then spilling scarlet and golden
sunshine. A tiny tinny acorn
shines silver in the light and I
plan to plant it when the sun
goes down tonight.

A Toast

More salt, please. Keep your honey
to yourself.
Trembling, I lift my cup.
A toast.
A toast, a toast!
To salt and honey.
To the cat and the poppies.
To the acorn and the ants.
Drink, drink.
A toast to the golden thread.
A toast to the drunken roof.
And to the drunk whose words
are stumbling.
A toast to the two bodies.
And the one honey. A toast to me
sitting by the edge of the field.
The well is dry but the lake flows
with wine. I lie there in the scarlet
and golden morning sun, dreaming.
Rumpelstiltskin liked golden thread, too.

The power to inflict

Love hostage, you bind yourself
in chains of unrequited love, trembling
at your own power to inflict the punishment,
to inflict desire.
Red sky, pure wine, and a language
I am still stumbling to speak.

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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

Gravel pressed through my Levis there on the cement. My hands draped over my knees and I leaned my head against the stone wall, wishing it would cool the heat climbing up my neck. This person next to me in the shade — barely half my age — she asked impossible questions as though making effortless small talk.

Looking back, it was only one question. But it felt like a full entrance exam to somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

“I know what you have to do,” she said. “But what do you want? What do you desire?”

My mouth opened to answer. But neither my brain nor my heart delivered up any useful vocabulary. I sealed my lips around a clump of dry air and breathed it back out in relief when another person came and sat down, carrying a generous armload of subject change.

My soul tangled itself that day at my lack of a ready answer to what seemed such a basic question of one’s existence: What do you want?

I stewed on my ignorance a while, but like many things that knot up my soul, it went its way soon enough. The conversation with my friend came back to me as I read David Whyte’s chapter on Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge in this week’s portion of The Heart Aroused.

The story, centuries old and known throughout Ireland, goes that a young boy was raised by two druid sisters after his father’s murder. When he determined they could no longer protect him, Fionn set off into the world himself, perhaps even in search of his destiny.

Along the way, he joined up with a band of gifted young poets. Overnight, the infamous bandit Call Mac Cona slew his companions, but before being struck with the sword himself, Fionn declared his identity to the man, who immediately recognized the son of his old captain. Mac Cona took Fionn as his apprentice, teaching him everything he knew.

(There’s more to the story, of course, than my skeletal retelling here. That’s just one reason in a thousand why you might like to pick up this book one day.)

In the brutal slaying of the young poets, Whyte sees more than a terrible sword:

The first entrance of the adult male into Fionn’s life is in the guise of the slayer of youthful innocence.  . . . Many of the youths [the adult world] has slain are still standing in upright positions, carrying out orders to the letter . . . (p. 153)

I know what you have to do . . .

The young poets remind us that our knowing must go deeper, must be a part of us. Whyte suggests that our soul itself must be our “inner sponsor.”

At a crucial moment, Fionn must declare his lineage, or he will be killed. He must know from whom he is descended, where his strength comes from, and what kind of blood flows in his veins. Otherwise that part of the world that has been orphaned without any training or preparation will kill him out of its own grief and alienation. (p. 154-155)

Fionn went on his way, meeting and finding favor with two kings, in both cases forced to move on when his identity became clear and the danger too great. Recalling the spirit of the previous chapter and the ways in which a well placed No can often open the way for far greater Yes, Whyte describes this “refusal of the call,” an almost mystical sort of knowing by which the “soul chooses its time” and prevents us, if we’re paying attention, from engaging our destiny before we are ready.

Equipped with Mac Cona’s skills, he journeyed on in search of Fionngas the Seer and his deeper ways. He stumbled upon the Seer and found him roasting a salmon over the fire. Fionngas knew — though Fionn did not — that this was the Salmon of Knowledge, which he had sought for years.

Quite by accident, Fionn ate of the salmon. Upon discovering this, Fionngas recognized that for all his planning and strategizing, it was this young wanderer who would receive its gifts: “second sight” and for the Irish, the greater honor of becoming the greatest poet in the land.

Reading of Fionn, it’s easy enough to toss aside experienced strategy in favor of youthful whim and abandon. But Whyte is careful to conclude that we need both, for while Fionn was the one destined to eat the salmon, it was the old man who’d caught and prepared it.

The point is to make an equal place in the psyche for both strategy and soul.  . . .[Fionn's] breakthrough comes through a meeting of two parts that have been previously split — our vital innocence and our knowing experience. (p. 174)

Just yesterday, a wise friend said “sometimes the unexpected events are the most dear.” I know that to be true.

While I’ve worried that perhaps this frail sense of knowing my own desire might leave me short of some unknown destiny, I’m beginning to think it’s not something that, at least today, I really need to know.

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What do you think? Have you “refused the call,” or stumbled unexpectedly into something that seems made just for you? Do you lean more toward innocence or strategy? And how do you best join them? We’re discussing The Heart Aroused: Poetry and Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. Whether you’re reading along or just dropping in for the discussion, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment box. And, if you’ve posted about the book, we invite you to share your link.

Join us next Wednesday for the final chapters, 7 and 8: Coleridge and Complexity and The Soul of the World. New book club begins April 4th, featuring Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing. Come along?

Photo by L.L. Barkat. Used with permission. Post by Lyla Lindquist of 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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

A (very) short primer on editing tweets from our Twitter poetry parties:

Editing the tweets of anywhere from 10 to 20 people posted over an hour, and turning them into recognizable poems, can often be a challenge. Some participants do a kind of rapid response to the prompts; others ponder and consider, and then add a line or two.

