The TweetSpeak theme for April was candy, or maybe it was Daily Doses, or was it National Poetry Month? Anyway, with my confessed weakness for candy corn, I forgot the doses and Poetry Month and went looking high and low for some candy. 

I looked at the Facebook pages for TweetSpeak Poetry and T.S. Poetry Press I looked in the comments for all the posts in April (all the comments, and trust me, there were A LOT of comments in April). I looked at blogs. I even looked in my email (yes, my email – containing some of the most interesting email messages in the world, I think). 

I found candy. 

Boy, did I find candy. I was the kid in the candy shop. I didn’t know what to buy with my nickel. So I spent 25 cents and bought five pieces of candy. 

They were wonderful. They were not chocolate, however. Chocolate is not candy, according to my wife; chocolate is one of the four basic food groups. 

But they were all good. 

Darlene at Simply Darlene had some figurative if not literal Red Hots. 

Gluttonous
tongues
lick
greedy pink
sweet

and drill
woodpecker
holes, giddy-up
straight
through
chocolate’s heart.

Who me?
No, no,
no. .

Honeycrisp
apples
rocket
this country-fried
vegan girl
toward
gluttony’s
yummy moon.

It’s my mustached
tall drink
o’ water cowboy
husband
who
flirts

mouth-first, with
miniature
cakes

all mixed
whipped
baked
fluffed out
and
fancy-pants sugar
sprinkled.

Grace Marcella Brodhurst-Davis had an entire candy jar, including the Red Hots:

The Candy Jar

She stands tall
Atop the console in my entry hall
Vessel for candied contentment
Sweet childhood memories
Now my posterity’s
She is a regal lady

Her mermaid-like gown
Flows gracefully from
Her buxom-bodied phial
Fecund with sweet treats
Proudly displayed for trial 

She’s entertained many varieties
From lollipops to lemon drops
Facilitated certain balance
Between upstart ‘Red Hots’ 
And indecisive ‘Sweet Tarts’ 

Though she’s been packed 
And traveled quite a lot
She’s been bobbled and toppled
It’s a wonder she’s still intact
She remains a regal lady

Maureen Doallas created some cocoa balls, bonbons, and sugary things – and even an advertisement!

Playing Her Craft

Your superhero swings
in her cherry red boots,

high on the mayplay
and jacked up on coffee.

Heavy with poems,
she emerged Mondays,

already big, her deliveries
of off-counter words your sugar,

each just a play for real
-world encounters in a minute

or two. She drizzled nothing
sweeter to us than a promise

to continue playing with candy
-themed poetic picks featured

so often at Every Day Poems
we’re going to add a hashtag

to remember to tweet the weekly
new combinations: a month of Play

-Doh, bonbons, and cocoa balls to grab
at the right time and leave here.

Nancy (or is it Davis?) Rosback found some candy that I hesitate to describe, but it reminded me of that hot tamale gum I chewed as a child.

just look at the two of them together
red tongues and sticky syrup in their hair
some on the spoon and down the front of their shirts
thinking that we might want to dose e dō.

Britton Minor developed some haiku-ish candy:

While the branches swayed
I ate the candy bar whole
Three lemonheads fell 

And then Darlene came back with some (Yay!) jelly beans, down-home style:

i know my rhymes
are childish
in comparison
to your alls
who know
bigger words
‘n paint purtier
scenes
with things mightier
than assorted jelly
beans.

it’s sorta
like when the Clampetts
bumped (& burped) into
to town
and met that dude
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson
at the gas
station
hall o’
fame 

But with all these riches, did I find my prize, my sought-after sweetness of orange yellow and white, my candy corn? 

Alas, no candy corn
no sweet kernels of saturated
high-fructose corn syrup
(I don’t care)
no getting sick after
eating the third one
no cloying feeling
on my teeth
no sugar high

just a sugar sigh

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

___________

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

From the Playground of L & L on Facebook.

It is going to be hard to explain this one. Needless to say, Laura Boggess and Matthew Kreider were complicit. And now we are all trying to make our next mental hygiene appointment.

Drawing on Skitch, accessed through Evernote, by Lyla Lindquist. Half the inspiration by Princess L.L.
___________

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

She swings open the heavy oak door of the coffee shop, holding a small plate of chocolate truffles. It’s a new ganache, she tells us. Like a superhero wearing cherry red boots, she’s emerged from her candy cave on a mission. She’s the owner of the candy shoppe. And today she wants to share her craft. 

I’m in the right place. At the right time. And already jacked up on candy. As a subscriber to Every Day Poems, I’ve received regular deliveries of candy-themed poetry to my inbox all month long.

I flex my spine like an infatuated 13-year-old, “Do you like poetry?” 

Maybe it was the sugar, I don’t know, but we stood together at the counter and spoke of cocoa balls and bonbons drizzled with poetry. There’s nothing sweeter than sharing.

In the month of May Tweetspeak Poetry wants to continue sharing. And playing.

If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Every Day Poems. We’re going to play with these poems.

1. On Mondays, the Every Day Poem in your inbox becomes Play-Doh. Pinch off a word. Or more. Mix in your words and colors. Until yours.

