Category: Poetry Friday

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of March! Here’s the scoop: We’re doing an ekphrastic dodoitsu! The humorous dodoitsu form has four lines with a 7-7-7-5 syllabic pattern, and its topics are usually love or work. There’s lots to riff on wryly about love and work, right? Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to a.) find an image for ekphrastic inspiration, and b.) craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on March 25th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.

Yes, poetry peeps we will indeed make exquisite corpses! Eventually. Wow, that’s just not a sentence a well-placed comma will save, is it? Oh, well…

This exquisite corpse challenge was one I wasn’t quite sure about to begin with — I’ve tried writing exquisite corpse short stories before, and it’s like the worst sort of Mad Libs. Our group has a bunch of rule followers in it (*raises both hands*) so we tend to try to counteract that by being light on the rules. We didn’t try for patterns or anything – each writer was responsible for a single line, and that was that.

The Poetry Sisters came up with an order of operations – who starts, who finishes, do we want a topic or a pattern, or how are we doing this? – and then the texts begin to fly.

Liz: Okay, here’s my line. Wait… I might want to shorten it, if you haven’t started yours or sent it on…?

Me: Oops, too late.

The imagery is stunning – broken light through canyon rims, yearling hawks, steel-edged clouds and trees bowing and bending. A rattle of leaves on asphalt finishes us – and we’re moving out and away from where we began.

This month, Liz begins, and then gathers images of time and light and rest — things from the natural world as well as things which are impacted during this winter month. I echoed the same two words as I began my line, because I am all about the pattern and though we had decided against sticking strictly to one, I couldn’t help myself. I also assembled elements from the natural world as well as adding symbolic elements from February – the Lunar New Year, celebrated largely by Asian communities, and Black History Month.

…And then I passed my line on…

… to Kelly who is Anarchy with aquamarine hair. She was not here to follow my lead – and I honestly, I couldn’t expect her to be. For those following along, the whole point of the exercise is Different lines, even though I was clinging with my teeth and my fingernails to Same.

::sigh::

This comes up time after time after time. Some of us are deeply uncomfortable with things like blank verse, unrhymed verse, long or prose poems, and a lack of guardrails in the form of meter and syllabic requirements… and the rest of us like to construct our plane while it’s taking off. It often makes collaborating on a single poem very difficult (witness that we haven’t attempted that since…2018?), but it also often gives us unexpectedly strong results when doing something wholly off-the-cuff and new… like this.

And helpfully (?) the second step in our exercise was to… revise and resubmit. Rotate, wring, and repeat – and snip these phrases free like decoupage. Take this cloth and from it cut a whole new dress… Yes, I think we’ve exhausted our metaphors, but look how awesomely we did it! – Laura’s version is here, and Liz came up with this. Sara’s variation is here, and Cousin Mary Lee took a whole new direction. Andi‘s variation is here, and Kelly’s edited us here. Michelle K joins the fun and even brings a band. Carol V. worked in another variation on a Corpse and played along as well. Finally, Tricia’s poem is here, and she’s hosting the rest of the Poetry Friday crew this week, probably (hopefully?) sans additional corpses. More Poetry Peeps may post throughout the day – I truly can’t wait to see where else this project takes my fellow poets – so check back as we round up all the …um, corpses. (Cue lines from Monty Python: Bring out your dead…!)

We had a great group of words, to begin with, but it took a while to feel comfortable cutting anyone’s lines – even though we all agreed that we were wholly free to fold, spindle, and mutilate the original. Eventually, I came up with an initial stanza:

(It was brassy-loud and bold, and I liked it – but a few of us had talked about writing a new draft another day, to see how the lines and words moved us in a new moment… so, I waited. Sure enough, Wednesday, I didn’t feel like that bright and brassy winner, so wrote a new stanza:)

Not the most… upbeat conclusion. Here, the fresh wind doesn’t rattle us and turn us around. The emergence of brightness has shifted to steel-edged gray. But, even broken, the light persists.

