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

Academy of American Poets

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

American Life in Poetry

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

From the Fishouse

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

Modern American Poetry Site

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

MotionPoems

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

PennSound

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

Poets & Writers

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

Poetry Foundation

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

Poetry International Web

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

Tweetspeak Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

the beginning

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

continue reading ‘the beginning’ poem

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

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

It 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.

With apologies to Robert Browning, Marianne Moore,
Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Mother
Goose, and my readers

I, too, dislike the villanelle,
redundant song that tasks one’s reason,
its circuit subtle as the Bronx El.

To write (or read) one hurts like hell.
It matters not which hour or season.
So I disdain the villanelle.

Though I’m not one to kiss and tell
I do confess my poet’s treason
(that 3rd line’s always your Bronx El).

So I cajole, try to compel
other readers: How it frees one!
Let’s just forget the villanelle!

I do concede it weaves a spell,
shows poet’s grief, the drugs she’s on.
(Stand back—here comes that damnéd El!)

But even so, it’s just as well
to let this snoring form sleep on.
I so despise the villanelle
relentless (listen!) as the Bronx El.

As this piece of homage (pottage? triage? collage?) would suggest, I have mixed feelings about the villanelle.

I admire a well-executed villanelle in the same way I admire a Baroque Tromp-l’oeil ceiling—the kind that conceals corners and suggests roundness where all is square, until you stare (and stare) long enough to see the trick. Unhappily, once the eye discovers this, it can’t be fooled any more. But what fun the before-hand fooling is!

Most villanelles (let’s face it) are not well-executed. They are heavy-handed, mechanical pieces. Granted, the machinery may be tight, functioning properly, clicking right along. But the poem is just that—a machine (albeit an ingenious one)—and, therefore, dead on the page.

These are the kinds of villanelles I write—dead ones—and I don’t know how to stop. What do Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop possess that I don’t, I wonder—besides talent, a finely developed ear and eye, and impeccable technique?

Here, I fear, is the root of the problem. The villanelle, alas, is not for everyone. In fact, given the paucity of successful villanelles that exist in English—relative to successful sonnets, let’s say—it’s barely for anyone at all.

If poets were obstetricians, the villanelle would be their forceps—an instrument one carries in one’s bag of tricks but rarely, if ever, uses, as the results of employing it are nearly always disastrous and sometimes even fatal.

The villanelle should be used only under the most extreme circumstances. Notice how nearly all of the villanelles universally admired portray terrible loss and utter and intractable grief: “Do not go gentle into that good night,” Thomas begs; “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow,” Roethke recites, automaton-like in his benumbed, post-traumatic-stress-induced state; “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” lies Bishop’s brave and brilliant poem, which proves not only that it is hard to master losing, it is impossible. These poets and their poems are alembics of agony. They fairly bleed.

If villanelles could be bought in a package, the warning on the side might read:

“Highly combustible! Do not use near open hea(r)t!”
or
“For professional use only. Do not try this at home.”
or
“In the case of accidental composing, review repeating lines 1 and 3. If they bore you, amputate immediately.”

So what is an average poet (i.e., a non-genius) like myself to do? If a serious, heart-rending, spectacularly-executed Villanelle For The Ages lies outside my range and repertoire, what of it? Sure, I can keep practicing at home, in private, in the dark, for the fun of it. (As with my singing, a corollary activity, that won’t harm anyone so long as it is done in the shower with the door of the bathroom firmly closed.)

Just as I don’t expect to write a great villanelle, I confess, I don’t expect to read many more of them in the course of my lifetime. But if and when I do meet one, as I have on a few very memorable occasions, I’ll be ready. As poet Robert Hass once wrote, when one encounters a huge and magnificent monster, there is only one proper response: “I think I’ll praise it.”