2. Tweet your poems to us. Add a #mayplay hashtag so we can find it and maybe share it with the world

3. Or leave your found poem here in the comment box for each week’s May Play post

May is for play. Your poems don’t need to be big and heavy. (We like little candies, remember?) Tweet new combinations of found poems as often as you like. Whenever you find a minute or two, grab a word. Make a poem.

Tweet it. Share it. Just play with it. We’ll read your tweets and share some plates of your weekly play each week. We might even ask you to record your poem to be featured in our Top 10 Poetic Picks. Basically, we’ll tell everyone we know about it.

Begin with today’s Every Day Poem.

Enjoy yourself. While you’re at it, if you meet anyone with a plate full of truffles, invite them over to come play with us. We may bite. But we promise to share.

Finally, if you have a short story about why you love Every Day Poems, perhaps even a real-world encounter (think candy shop), post it to your blog and leave your link in Monday’s May Play comment box. 

You might earn some chocolate candy roses…

Photo by Andrea KW. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Matthew Kreider.

___________

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

It was a cold, foggy morning in Covina, California. 1967. My mother had just suited me up in an elaborate hobo costume she made for Hobo Day at school. She rushed me out the door with my Diver Dan lunch box. I continued across the quiet cul-de-sac, as I did every morning, to pick up Lesley Anne; we would hold hands as I walked her to Kindergarten, then I’d continue on to my first-grade class. My mother endorsed magic moments like that. She was an artist and a colorful individual who nurtured my imagination and creativity.

Amidst the sporadic magic moments, my parents fought nightly—loud, often disturbingly loud, which escalated into mom breaking down crying. Dad wasn’t much of a right-brained, feelings guy. He was a survivor, a tough guy, an ultra-responsible one. That is all my dad knew how to teach: responsibility and survival. It was burdensome and disturbing.

The rare moments I was able to engage my imagination and creativity, time seemed to suspend. Though my parents argued ritually, I found escape and joy through the creative bond I had with my mother and the artistic imagination she was able to foster in me.

Fast forward: I am sitting in my cubicle, entering data, crunching numbers, checking details and instruction narratives. It’s the boring part of what I do—the repetitive, left-brained part, that doesn’t come natural for me. This is where I need to tell myself, “Focus Reno, don’t take this part for granted.” I would rather be exercising creativity in order to make a job more profitable.

My boss came up to me a couple weeks back, telling me, “Reno, the idea you proposed in the morning meeting was awesome. That is the third job in two days you found ways to make profitable. What has gotten into you lately? You’re on fire.”

I told her, “I found this Facebook site called Every Day Poems. I subscribe to their daily delivery and read a poem in the morning. Then I look at a prompt or instruction. For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing poetry, brainstorming lines. I imagine the right-brained play is overflowing into my creative process on the job.”

“Whatever you’re doing,” she said, “don’t stop. It’s really working.”

My mother encouraged imagination, supported romantic thinking, and nurtured me to flourish in creative development. I guess it was time to find her ways again, here in the midst of my often left-brained life. I didn’t expect to discover these ways through the simple act of just having fun with Every Day Poems. But here I am at an e-venue, where I play, imagine, create, dream, get encouraged by others, and write a poem a day. No hobo costume needed.

Photo by Fiddle Oak. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Reno K. Lawrence.

___________

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

We might do this just for today. Maybe we’ll do it on Tuesday. Maybe you’ll have to wait two weeks for your next Daily Dose. Lyla and I can be that way. You should see our email exchanges.

Well, okay, this is based on one of our email exchanges. This is what we talked about today, after Lyla came tromping into my kitchen with her wet boots at 8 a.m. to discuss an editorial matter.

It is a dangerous thing to do business with me (Princess LL). Next thing you know you are doing an impetuous version of a Daily Dose, where your readers never know when the next edition will actually appear.

Drawing on Skitch, accessed through Evernote, by Lyla Lindquist. Half the inspiration by Princess L.L.
___________

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.

Can you find a poem in this photo? If I were to find one, it might be in those hands, the blue shadows, or the three roses.

Share your poems with us here in the comment box, so we can celebrate each other’s words.

(Also, did you know? Our May theme here at Tweetspeak and Every Day Poems will be Roses. Some of the poems may surprise you!)

Photo by Zahira. Creative Commons, via Flickr.
___________

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 Matthew Kreider.

1 Art

When I was in college, my eyelids often weighed more than my backpack. The top floor of the library provided me a place for quiet and rest. I remember slowing down as I listened to the low-frequency hum of the air unit, the rubbery slide of elevator doors and the rustling of page turns. I drifted off and drooled quite a bit during those naps. Now, after scrolling through 25 of the world’s most beautiful college libraries, I’m drooling again, but more from lust than a need for rest.

Color wakes me up. It refracts my attention. And yet many Americans have a penchant for jumping into the grey and beige puddles of subdivisions. But the Italians! The Italians know how to pay attention. Can you find the poems inside these pictures of Italian Colour?