Now more than ever, when things feel like a tsunami about to break over our heads, we needs the world of words to warm us, nourish us, and keep us going. So friends, as always, tell your stories. Write your poems. Say your piece, and sing your songs. Be well, and do well. Stay warm, in this last gasp of winter, and find the peace and beauty in this world – and as always, don’t forget to share it. Happy Weekend.

Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday!

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of December! Here’s the scoop: We’ve got a ringing in our ears! Clock chimes, the Liberty bell, church bells, school bells, ding-dong merrily – we’ll be writing with bells on about bells of all kinds. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on December 31st (riiiight before your hopefully safe New Year’s shindig, so plan ahead) in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.

Well, speaking of planning ahead, I certainly expected this post to go better, but my body is insisting on lying flat instead of sitting up doing much. Ah, well. For more brilliant takes on our November ode, don’t miss Sara’s poem, Laura’s poem, and Tricia’s is here. Poetry Friday is ably hosted by Ruth coming to us from the intriguingly named There Is No Such Thing As A God-forsaken Town. Ruth joined us in writing an ode today, so yay Ruth! Michelle K. shares her ode here, Linda M’s is here, while Linda B’s is here! Heidi’s ode is an acrostic! Jone’s ode is here, and Carol V’s praise is here. More Poetry Peeps may check-in throughout the weekend, so stay tuned for my very slow round-up.

Our precis this month was to write a poem that was an ode to autumn. Odes tend to have three sections – a kind of a layering that moves from an initial thought, a shift deeper, and then a turning toward the end. Some of us banged away on the form before we thought about rhyme while others of us jumped straightaway into trying to find thematic words that went with rhyme. In an attempt not to recreate our hymns to autumn of 2015, some Poetry Sisters discussed challenging themselves to create their poems non-nature focused. Ouch! Other than pumpkin-spiced everything, which is wholly unnatural anyway (okay, maybe not, but close), most people who love autumn tend to love… the nature of it! Frosts and changed leaves and drifts of leaves and big-headed mums and the swift drift of woodsmoke, and… hm. I obviously could write a poem about my love for the trees and leaves and such, but I also love a concept that makes me dig past the obvious, so I fiddled around and did some thinking… What happens in my life without fail, every autumn?

winter concert practice

September, late, and in an airless box,
We fan our pages, desperate for a breeze.
Sight-reading scores with one eye on the clock
In sweating ranks. Our voices drone like bees

As we commit each note and bright reprise
To memory. We dream of early nights
When sudden sundown catches by surprise
October rooms gilded by firelight.
For then, we’ll know these notes and harmonize!
And stand prepared for performance spotlight.
Or so we fool ourselves and fantasize
But late November tells us otherwise…

For EVERY YEAR the winter concert looms
As sudden as an iceberg in the fog!
That shrugged off “some day” morphs. Impending doom
Accompanies the notes through which we slog…

But…every singer warming up to C,
The orchestra, while tuning to their A
Know life with music gives no guarantees,
But feeds the soul. – Reason enough to stay.

I hope you had a lovely Thursday, filled with just as much noise and tumult or peace and quiet as your soul craved, with celebration of family and repudiation of the wholesale murder and greed from which the original American holiday sprung. I was wholly satisfied with my first visit to family since the Great Isolation began; even sitting in a chair and doing nothing but laughing at our collective goofiness was a precious, precious gift I will never take for granted again. Happy autumn, happy weekend.

You’re invited to try our challenge in the month of September! We’re writing tanka in response to a poem we love from the Poetry Friday universe. Choose to respond to an original poem of any sort, from anyone who participates in Poetry Fridays – give us a link to the original poem, then go tanka-trading away, and make something tanka-true and new. Are you thinking of a poem you love? Good! There’s still time to play with your 5-7-5 creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on September 24th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.