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems

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

Glynn Young, a contributing editor here at Tweetspeak, is the author of a newly published novel, Dancing Priest. A professional writer with a background in journalism, speechwriting, and public relations and marketing, Glynn began blogging in 2009. It was at Faith, Fiction, Friends, where Glynn posted a poem for the first time, that I first found his work; since then, he’s become a friend whose writing trajectory I’ve watched with interest and admiration. To learn about Glynn’s writing life generally, see my interview at The High Calling: A Man of Many Good Words.

MD: You’ve written* that your first and every subsequent hearing of the song Luna Rossa [translated as “Blushing Moon” or “Red Moon”] evoked an image of a priest dancing on a beach, and that it was this image that gave way to your story idea. The song’s lyrics address “playing the part of love” and include the lines “. . . forgive me, Luna Rossa / For the vows I made tonight that are untrue. . . .” Given a priest as central character, those lyrics hold double meaning, making your story line seem especially promising for its inherent tensions; we might even say it was “received” inspiration. How conscious were you of the meaning of the lyrics while writing the novel?

GY: I don’t speak or read Italian. I had no idea what the lyrics meant. And I can’t explain why the song evoked that image. It just did. The priest was never [in my mind] a Catholic priest. For some reason, I knew he was Episcopal or Anglican.

MD: What about that song accounts for its continued strong hold on you?

GY: I think it’s the beat. I probably should mention that I love to dance. My wife gets embarrassed when we dance together. She says, “You don’t dance; you perform.”

MD: Does music have a role in the novel or otherwise help in some way to frame the story?

GY: In two scenes, one early and one late. The early scene involves the two lead characters, Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes, doing a tango. The later scene involves a youth group at the Church to which Michael is assigned; the former discover they have a dancing priest and name him that.

MD: Who is the novel’s audience? Did you specifically and consciously write for that audience?

GY: I didn’t write with an audience in mind. I wrote the entire novel, and a lot more, in my head over a three-year period. I didn’t really think about who was going to read it; for the three years I thought it was just a story in my head. After I started the writing process, I thought about audience, but by then the story itself was in control.

MD: What is the significance of the locale of your novel? Why the United Kingdom?

GY: The story is told in six parts; the first and third are in the UK, the second in Greece, and the last three in California. I’m not exactly sure when it happened but, at some point early on, my dancing priest on a beach in Italy became a theology student in Scotland. The story moved to the UK because the priest was Anglican.

MD: Interestingly, as you note, you always envisioned the priest Michael as Anglican (Episcopalian in America), a faith, unlike Catholicism, that allows priests to be married and so, for purposes of your story, allows for the possibility of flesh-and-blood romance. How deliberate was your choice of faith for the protagonist?

GY: It was very deliberate. I knew, even when the novel was all in my head, that this was going to be about a romance, a romance that moves forward in spite of a gap of shared belief. It can go only so far before it breaks down.

MD: To what extent, if at all, does your own personal faith journey echo in your conception and realization of the story and its main characters?

GY: The story of Sarah’s journey toward faith is based almost entirely on my own, including many of the specific details.

MD: You give several interesting twists to Michael, making him English-born but raised by Scottish guardians, a man studying for the priesthood at a university not a seminary, and a contender for an Olympic cycling team. Any one of these aspects would seem to offer myriad possibilities for character and story development; yet, you employ all three as tests of witness, faith, and love. What did introduction of the sporting competition allow you to show that you could not have achieved for your character otherwise? What’s the character’s greatest or most important test?

GY: Michael is not who anyone would think of if asked to imagine an Anglican priest. I deliberately drew him that way. Participation in the Olympics tests him in two ways: first with a jealous teammate and, second, with tragedy. Without any aspiration toward the heroic, he finds himself thrust into the position [of having to respond heroically]. He will never think of himself as a hero but as someone having to do what he was there to do, the instrument used to do it. He returns to Britain a hero not because he wins gold, which he does, but because of his actions in the face of a terrible tragedy.

MD: The story’s romantic interest is Sarah Hughes. What did you find most difficult in writing a female character in whom you endow similarly tested traits?