2 News

Every writer counts on earning posthumous fame, right? Not for selfish reasons, either. We merely want to leave our descendants with a fortune the size of a Russian novel. But even if our royalties never rise from the dead, maybe our progeny will at least find a job. Here’s one publisher set to release a collaboration between the descendants of Dickens and Tolkien.

Today is National Poem in Your Pocket Day. In an age of smart phones, think of the number of poems we can fit into our pockets now. Still, my hunch is that some of my most dearly beloved poets wouldn’t have an inkling such a holiday existed. They’d just be walking down the river, by themselves, with a pocket full of sunflower seeds.

3 Publishing

You want to write a book. The walls of your study are tacked up and covered with torn pages from the most flourishing fiction titles of the last 100 years. You comb through syntax, themes and genres. You must crack this code and determine the x factor responsible for creating a best seller. But there’s a better way. Hit Lit by James W. Hall is a helpful examination of a century’s worth of successful books. From To Kill a Mockingbird to Twilight, he claims these powerhouses share 12 features.

But maybe it all comes down to food? After listening to The Splendid Table on public radio this past weekend, I reveled in how buttery suggestion and steamy imagination can sizzle on a white plate. Writers can learn a lot from foodies. This savory list of the Best Food Books of 2011 might have you writing like a foodie musicologist in no time.

4 Business

We don’t normally think of the practice of human resources as the stuff of poetry. But if you listen carefully to the HR manager’s language and craft, you’ll hear a social poet at work:

“Continually diagnosing where your people are in the development cycle and flexing your leadership style to meet their specific needs are steps that are paramount to your ability as a leader to develop your peak performers.”

We all need to be well-versed in knowing How to Get the Best People on Your Team, and Keep Them.

Because distractions prey in coffee shops and search engines, you might be interested in these distraction-blocking apps and other defensive tactics to help you manage your time. They’re just one click away. Please ignore any inbox dings until you get there.

5 Creativity

Although Sylvia Plath enjoyed wearing an apron in the kitchen, she also felt its heavy domesticated tension hang from her waist. Now you can taste for yourself how creativity springs to life in the kitchen, even from the pages of The Joy of Cooking. Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” was penned while baking this recipe for lemon pudding cake.

Kitchens nag. Ad infinitum. Right now my counters are peppered with coffee grounds, and my sink basins are constipated with red sauce and dirty pots. But these mundane rhythms of cooking and cleaning are good for creativity, when we get around to doing them. Novelist Haruki Murakami says, “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

6 Write-It

Now it’s time for a walk — a poem walk. Force your ex-lover to leave the restaurant. Invite your newborn to crawl to your feet. Or maybe even woo that old, bronze-eyed “Marathon Boy” with a fresh toga and a pair of sandals.

Fit inside someone’s skin and write a persona poem. Here’s one example written from the perspective of a convicted murderer. You can watch a video of the poet reading the poem.

7 Poems

A poem a day keeps the doctor away. Dr. Milton Ehrlich is a psychologist who understands poetry is good for the brain, even when it becomes a “mad obsession”. After you read Ehrlich’s “Vintage Lovers”, hop on over to Every Day Poems, your local poetry pharmacy, and pick up a daily subscription. Your body will thank you for it.

Of course, the psychologist has no monopoly of understanding when it comes to the health benefits of poetry. In “Regarding the Mandala” by Catherine McDonald, consider the ascetic:

“the monk who, tools in hand, turns
       away from his work
to stroke the child’s curved cheek.”

8 People

The clean, uncomplicated design of Apple’s computers and software doesn’t typically conjure up any hurly-burly for their users. A closer inspection of the life of Steve Jobs, however, reveals an ambitious and steely reign still worthy of Shakespearean drama.

An interviewer placed two hypothetical prizes on the table for Pablo Neruda. He was asked to choose between a presidency and a Nobel Prize. “If they put them on the table in front of me, I’d get up and sit at another table,” said the Chilean poet and politician. And which of his literary works would he save from a fire first? “Possibly none of them. What am I going to need them for? I would rather save a girl.” Read Pablo Neruda’s “The Art of Poetry, No. 14″ interview at The Paris Review.

9 Education

Does poetry still have a spot in public education? One high school senior said, “When I was reading a lot of Shakespeare, I actually started to think in strange sentence orders.” But in an environment of state standards and high-stakes testing, poetry often gets lost in talk of math and science curricula. What do you think? Do students need more poetry?

A number of university professors think so. They’re offering online poetry courses, creating Stanford-esque opportunities for hundreds of thousands of students. One professor says,

“Poetry is really good in this setting because you can read it alone and get so much out of it, and be perfectly fine with it, but the next step was [to] hang out with some intuitively smart people and collectively — together, collaboratively — let’s read the poem together.”

He knows he can’t read thousands of essays, but the collaboration and comments will allow the best to rise to the top. In the meantime, the masses participate in poetry.

10 Sound n Motion

Poets have grand conversations. Poets On Poetry (P.O.P.) “is an evolving conversation between and about poets. Each poet answers anonymous questions by leaving a new question for another poet.” Let’s have more of this.