So you don’t pay too much attention to the order of the tweets, instead looking for themes, common words and phrases, and parallel ideas. You group related tweets together, and then the editing begins in earnest. Some words are shaved; a few get deleted while another small number get inserted. Occasionally two separate tweets are joined together. Sometimes a phrase is pulled from one tweet and added to another. And all the while you’re trying to stay as close as possible to the original contributions.

It’s work, yes, but it’s also great fun. There’s one additional bonus: you gain insights into the creative processes of the individual participants.

At our recent Twitter poetry party, where the prompts were taken from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda, the tweets took a turn toward rooftops, wine, ambrosia, flowers and ants. Ants?

Here are six additional poems from the party. We will post the final six on Thursday afternoon.

Fields of Red

By @llbarkat, @sethhaines, @chrisyokel, @lauraboggess, @mmerubies, @annkroeker, @meganwillome, @lwlindquist, @gmthul and @morningglorydlc. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Drunken Rooftops

Drunken rooftops stumble into basements.
Coral hedges say, “Let us stagger suburbia
to its knees.” White tile, coral spill. And
my hunger is on its knees.

The goddess appears inside of me; she grips
my gut and sends the words forward, desperate
spilling across white tile, washed with a golden
twined mop, coral dreams and obscured stars,
forgotten coral crisp layered deep, catches prism
of sun through deep.

Ants

Where are the ants? The coral ants?
Layered drunk upon drunk.
It is the fault of the ants.
Ants are life, wild and uniform.

Ambrosia

It is the earth’s ambrosia,
now alarming. “Ambrosia!”
cry the rooftops. And the grass
rises, every blade bearing
an ant, bearing a cup.

Adjust the words to cover
the drunken rooftop. We
cannot cover the drunken rooftop.
This is the realm of the poet.

Sew me a uniform of ambrosia.
Let it be peach. Ginger. Sugar.
Let it fit every curve.

Ambrosia is for goddesses.
I hunger for gold, scarlet,
and silver words, ambrosia
of the goddess.

Choral of man,
sing of the goddess,
who makes the grass rise
with every spring birth.
Then call me a goddess,
and let’s begin.

Wildflowers

Purple wildflowers take over the grass;
The red, the gold, the floss is tangled
in the poppies sprouting between the pearls.
Scarlet King, bleeding love drops…crimson
tale of breaking heart, his world colored
in humanity hues of flesh tones.

Needle, thread

Take the needle, take the thread;
make your stitches deep across
her breast make them count
silver thread turned scarlet.

Needle, thread. Sew me a chorale
I can clasp. Russian violinist
please play me with your bow
sew me in your song
with golden thread.

Seams of Coal

My uncle mined coal.
My Grandpa mined coal.
I can honor them best by
mining lumps of poetry
from deep within my soul.

When you mine coal
the tunnel is no bigger
than the seam so you slide
down skinny shafts and pray
just pray.

Coal seams, my seams are
slowly coming apart. Drunk
on words, I stumble up to bed
alarm dread alive inside
before I even close my eyes.

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 March we’re exploring the theme Angels.

The words of my youth were simple words. They were good words, functional words, words with concrete meaning. Even the bedtime stories my mother told us had an obvious purpose.

The moral of the story is…

What other need of words would the children of a blue-collar family have? Lofty words were for lofty people and we surely had none of those in our household.

So when my little brother’s kindergarten teachers gifted him with a book of poetry…it sort of rocked our world.



Dilly Dilly Piccalilli
Tell me something very silly:
There was a chap his name was Bert
He ate the buttons off his shirt.

Have you ever?

The book was Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes by Clyde Watson, Illustrated by Wendy Watson. The verses capture the adventures of a large family of foxes with remarkably human traits. My siblings and I fairly memorized the entire content. The sing-songy rhymes set us into fits of giggles and gave us a new language to share. We would call out the lines to each other while riding bikes down our dusty hollow, whisper them up through the crack between the wall and the bunk beds at night, sing them out from the tops of the trees we climbed. We carried them with us through the years.

Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes is a collaborative effort of two sisters. Says Wendy, of the book, “Its inspiration has been our childhood at home on the farm in Vermont—the seasons and the work that goes with each, the buildings, the countryside—and the atmosphere and fun of our own family. Many foxes wear favorite garments that still hang in closets in Putney; and special family occupations and times of year and occasions are in almost every poem and picture.”

What? You mean poetry can be about real life? And be fun too?

It was a lesson I took to heart. I began to hear poetry everywhere. In the kneading of the bread dough my mother drummed and moiled on Sundays, in the way the wind soughed through the trees, the distant bark of dogs, or the long low whistle of a train.

Poetry came to me from everywhere.

And then I grew up.

Once again Poetry took on the lofty presence of a thing that required careful study. I was afraid of poetry. Afraid I didn’t know the right words or the right form or the right anything. It made me nervous.

And so, I avoided it.

But poetry came looking for me.

When I met Laura Barkat, and she re-introduced me to poetry—I was cautious at first. But what was offered was so much grace—tender leading hands which desired that I bask in the joy of this luminous word-play. Her gentle encouragement awakened a recognition in my spirit. And so I began to join in the word–play—frequenting Tweetspeak Poetry, participating in Twitter poetry parties. Poetry here is warm, inviting. And sometimes I accept the invitation.

I still feel clumsy with words most days, but I am slowly embracing this new way of seeing. That is what poetry is to me—a way of opening my eyes to the beauty around me. A way to name that beauty. And it has made my life richer.

I’ll leave you with these wise words from Father Fox:

Knock! Knock! Anybody there?
I’ve feathers for your caps
And ribbons for your hair.
If you can’t pay, you can sing me a song,
But if you can’t sing, I’ll just run along.

Photo by L.L. Barkat. Used with permission. Post by Laura Boggess of The Wellspring.

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