GY: Michael was a more difficult character for me than Sarah, likely because I shaped Sarah’s search for faith along the lines of my own experience in college. There’s a scene where Michael’s guardian mother tells Sarah that Michael has always been confident about his faith—has faith enough for three people. Not so Sarah, mirroring my own experience.

Both characters take on lives of their own after a while, doing things I didn’t expect them to do but that, in my hindsight, make sense.

MD: Does Sarah function as Michael’s missing side, and he as hers; that is, are both what the other needs to discover about him- or herself to become whole?

GY: Michael knows from the beginning that he and Sarah are meant to be one. She has glimpses of that but pushes the thought away. Faith scares her; she thinks people with faith are scary, wacko. Michael confounds that notion, and that’s what Sarah struggles with.

MD: How much from your own life did you draw on in creating your characters? For example, you introduce Hughes to Kent early, in Chapter 2; by Chapter 4, they’ve kissed. While the details are different, the description reminds me of what I know of how you met your wife. In Chapter 4, you put the characters together at a concert with a tenor, which somewhat echoes your experience of hearing “Luna Rossa” and becoming enthralled. Are readers who know you apt to find other such real-life parallels in the novel?

GY: [Glynn laughs.] You mean the fact that my wife and I talked about getting married after knowing each other for three weeks? There are some parallels but surprisingly few. I ride a bicycle but, unlike Michael, I don’t compete. Like Michael, I like to dance. The character of Jenny (introduced later in the book) is a composite of several people I’ve known.

MD: For nearly three years, you “wrote” and carried Dancing Priest entirely in your head, committing no first words to paper until the summer of 2005. How did you keep this “mental writing,” which you did at night, in check, so that it did not spill over into your day job? What, if any, techniques other than remarkable memory did you use to retain all the details, especially as you mentally reworked them in developing your story?

GY: I blocked the story. Those six parts [I mentioned] are the original six blocks. I had a prologue, a fairly lengthy one, explaining how Michael’s parents met. I shortened that into the conversation his guardian mother has with Sarah. By setting the narrative into blocks, I could work on each one independently, and not during my day job.

Once I started writing, things got much more complicated, because you can imagine faster than you can write and when you write, you have to be conscious of the entire story.

MD: What are some of the details you had to research to ensure the story’s credibility, and how did you undertake the research?

GY: A friend at work who’s reading the novel asked how many times I’d been to Scotland. I told the truth: zero. She was shocked, because she had been there many times and loves Edinburgh; she found the setting in the book so familiar. The publisher, a native Scot, had the same reaction.

While I’ve never been to Scotland, I feel like I have lived there, albeit virtually, for almost a decade. I looked at all kinds of sources, including sermons by John Knox (I make slight reference to him in the novel). I read history and travel books, and popular Scottish authors like Ian Rankin; I explored the region online; I subscribed to magazines; I studied the application process for University of Edinburgh, and the university’s curriculum. I took virtual tours and walked virtual streets.

MD: How did you determine when you’d done sufficient research?

GY: I never did feel that I had done enough. I kept at it, even after the manuscript was “finished.” I’m still doing research.

MD: How did you fold your research into the story?

GY: Very subtly. I tried to avoid being obvious about it. Readers will be hard-pressed to find many specific details but the sense of Scotland, I think, permeates the novel, especially its first part.

MD: What helped you the most to keep track of your characters and where, when, and under what circumstances they interacted?

GY: Constant rereading and rewriting. I didn’t have a story map, or at least one that was written down. The mental process I went through for three years fundamentally shaped the writing. When I started writing, I knew where I was going, I knew where the story was going.

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* Glynn has written a series of short blog posts about his novel:

The Best Laid Plans
‘Dancing Priest’: The Writing Process
‘Dancing Priest’: The Inspiration

The novel is available for Kindle and Nook. It will be published in paperback in January 2012.

Post by Maureen Doallas, author of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems.
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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.