Have you clocked 10,000 hours of writing yet? Okay, delete your spreadsheets, take a deep breath, and watch this latest episode of Yuvi Zalkow’s Failed Writers Series. You won’t be writing, but you will rack up some laughter here. And possibly an epiphany.

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

___________

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 son and I have been talking about his future. He stands just a few of his 38-inch inseam steps away from adulthood and important decisions — where to study, what to study, what to do when he’s done. The calendar is unforgiving, each day bringing him closer to his final year of high school.

Last week he sat down on the dark side of my office. I leaned back in my squeaky orange desk chair and noticed how the light from a single lamp bounced off his eyes as he looked at the ceiling, then the floor. Books and work piled up on every open surface and three computers gaped open, churning away over something very serious. Smart-looking certificates on the wall entitling me to a handful of letters after my name made my office seem the ideal place to find wisdom on the big questions of life.

Fingers laced behind his head, he pumped his powerful arms like bellows and pushed out a long breath. “I don’t want to screw it up, Mom,” he said.

“I just . . . I don’t want to end up like you.”

The sage aura enveloping my office vanished like smoke in a rain shower and I decided sometime soon I would replace the burned out light bulbs.

Oh, I knew what he meant. He doesn’t want to do things the hard way. He wants to get it right the first time.

When I was my son’s age, I wrote a weekly column for The Milbank Herald Advance, our county paper. Famous with the blue-haired ladies who drank coffee in the cafe at 10:00 every weekday morning, I left my town of 3,000 to study journalism in the university with a goal folded up on lined paper in my back pocket: a best-selling book and syndicated newspaper column by age 40.

Midway through college, I made what my son considers to be the biggest mistake of my life. I marched into the registrar’s office and declared a new major: political science.

I murdered my writing dreams in their sleep.

My son knows it. And he worries that a reasonably bright person could do something so stupid. I had my reasons. They even made sense at the time. But twenty-some years and a winding career path later, I work here in the shadows of my basement office to breathe new life into them.

L.L. Barkat encourages me with a story of her daughter hosting a cooking show in the foyer of their Tudor home, not quite a television studio complete with a large network audience.

If we are worried about our writing future, because at the moment we seem to be standing in the foyer with a make-shift table of old cooking tools and a magic-marker sign to announce our show, we shouldn’t worry. We are exactly where we need to be. Tomorrow we might move to the front porch and entertain a few neighbors as well. This is also exactly where we need to be. The key is to keep working with small audiences, while gradually making forays into slightly larger arenas. Right now, Sonia is in the foyer, exactly where she wants to be . . . (p. 108)

Books and newspaper columns are not on my radar today, but for the past four years I’ve come back to giving the words a place to go, keeping a small blog and making a few meaningful connections along the way. Every once in a while I try something new, and every once in a while I notice a someone pulls up a chair in the foyer. Some days, I even think it’s exactly where I want to be.

It’s anaphylactic,
this shock
the poison juice of a
forbidden fruit
dribbled down my throat
so the silver tape
constricts til I need
a longer sort of breath.
Look, just rip off
the cap, don’t fuss
for the vein, Quick!
ram it into my thigh,
right here, on the outside
Break the pen already,
release the epinephrine
words into my stream.

_________

We’re discussing L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water, chapters 21-26 on Publishing. How have your publishing goals changed over time? How do you develop a small audience?

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 our last post in this series, chapters 27-32 on Glitches and Time.

Photo by Vinoth Chandar. 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.

___________

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.

Poetry can be hard. Hard to read and hard to write. But this doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. And enlightening at the same time. Kind of like candy for the mind.

Hard candy, perhaps. Like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

          The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
          Petals on a wet black bough.

That’s it. The entire poem. Deceptively short. Seemingly easy breezy. But like a piece of hard candy, the more you work at it, the longer it seems to last. Volumes have been written on Pound and the school of Imagist poetry to which this work belongs. The hard-packed language, the compressed emotion, the seemingly random linking of images to convey feeling, the profound implications of a word like “apparition” make this poem much more than it first seems.

More like bubble gum, endlessly expandable and malleable, is Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Surely you remember this one. It begins like this and ends in the same vein:

         ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
             Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
          All mimsy were the borogoves,
            And the mome raths outgrabe.

         “Beware the Jabberwock, my son
             The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
          Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
             The frumious Bandersnatch!”

It seems mere silliness, but there is a method to Carroll’s madness, for the way we assign meaning to the nonsense words demonstrates the expansive and malleable nature of language itself.

A little tougher than bubble gum, but just as stretchy is taffy–and e. e. cummings. (See, even his name alone is as playful!). Like a piece of taffy, his poetry is colorful and bright, but strong and chewy, too. Cummings’ poems look deceptively like child’s play, but there is much more than first graces the tongue, and it takes a bit of work to subdue it. Here are the closing lines of “in just—“ (just to give a taste):

          it’s
          spring
          and
               the
                       goat-footed
          balloonMan      whistles
         far
         and
          wee

Not to everyone’s taste (perhaps not many), is black licorice–and this dark, dusky poem by the feminist writer Margaret Atwood. (Confession: I don’t like black licorice at all, but I do love this devilishly clever poem). It goes like this:

          You fit into me
          like a hook into an eye
          A fish hook
          An open eye
Ouch.

A gentler kind of candy—and poem—is the simple Dumdum pop. Remember those? For how many children is a Dumdum pop their first introduction to candy? Mild, but totally sweet, and with a stick that prevents choking. I think it was the first candy I had as a child. Likewise one of my first—and favorite—poems from back then is this:

          I eat my peas with honey.
          I’ve done it all my life.
          They do taste kind of funny,
          But it keeps them on the knife.

Oh, how I loved—and still love—this poem. But yet again, there is more here than the surface silliness suggests. For we see that this strangeness of eating peas with honey actually has a reasonable cause: keeping the peas on the knife. But then we realize—even as children—that the problem begins with using the wrong tool—a knife—to eat peas. Like so many other things in life, one false turn results from another. What an important lesson conveyed in such a fun way!

And they say candy’s not good for you.

Photo by Graffiti Land. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Karen Swallow Prior.

___________

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.

Want to borrow or share this cool quote? Feel free.

We could think of nothing sweeter to do with Cool Quotes Poetry.

This quote is also available at our Store, as an iPad cover or mousepad.

***

Quote from untitled poem by Gregory Orr. Blossoms photo by L.L. Barkat.

___________

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 sit on my brother’s porch, breathing in the honeysuckle’s incense (Lonicera sempervirens), trying to identify that first step, that first choosing, when I knew I would write. I cannot remember a time when there was not a passion for cadence and knowing and naming.

I come from a family that read hungrily and constantly; there was music—banjo to clarinet to piano—and hikes beside copper-colored ponds, beneath the huff and shrug of spruce at places like Peaks of Otter, reciting the names of deciduous trees. In between, stillness, time to reflect. And within that, Walter Farley’s novels and Webster’s Dictionary, the 1970 edition, I Capture the Castle and World Book Encyclopedia, which opened up the universe and made me hungry to understand why a Tennessee Walking Horse was what it was. But I cannot tease it apart, say, here I begin, here I turn my face toward a different tree line, moving from reader and listener to writer. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end.

I had a flute teacher once who stood me on a wooden floor and told me to feel the planed boards under my feet and to think of oak roots, to hold a middle G for as long as I could sustain the largeness of the tree, root to branch, with my breath and mind. We did this over and over again. That note will always sound like damp earth and acorn meat to me, and smell like tarnished silver. Another teacher argued passionately about whether hot chocolate had any part of texture that could be called grainy. Each time I try another variety of cocoa, I am tempted to dip into the dregs to retest the theory. I know these moments shaped my work because I recollect them vividly.

It’s all of a piece: the amalgam of sugar and milk and chocolate, the oak-root note. I want to follow something deeper in.

The beach down the hill is composed of pea- to pumpkin-sized rocks and gritty sand. That sand is a myriad of shapes, hexahedrons, spikey stars, honeycombs, colors ranging from saffron to blush to azure. I cannot recall a time when such things did not fascinate me, and I don’t know exactly when that fascination moved onto the page. I pull up a chair and grab a book on geology. This is also a pivotal moment.

I keep turning, the road branching out behind and in front of me. I want to know everything and I want time to examine the architecture of a checkered mallow. Where else can such desires co-exist so exquisitely, where else is permission given for such fascination with simply everything, but poetry?

Photo by Maccio Capatonda. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Anne M. Doe Overstreet, author of Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems

___________

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.

Delicato come un fiore… Colorato come la gioia… Profumato come la primavera… il canto dell’usignolo accompagna il profumo della vita… L’amore è il profumo della vita*

No Tear Yet Blooms

Winter’s lifeline cut,
spring lets loose

its unseen shaman.
This Philomela, her body

sun-kissed and delicate
of bone, conjures no night

-colored song to rob
the joy of a morning long

in reverie. No tear yet blooms
in the nightingale’s eye.

Love distills her fragrance
only when the petals fall.

_____

*Italian translation: Delicate like a flower…Colored like joy…Fragrant like Spring…the song of the nightingale is the fragrance of life…The fragrance of life is Love

Painting and Italian post by Ylenia Mino. English poem by Maureen Doallas. Visit Ylenia Mino on Facebook and Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper

___________

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

Let me be clear: this first item—Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style—has pretty much nothing to do with poetry. But it’s so flipping creative I just had to include it. Besides, what else are you going to do on a trans-Atlantic flight?

Since we’re going trans-Atlantic, we ought to bring a map or two, just in case our smart phones aren’t as smart as they think they are. Seriously, I love maps. We use them as decoration at our house: a world map in the hall outside the bathroom and a U.S. map behind my closet door (there wasn’t any other wall space large enough for it). So I was thrilled to find these gorgeous maps, including a map that is also a pictorial history of my beverage of choice. Any guesses what that might be?

2 News

Poetry makes waves in Germany: when a poet with a Nazi past writes an anti-Israel poem in a country where Holocaust guilt and shame still linger, well, it’s hardly surprising that said poem creates a maelstrom of commentary and confusion.