If you are trying to be a better poet, you know that writing poetry is only half the work. Reading good poetry is the other half. It is what informs your sensibilities, introduces you to new techniques, makes you jealous (in a good way) so you work even harder to find just the right images, sounds, rhythms.

I read a lot of poetry, because it helps me become a better poet. It also makes me a better writer in general. I also read poetry just because. For me, it is a source of enchantment, a kind of hope, a place to dream.

There is so much to choose from in the world of poetry, but here are a few ideas for you or a friend, this holiday season…

1. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. This is an excellent resource book and includes a lot of great classic poems, grouped by form. It’s the book my daughter Sara once stole away; she later returned with poems of her own: sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, sestinas.

2. Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words is a fun little book that will get you playing with words in new ways.

3. The Butterfly’s Burden. This collection, by a Palestinian poet, never fails to make me swoon. Take this little untitled poem for instance: The fog is darkness, thick white darkness/peeled by an orange and a promising woman.

4. Of course we recommend any of our titles. Beauty, style, unique ways of seeing the world, real voices. That’s what you can expect from a T. S. title.

5. How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. Hirsch says poetry is “a secret that can no longer be kept a secret.” If you’ve wondered why and how you should read poetry, this book will give you some unexpected and delightful answers, so that maybe you’ll find yourself saying, like he does, “It always carries me away.”

6. Nine Horses: Poems. One quiet Sunday, I read this entire book of poetry to my kids. They loved it. Collins is pure grown-up, but he’s accessible at many levels. One of our favorites was about the neurotic fear of a mouse who might burn the whole house down by accidentally striking a match in the walls.

7. The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. Neruda will teach you the power of the image. Abstract language takes a back seat to poppies, a green knife, footsteps light as flour dust. I am particularly enamored with the love poetry. Here’s an excerpt from “Twenty Love Poems, 7″: Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets/to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.

8. The Anthologist is one of the funniest books I’ve read. Part fictional memoir of character ‘Paul Chowder,’ part terrific insight into the inner workings of poetry. The running story of Sara Teasdale is both fun and poignant, as is the character’s own failed love-life with Roz.

9. The Art of Recklessness. Not an easy read, but somehow I can’t put it down. The force of Young’s voice, the liveliness and depth of his observations, and sometimes the surprisingly simple interjections (no one can ruin poetry by trying to write it!) make for a profound and sometimes winsome read.

10. Every Day Poems. One of the best things I ever did for my poetry writing was to start reading a poem a day. This daily poetry delivery (weekends excluded) makes it simple, and gives me joy in the morning.

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— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle.

Like most poetry built on refrains, the villanelle steers away from narrative ideals, away from conversation and linear exchange. Instead, the villanelle circles, like carrion fowl. And like the buzzard, no one really likes the villanelle. (Go ahead, gasp.) They aren’t fun to write; they aren’t exactly lucid morsels to inhale, unless you’re reading Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, or some other dead poet.

There’s a reason only a handful of villanelles are actually famous, and even so, few of those keep to the strict form like Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”: The villanelle is, perhaps universally, the most difficult form of poetry.

You write the first line, and you’re stuck with it until the end. You pick up momentum, but then that third line keeps popping up, too, like Presidential debates.

By the time you reach the second stanza, you might be wondering if the endeavor is worth continuing.

Something you’ll notice about Elizabeth Bishop, in “One Art,” and Dylan Thomas, in “Do not go gentle…,” is the imperative. Each poem reads as instructions, commands, with an understood you. When a line omits its subject, it becomes versatile, mutable, easier for the poet to work with.

Notice it most as Thomas develops a litany of wise men, good men, wild men, et al. who “rage against the dying of the light,” who “do not go gentle into that good night.” While the poem is presumably a plea to his father in the face of death—the understood you of the first stanza—the refrain lines act as predicates to simple, declarative sentences in subsequent stanzas, elaborating on the hall of fame with whom Thomas, the elder, might soon enter cahoots.