Former U.S. poet laureate Reed Whittemore passed away last week. He was 92. The New York Times retrospective of Whittemore illuminated his urbane exterior that concealed, or perhaps allowed, a strong subversive streak:

Mr. Whittemore’s poetic style bespoke an artisanal attention to craftsmanship. Often described as spare and elegant, it combined the natural cadences of speech with precise metrical control, keen wit and the judicious use of both end-rhyme and internal rhyme. But beneath this composed surface his verse sounded notes that ranged from mordant to melancholy.

3 Publishing

I’m a babe in arms when it comes to social media. I still don’t really get the appeal, but I’m starting to: someone retweeted me! Someone else shared a link to my Tuesday blog post! I’m smart and funny and people like me! But wait, I only have 111 Facebook friends and an even paltrier 73 Twitter followers. Maybe I’m not smart or funny. Maybe no one likes me. Maybe they just followed or friended me out of pity. Craig Santos Perez isn’t quite as neurotic as I am, but he gets the ludicrous nature of social media. And he’s smart and funny, too. I just might like him.

For more on the Amazon vs. Everyone Else controversy that’s stirring the publishing waters, check out this fascinating (if long) look at Amazon’s grant-giving to the very people who love to hate them. Is this disinterested philanthropy or the ploy of an evil predator creating dependence in its prey? You decide.

In related news, more than a few someones at Amazon are probably dancing on Steve Jobs’s grave over the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Apple and the Big Six publishers.

4 Reviews

Poet and pick-up basketball player Catherine Woodard reviews a new book, From Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, that may relieve the doldrums for basketball fans who languish in a wasteland between the end of March Madness and the beginning of the NBA/WNBA seasons. Perhaps April won’t be the cruelest month this year after all?

Or maybe it will be. If you like your poetry on the dark side, there’s possibility in Michael McGriff’s new collection, Home Burial. Jeff Gordinier lauds McGriff’s language as “simultaneously spare, cinematic and tactile.”

5 Creativity

Do you need a little pick-me-up to get you in the mood to write again? To hone your focus so you can face that blank page and tell procrastination to take a hike? Step on over to Colin Nissan’s inspiring article that will have you writing the best dang poem EVER before you’re even done reading it. Guaranteed. (Sort of.)

Inspired by the Sorted Books project, Maria Popova wrote her own book spine poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. What might your book spines say?

6 Write-It

Haiku: the perfect form for busy writers?

Maybe, but even
if it’s not, at least you can
post it on Twitter!

Or if haiku’s not your thing, you could fixate on the color blue, say, or the word raven or whatever you like to fixate on. See how many times in a day that fixation recurs. Collect the incidents or images into a poem. Call it “A Message from the Universe.”

7 Poems

Poetry lover that you are, you know that April is National Poetry Month, but did you know it’s also Math Awareness Month? Mary Cornish celebrates both in one fun poem.

Here in Seattle, we have poetry on our buses. Sometimes it’s even good. But even when it’s not, it sure beats reading the fine print in the ad for Intel…or Viagra.

Poet Anne Doe Overstreet lives in the Seattle area, too, though I don’t know if she’s ever written a poem for a bus. No matter. You can still read her poem about Icarus, in which she captures a brief moment of flight before falling:

Immolation

As the horizon looms, flips over to present
an endless span of waves, I give up, surrender.
My fate’s the fate of falling. I guess I hoped for recognition,
that when I pushed my arms into the hostile sun
he would look up and see my face, the frame
of limb so like his lover, perhaps invoke my name.

Read the rest of “Immolation.”

8 Business

Guy Kawsaki distills the vision behind the Apple Store, the most profitable retailer in the United States. Rule #1: Don’t sell stuff.

Kawasaki also promotes poetry as good business. At least, that’s how L.L. Barkat interprets his advice to make your message “swallowable” by using metaphor, simile, and brevity.

9 Education

The Irish really took their poets seriously: 12 years of training to become an Ollambh, the highest poetic post; 7 years for a mere Bard. And we think a three-year MFA is killer.

If you’re feeling ambivalent about vitamins and want to see an immunologist, you can thank 1912 for giving you the words you need. These are just a few of the words that appeared in print for the first time 100 years ago. Others include punch-drunk, nosedive, sodding (thanks to that sodding rotter D.H. Lawrence) and Oreo. Who knew?

10 Sound n Motion

It’s fascinating to me that sound and motion—in this case, music and video images—can change the feel of a poem. This one became dark, even scary:

And just because I liked it, I’m including Robert Frost reading “The Road Not Taken.” The man has a fabulously deep voice. If you prefer to watch as well as listen, take a gander at Frost reciting “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

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

___________

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.

She asked nicely enough. She said Please.

In fact, when L.L. Barkat asked me for the sparrows-in-flannel-lingerie-insurance-report-poem, she said Pretty please.

At the time, I’m not sure she knew me well enough to realize that such an invitation would more likely garner an eye roll than lyrical verse about how sparrows dress for bed.

Looking back, perhaps she knew me just well enough.

I’m married to a man who will drop to an arthritic knee and sing happy birthday to one of his high school students in a crowded hallway or teach a fidgety toddler to say rubber baby buggy bumpers between the gum and candy bars in the Target checkout line while I pretend not to know him. When he wrestles one of our near-grown sons to the living room floor and ties him up in the chicken wing hold, I tell them not to wreck the furniture I and leave the room.

It’s tough to get me to unfold my arms from across my chest. My brand of fun almost always comes with a hint of reluctance and a straight face, and words like stoic, droll and deadpan come up often in my company. But some will see the quick-flashing glint in my eye, camouflaged by the stuffed shirt I often wear.

One cold, winter afternoon when I was posting Facebook updates between stops on a day of claims work on desolate country roads, L.L. must have caught that glint. Sensible conversation quickly dissolved into a playful exchange about frozen plumbing, lingerie and small birds figure skating on the ice. She knows a little something about the value of play.

When we are engaged in what feels like the serious business of writing, we may be reticent about regularly incorporating play into our writing habits. It might seem too childish, too outside our familiar routines, too unpredictable concerning its potential impact on our writing. Yet I have come to accept the drain-clog [or in my case, frozen hot tub] episodes as a kind of godsend in my writing life — a signal that I’ve been taking myself too seriously and need to change venues, from the writing counter to the sled. (Rumors of Water, pp. 70-71)

I sometimes think I’ve been taking myself too seriously most of my life. So when Pretty please came with a frozen hot tub on top, it was too much to pass up. I tapped a few lines together on my phone from that brief Facebook tomfoolery.

Hot tub, frozen

A man in bright Bermuda shorts tapped
a chisel against the ice
to free a wide-eyed yellow duck
caught swimming and mid-squeak
when the cold snapped

His wife laced up hockey skates
on winter white legs
and sniffled that they don’t
wear flannel in Florida

I poked fingers into frozen pipes and
advised it is our policy to bathe indoors
when thermometers read zero and
deductibles do not

With Spring coming into full bloom, I’m still doing all the same serious things I did all winter long. But I get up a little earlier and I read a poem (or two) every day. I pull out my leather-bound notebook and write a poem every day. I unfold my arms and accept invitations to play—even with flannel lingerie.

_________

We’re discussing L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water today, considering Habits and Structure. Maybe we won’t find you dropping to a knee and singing in public. But how do you play? How does it add dimension to your writing? To your life?

Could a disruption in your normal routine (like a drain clog) give you grist for a few lines in the comment box?

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 21-26 on Publishing.

Photo by Pink Sherbet. 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.

___________

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 intersection of Grand and Arsenal in the city of St. Louis is one part park, three parts commercial. Arsenal Street actually does a little zigzag as it crosses Grand and then runs the length of Tower Grove Park, which is due south of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Like so much of the city of St. Louis, the residential buildings in the area are red brick.

The area is also “in transition.” Not that long ago, the transition was in the direction of poor. Now, the transition is in the direction of hope. The intersection marks the beginning of an area known for ethnic restaurants, food stores and other Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Mexican, Middle Eastern and other establishments. A few blocks to the southwest is Little Bosnia – the largest settlement of Bosnia outside Bosnia itself. Thousands of Bosnians fled the Serbian war in the early 1990s and settled in St. Louis. (One of our favorite restaurants in St. Louis is close by – Grbic, specializing in Bosnian food.)

Eclectic, a jumble of cultures, neighborhoods transitioned from old South St. Louis with its German and Italian founders to newly-arrived immigrants – that’s Grand and Arsenal. But it still looks largely like it always did, in a kind of defiant red-brick splendor tying people and cultures together.

Grand & Arsenal: Poems by Kerri Webster is something like that neighborhood in south St. Louis, and she took the name from the intersection. Webster, who was writer-in-residence for Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010 (she now lives in her native Idaho), won the Iowa Poetry Prize for this collection. And it is filled with references to the city that only residents might recognize.

But the appeal of these poems is broader than only to St. Louisans. They are delightful, learned, approachable, historical and regional, and replete with literary references to Hawthorne, Lucretius, Ovid and even Agatha Christie.

Webster maintains an irregular rhythm throughout the collection, often stringing together what appear to be unrelated and disjointed lines, ideas, and observations, until the reader catches the deeper, internal rhythms. Her words are like polished shards of stone and glass, sharp and pointed. Consider “Places I Haven’t Slept:”

An island. The campground. In sixteen
states. At the sleep clinic, wanting
to strip the electrodes off
and glide home. Such feeble means: pill, wine, looped
sea sounds. In whatever bed
listening to breath, my body called
by what, jerking, muscles holding their animal
startle. By the Mississippi
in the house of sleeping women, barges
sliding past, my chest thick
with damp. The prophets thumbtacked to the wall
watching as I watched back.