While Thomas and Bishop, along with Auden, Roethke, and others, take more somber tones to their villanelles (as have I in the past, with “Sunday Morning Bread” and “Prayers for Friends”) I’ve always thought the strict repetition of lines created something of a Gong Show within the poem. An idea is begun, only to have another supersede it. Just when we gain a new rhythm, the first returns to center-stage with the self-importance of a five-year-old. The second returns soon enough, like the first, and when there is an understood you, you cannot help but play along.

The two lines come and go, chasing one another (and you) through the poem until they’ve twined themselves into a couplet at the end. Given that premise, my recent viewings of Cabaret and The Muppets, and the irresistible fusion of the words in question, inspiration has driven composition of this—my VaudeVillanelle:

Kick and dance onto the stage—
as the piano man bangs a ditty—
rush behind the theater drapes

Do you enjoy the wild old cabaret?
Do you like how the young ladies
kick and dance onto the stage?

But don’t blush or try saving face
while you watch our brand of comedy
rush behind the theater drapes

because champing right at its tail
a new bit or gag, and something witty
kick and dance onto the stage.

Lacing dialog in the one-act play
the satire will get a mite snippy,
rush behind the theater drapes,

and tweak it up with shadow shapes.
Then comes the closing routine:
kick and dance onto the stage,
rush behind the theater drapes.

Post by David K. Wheeler, author of Contingency Plans: Poems.
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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In December we’re exploring the theme The Villanelle

My original title for this post: “A.A.’s Birthday.” I was shooting for catchy and mysterious, but another A.A. has bested Anna in terms of instant recognition. Still, this day is to be remembered if only because Akhmatova herself should not be forgotten.

Born Anna Andreevna Gorenko in 1889 (she later took her grandmother’s name, Akhmatova), the poet survived some of the most brutal years of Russian history, but not without massive loss. Her first husband was shot for conspiring against the state. Another died in the Gulag on similar charges. Her son was repeatedly arrested, released, rearrested and ultimately freed due to Akhmatova’s perseverance (this period was the only time she wrote propagandist poetry for the state). The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote of Akhmatova:

“The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure [...] not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in [the Twentieth] century.”

Akhmatova’s work was revolutionary in its time, “composed of short fragments of simple speech that do not form a logical coherent pattern. Instead, they reflect the way we actually think, the links between the images are emotional, and simple everyday objects are charged with psychological associations. Like Alexander Pushkin, who was her model in many ways, Akhmatova was intent on conveying worlds of meaning through precise details” (Roberta Reeder).

The following poem was written in March of 1944 and is part of a larger sequence entitled “Death.” It exemplifies Akhmatova’s attention to detail and scene-setting, and like the best of literature, is universal, by nature of its specificity.

When the moon lies like a slice of Chardush melon
On the windowsill and it’s hard to breathe,
When the door is shut and the house bewitched
By an airy branch of blue wisteria,
And there is cool water in the clay cup,
And a snow-white towel, and the wax candle
Is burning, as in my childhood, attracting moths,
The silence roars, not hearing my words–
Then from corners black as Rembrandt’s
Something rears and hides itself again,
But I won’t rouse myself, won’t even take fright…
Here loneliness has caught me in its net.
The landlady’s black cat stares like the eye of centuries,
And the double in the mirror doesn’t want to help me.
I will sleep sweetly. Good night, night.

—translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

Post by Jennifer Jantz Estes. Reprinted with permission from Eighth Day Books.

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

Four years ago, while I was on a writer’s retreat in the wilds of rural Minnesota, I set myself the daily task of writing a poem each morning to my body. “Go ahead—choose any part,” I urged my writerly self. But there was really no doubt what part I would address. And so began the poem that would become “Letters to My Heart.”

Why, of all the wonderful and praise-worthy parts of my body, the Heart? Walt Whitman could not decide among his own corporeal glories—and so celebrated them all in his “I Sing the Body Electric.” But not me. Unlike Whitman, I believe the small ‘contains multitudes’ as much as the large, and what holds more than the little fist of the Heart?

Dear Heart,
At last you are too full,
a belly at the wedding feast
whose hollowness is wholed
before the groaning table goes quiet.

What am I to do,
strict mistress, ready friend?
There is so much prayer pressing
these small walls,
urgent to get in and to get out.

The Heart’s capaciousness is one of her virtues—hence her role as the repository of memory. In the course of our lives, we learn “by heart” facts of great import (name, address, phone number, nothing less than who we are) bundled together, randomly, with chunks of language that have little or no significance at all:

Doublemint adds to your fun.
Double pleasure all in one.
So delicious! Great to chew!
Treat yourself, and your friends, too!

This advertising jingle I learned (quite involuntarily) from television when I was a child is inscribed on my heart, as indelibly as the Hail Mary, and there is nothing I can do about it. She is a wayward creature, this Heart, easily seduced, especially by language that sings.

When I was in the second grade, a series of events—both great and small—led to my taking the Heart seriously. First, my father died at the age of 42. He had been ill for months, but none of us—not my mother, nor any of us 5 children—expected him to die. Then, one day in science class, our teacher showed a filmstrip, in grainy black-and-white, whose central focus (it seems, in my imperfect memory) was the open chest of a human being and the repeated beating of a live heart. The image haunted my dreams, both then and for years afterwards. Somehow the raw vulnerability of that most necessary of organs became linked with the sudden cessation of my father’s heart, and harbinger of the eventual cessation of my own. I was terrified of mortality, though I had no such language to describe the dread I felt—the dread I feel, even now, as I recall that memory.

Science had taught me that the heart was meat and machine, that it could quit on me at any moment, that it was my enemy. And so began the life-long process of trying to make my enemy my friend.

Dear Heart,
Please be my memory
When my mind is shot.

Say “Yes”, Dear Heart,
My Liar. My Art.

If the Heart was going to be my memory, my diary, my treasury, my breviary, I knew I needed to begin to inscribe on its pages language that would serve as a repository against extremity. I began a course of memorization, which included the sublime—as in Poe’s obsessive octosyllabic tour-de-force, “The Raven”—and the ridiculous—including a little poem in my school reader beginning thus, “Dolly is an old horse / with a white star. / She’s a great deal nicer / than other horses are.” These poems equally delighted me, for reasons I did not know—particularly since I had never seen a horse in real life, nor, now that I think about it, had I seen a raven.

This early courtship of my Heart, in turn, led to my writing poetry. Internalizing all of this rhythmic language produced in me the desire to answer it with my own. I had not yet heard or read Sir Philip Sidney’s injunction, “’Fool,’ said my Muse, ‘look in thy heart and write,’” but I somehow intuited its wisdom and obeyed. And so I began to carry around a portfolio (a manila folder, really) and to fill it with sheets of notebook paper that I, in turn, would fill with words. Though those early poems (and I use that term loosely) are long lost, I know some of them by heart—nimble little rhymes that were, mostly, nonsense, but constituted my first steps towards joining the dance of language. One such rhyme went like this:

The bells are ringing,
the birds are singing,
the people are dancing around.

The grownups are laughing,
the children are crying,
O what a mystery town!

This I have by heart—right next to Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”—sandwiched between “Fly Me to the Moon” (Sinatra) and “Thunder Road” (Springsteen)—and in close proximity to The Apostle’s Creed and the Act of Contrition. The Heart is nothing if not catholic (and, in my case, Catholic, as well).

Despite the second grade film, despite my father’s early passing, despite the lessons in mortality I have learned, I have a theory that I live by: that my Heart is more reliable than my mind; that because of my attention to shaping her contents, she will serve me well as I approach the end of my life; that in the meantime, I have much to learn from her.