In apparent homage to Rilke (and possibly Flannery O’Conner), Webster writes “Letter to a Young Poet,” and offers sound if slightly irregular advice:

Do whatever it takes to rest. When sorrow
Sites on your chest, give him a lick. I have no clue
If I’m old or young. I think you’re a young lady
who should know I’ve never been to a castle,
though I did spend a day at the Climatron and,
after, scooped lotus pods from the mud. They
didn’t dry too well. I wish you well. It’s possible
for a year to forget where it left itself. Don’t
worry. The trees immolate. My waking dreams
involve shoeing horses, pounding silver sheet
into a lake…

(In case you don’t know, the Climatron is the geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller to house the tropical plant collection at the Missouri Botanical Garden; it’s about four blocks in a straight line from the intersection of Grand and Arsenal.)

I loved this collection, and not only because of the St. Louis references. Webster describes a landscape here, an urban landscape I know and experience every day. I’ve often biked near the intersection, and have had friends who lived in the area.

The poems in Grand & Arsenal are true.

Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

___________

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 room was dank. Yet, the smell of freshly washed man, birthing dog, and piercing chemical mixed seamlessly to create a safe haven for me. I loved this place.

Effortlessly, I would give up elongated sunshine hours to step into this dark world of fixer and toner: yellow buckets that held liquid magic.

Cameras hung on the door handle. Lenses balanced on the shelves above the bench. The door creaked, the cement floor was cool.

A stool with gangly sturdy metal feet held an unraveling red foam cover together. It claimed a corner of the room as it’s own, where the light tried to steal its way in, but where my father’s large creased hands had stuffed foam into crevices to keep it out.

I would stretch my little arms up upward, grip the cold metal of the workbench and hoist my body.

I would balance my elbows on the wood panel while I stood tranfixed, staring at my father as negatives became something else entirely.

The lifting from one liquid to the next, the pegging up on the line strung above our heads, it all funneled into me, burying itself until I discovered it again, years later.

Visual art does this.

It permeates the brain at punctured intervals that we may not perceive, until years later, when something calls it outward, makes it tangible, re-contextualises it in the present.

Instant has cheapened us. We need the forgotten process but we don’t know it.

It starts with the rolling of the film into the camera body; the clicking of the dial, the turning of the wheel to set the light metre just so; the rolling back of the film to prepare it for it’s liquid birth; the fixer; the toner.

We need the process to appreciate the art.

Since reading a poem a day, I have developed something unexpected. A few months ago I was not aware of the need but it grew within me, without my knowing.

A few weeks ago, it revealed itself: the words themselves were no longer enough. I needed an extension to them: I needed to discuss them in order to process them. I needed to talk in images.

And so I started capturing poetry.

The process is cathartic. It embeds itself more deeply into the nervous system.

This is the start of a journey we will be taking to capture poetry within images. The wellingtons are waiting at the door and the woods are just beyond. You coming? If so, look for our first Image-ine post this Friday, featuring painter Ylenia Mino.

Image sourced via creative commons on Flickr, Film Strip by Sven-S Prost. Post by Claire Burge.

___________

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.

Guy Kawasaki knows how to use a well-placed rhyme. In an interview about Kawasaki’s book, for instance, he said he wanted to write something that was “really tactical, really practical.”

Rhyming, according to Kawasaki, is serious business. People actually believe rhymed statements are more accurate than unrhymed statements; so if you want to remove psychological “fences” for your customers, you might want to speak in rhymes to ease their minds. (I’m assuming Kawasaki isn’t recommending that we turn into Dr. Seuss, just that we learn how to use… a well-placed rhyme.)

In a similar poetic vein, Kawasaki also recommends three ways to make our business messages “swallowable”: use metaphor, simile, and brevity. Metaphor “[conveys] the meaning of your cause,” while similes “provide a familiar starting point,” and brevity promotes memory and repetition of your message.

Okay, so Kawasaki never quite says, “Use poetry in business.” (That’s me taking poetic license. :) But I think just about anybody can recognize that rhyme, metaphor, simile, and brevity are the tools of poetry.

It turns out, in Kawasaki’s world, that these poetic tools aren’t for lovers. They’re for good business.

So if you ever needed permission to become a student of poetry, this is your official invitation to get intimate with Whitman, Collins, or Wheeler. This is your day to say, “If poetry is good for business, then poetry is good for me.”

As part of your official invitation, I want to give you the chance to revive a dead metaphor in a poem— and post the result here in the comment box by next Friday, April 20th. Then the following week, we’ll feature one poem on our Facebook Wall (and give thanks to everyone who participated).

What’s a Dead Metaphor?

Much of our language is rooted in metaphor (there’s one now… did you catch it? :). Over time, metaphors lose their power, become tired. Here are a few you might recognize:

I cried a river of tears
We hammered out our differences
That kind of thinking is a dead end
She broke the ice at the party

Author Kim Addonizio suggests that we can revive dead metaphors in our poetry, by adding specificity (When you left, I cried the Ganges, I cried the Amazon, I cried the/entire Mississipi…)

Try it out. Take a dead metaphor and get specific with it in a poem. We look forward to your word revival.

Photo by FatMandy. Creative Commons, via Flickr. This post is a modified reprint of a post that first published at TheHighCalling.org. Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

___________

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 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.

___________

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.

Comic by Sara Barkat, age 14.
___________

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.

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.

___________

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.