Dear Heart,
You are wise and winsome,
nimble as a bride.
You skip a beat
when my Beloved sleeps beside me,
his face my constant sun.

You race, a wild filly
stamping at the gate,
ever ready to run
at the crack of the start gun.

Thus, I choose to live By Heart. Yet I also know this glad version of her to be a fiction, a trope, a necessary distraction from a truth once taught me in grainy black-and-white. It seems inevitable that a poem lead me in the direction of that truth, also inscribed in black-and-white, imaged by words on a page.

Dear Heart,
You are an idiot—
You do not know your bounds.

Yet you say No, No, No,
with each declining beat.

This is the heart of the matter, the last of the “Letters” towards which all the others tend. I was surprised to discover, at the end of my writer’s retreat, that there is greater accord between my Heart and me than I had known, bound together as we are in our ignorance, in our insistence upon life in the face of death, and in our daily dance of irrational joy. Eased by the music of meter, my Heart assents, even as she seems to rebel, stays steady and true, keeping good time with the rhythm and the rhyme, singing the refrain she knows by heart.

Post by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra and Other Poems

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Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In November we’re exploring the theme By Heart, on memorizing or becoming one with poetry.

Says Laura Boggess:

I started this little story as I waited for Maureen Doallas’s Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems. I had been so looking forward to the release of the book, had ordered it the second I heard it was available–and then was frustrated by what seemed like a terribly long delivery (it was only a few days, but felt much longer). It was very windy that week–I watched religiously for the mailman each day amidst flying little bits of this world–leaves, papers, my neighbor’s flag. As I waited, I entertained myself with the story of Amy Pinkleberry–a young divorcee who struggles with depression. Amy’s depression is characterized by auditory hallucinations–destructive voices that prevent her from finding the happiness she so longs for. Only one thing stops the voices and that is…well, you’ll just have to read on to find out…

Waiting on Neruda’s Memoirs

“Alice! Do hurry or we’ll be late!”

She called up the stairs, trying not to be annoyed. She glanced in the foyer mirror, eying her hair critically between the reflection of bits of the flower arrangement on the hall table.

“Alice! Oh!”

She glided down the steps; face lit up with that dimpled smile that always melted Amy’s heart. Alice just turned fifteen last week and Amy swallowed hard at how grown up she looked in taffeta and pearls.

“Oh, honey. You are so beautiful.”

Alice curtsied at the bottom of the stairs and spun around slowly so Amy could appreciate the effect of the softly billowing skirt.

“And you are going to knock dad’s socks off!”

Amy had chosen a more sedate outfit—a long straight silk in a peachy color. She did feel pretty–despite her nervousness–and she couldn’t help smiling at Alice’s enthusiasm. They didn’t get to dress up like this often.

“Are you ready? We’d better get going. Don’t want to keep the governor waiting.”

She winked at Alice.

“Do you have your book?”

Alice nodded, lifting her bag in response as they hurried out the door.

Five years. That’s how long it had taken. The cancer center had been operating now for almost a year, but tonight marked the official completion of phase one of the project. Justine’s project.

Amy and Oliver had both been surprised by the thought and detail the old woman had put into the planning. Her will was very meticulous, but much of her plan was already well underway when she passed. The land had already been purchased, the architect consulted, and preliminary discussions initiated with St. Joe’s. It had taken some doing, but when Oliver had secured the partnership with the medical school, it was just a matter of building the thing. And Justine had even arranged that—contracting her husband’s former company to handle everything.

Tonight, they would celebrate. She felt her pulse quicken a bit as she pulled up to the breezeway. Before the valet could open the door she glanced over at her stepdaughter.

“Are you ready for this?”

Alice dimpled again.

“Sure I am. It’s all for Gram. It’ll be grand.”

And it was grand. The concourse of the center had been turned into a ballroom for the evening. The floors gleamed and the chandelier partialed out twinkling light. Circular tables were peppered here and there for the esteemed guests who would arrive later. Amy’s heels clicked sharply on the brightly waxed floor as she approached the small group of figures gathered near the podium. Oliver broke from the group as she drew near and extended his hand to take hers.

She felt herself relax as he gently folded her in his arms.

“You look stunning.”

He whispered in her ear and his breath sent shivers down her neck. How did he always do that? She smiled up at him and he reached his other arm out to gather Alice to him.

“Ladies and Gentleman, we may begin the ceremony. The driving forces behind the George and Justine Taylor Cancer Center have arrived.”

There were so many names that Amy lost track. The governor said “a few words” behind the podium and the senator from the fourth district was not to be left out. Her face felt like it would break from the smiling. But soon, she and Alice cut the ribbon—posing numerous times for the newspaper photographers—and she was free to sit. She glanced at her watch. The dinner would begin in half an hour. She sidled up to Oliver, who was hobnobbing with some suits, and leaned close to his ear.

“Can you hold down the fort for a wee bit?”

He glanced at the book she held in her hands knowingly.

“If I must…”

It was all she needed to hear. She found Alice and they slipped down the back corridor, up the elevator and clicked heels down the shiny second floor hallway. Amy smiled as they passed the colorful murals. When they reached the nurses’ station, the white-clad figures smiled and nodded, but continued their work without interruption. Alice hurried to the common room but Amy lingered in the large arch of the doorway.

“Alice!”

She watched as the children gathered around her girl, grinning from ear to ear. These little ones had been here so long they had gotten to know Alice quite well. How they loved her. Such a mix of joy and sad–their shiny round heads bowed into Alice’s. The tiniest ones clamored for a turn on her lap as their parents smiled them on nearby.

“You look like a princess,” one of them offered in awe-filled tones.

Alice laughed and pulled out her book.

“Who’s ready for some poetry?”

A collective cheer rose and soon the room was hushed of all but Alice’s rhythmic tones.

It never ceased to amaze Amy how even the youngest was spellbound at the reading. She thought of Justine’s last days, felt a tiny twist in her heart.

I miss you, my friend.

She fingered the two volumes in her hands and turned her back on the sweet scene of poetry. There was someone she needed to see.

The south wing was quiet this evening and Amy was conscious of the approaching dark. She nodded to the nurses at the desk and slipped into room 204.

“Emory?”

She knocked lightly on the door as she entered.

There was no response, but as she drew near his bedside, he stirred.

“Who is it?”

She put her warm hand over his fingers.

“Amy?”

His vision had left him long ago but his other senses were as sharp as the north star on a clear night.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“I was wondering what was taking you so long tonight.”

“Tonight is the dinner, remember? That ceremony I told you about? I’m sorry I’m a bit later than usual.”

“Did you bring it? The book?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Will you read me the one? My favorite? I feel the need.”

She made no reply, just opened the book to the familiar words.

“No Easy Solace.

crocheted
as from a spider’s womb.”

After the reading, she wiped the tears from his eyes as she always did and he sighed and they were quiet. He was in a mood tonight and she couldn’t wait for him this time.

“Emory?”

He sighed at the breaking of the hush—though he knew her nature by now and fully expected it.

“Yes?”

“I have a surprise for you. It’s a new book. We’ve read through Neruda’s Memoirs so many times now…I thought you might enjoy something new. It’s called Delicate Machinery Suspended. It’s by a poet who is new to me—Anne Overstreet. I think you’ll like it…she’s very…well, she notices things.”

He was quiet. Amy sat in stilled silence, afraid to breathe.

When he finally spoke it was with a gruff vulnerability.

“You’re not to leave Neruda’s Memoirs behind when you come, you hear?”

“No, of course not, I know it’s your favorite. I just thought…”

“Well, then. Read, girl. Read. Let’s see what this Anne Overstreet has to offer.”

Amy smiled in the dim light. She was going to be late for the dinner. And she didn’t care one bit.

The End :)

Story by Laura Boggess. Reprinted with permission.

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