{pf: peeps are talkin’ about bouts-rimés}

Welcome to another Poetry Friday Poetry adventure!

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of November! Here’s the scoop: We’re writing in the style of Valerie Worth. Unfamiliar? Renee LaTulippe shared poet Lee Bennett Hopkins’ NCTE reminiscences on her as a poet, and Renee wrote a great post highlighting her. And, now that you’ve read a bit, are you in? Good! The Poetry Sisters are continuing to throw our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION into the mix as possible. Whatever your topic or theme, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on November 24th – yep, that IS the day after Thanksgiving, so plan accordingly – in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.


We’re grateful to our Poetry Friday host today, Carol Labuzzetta Tricia’s poem right here, and Sara’s poem here. Liz’s poem is here. Mary Lee’s is here, and Laura’s popped in here. Michelle K. borrowed lines from Emily D. here. You might discover more Poetry Peeps checking in throughout the weekend, so stay tuned for the full round-up as I find them. Meanwhile… on with the poetry.

The original tale of the Bouts-rimés form has to do with a nobleman complaining of having some three hundred sonnets stolen from him. As it turns out, it wasn’t sonnets at all, only the rhyming end words. Our rhyming end words were A: profuse/abstruse/chartreuse/truce; B: incline/shine/resign/supine; C: various/gregarious/hilarious/precarious, D: ceasefire/quagmire/higher/dryer, E: transform/barnstorm/uniform/conform, F: humility/futility/nobility/tranquility; G: perturb/superb/reverb/disturb. With a couple of (horrifying) exceptions, the word list isn’t really that bad – and for once I gave myself permission to use forms of the words like inclined instead of incline. However, as there are several types of sonnets, I couldn’t really decide which would work best. I dabbled a bit writing three sonnet forms, but I found I really disliked the Terza Rima with this word list, so that one won’t ever see the light of day. Instead, here’s a Shakespearean sonnet, and a semi-Spenserian. I’ve made it a s/he poem for your amusement, but I defaulted on my illustration to HE, because we live in a sexist world, and I only found two graphics of MEN yacking, and HUNDREDS of women. (This is me, doing my bit for… equality. Or something.)


The Yack Attack
A waterfall of facts profuse
In detailed minutiae s/he shines;
The more perplexing and abstruse
Towards peak verbosity inclined.
Beyond the mere gregarious,
That tongue admits to no ceasefire.
Pleas for peace, often, various,
Unheeded. A social quagmire!
What if relentless talk transformed
To listening humility?
Could need to air one’s wit, barnstorm,
Be seen as gauche futility?

If such a thought serves to perturb
Sit with it. SHH! Let it reverb.

I think the funniest thing about the next poem is that I rarely drink coffee… it’s a “Oh, sure, I’ll have some,” drink that I have maybe once or twice a week, if that. And I know that’s not other people’s experience with coffee (I’m reminded of my friend Jules’ mug that reads “Coffee! Do stupid things faster, with more energy!), so if you’re a coffee person, this one’s for you.


La Belle Dame Sans Coffee
My day begins with apologies profuse,
Decaffeinated brain cells whine, crying ‘truce!’
Whilst wincing through faux pas, who among us shines?
To ‘grit-your-teeth-and-grin’ we become resigned …
Flubs and mistakes pre-coffee are various,
We hold as we can, our grip precarious.
A few sips of brew won’t relieve the quagmire
A FULL cuppa’s all that will create ceasefire.
Then Monday, a day full of headaches, transforms
To calm – since caffeine makes moods more uniform.
Vicious conceits give way to humility,
Soothing savage beasts back to tranquility.

Indeed, it’s a powerful brew that’s superb!
So, until we’ve had some? It’s DO NOT Disturb!


Can we agree together to dispense with quagmire, ceasefire, barnstorm or abstruse in our poetry? Those are such delicious words, of course, and the point of this poetic game is to actually make your fellow poets work pretty hard by CHOOSING the more outré vocabulary, but oy. Barnstorm. It’s just somehow unwieldy!

This time of year is just the best time for table games – sitting inside, cozy, while the weather does what it will, and we keep our brains busy. (I promise you that sitting inside, being cozy still works even if the weather doing what it will requires an air conditioner or fan to combat it.) I hope that you’re able to try this poetry game with a class, or a group of friends – even if the poems you play with aren’t as long as sonnets – admittedly those are a lot for first-timers – I know that almost everyone can write a limerick. Giving people end words for them to compose their own limerick will be… enlightening, at the very least! Never forget that DOGGEREL is also a poetic form with a long (from the 14th century!) and storied history.

(For more on the cartoonist, Mickey Bach, visit the GetWords archive.)


And thus we come to the end of October.

The summer seemed briefly endless, and now we’re free-falling through autumn, plunging towards winter. In the month of November, that traditional time of pause, I’m going to try a daily exercise of poetic gratitude. It has been a grinding summer for me personally and physically, as well as for members of my family, for those of us nationally who love books and have deep concerns for inclusivity and freedom, and then globally – oof. I’ve gotten out of the habit of journaling over the years, so a daily poetry practice is for me one way to slow down and reflect on things which are happening, to recall what I’m meant to be doing right now, which is to be present in the moment, and then to also remember what I have done in previous years during this time. This reflective practice reminds us how troubles, though seemingly endless in the moment, always pass with time. This is an especially important message now, and I hope some of you will find a gratitude practice for yourselves in the days to come. This, too, shall pass. This moment, this place, this You is right here for a reason. You will find it. You will embody it, and you will shine. ☆You are made of stars.★

Happy Weekend.

{fire season}

It’s been cold when I wake up for the last several nights, and we’ve had a brief rain – so this idea of autumn is not a fluke. “Fire season” is almost over.

Like the mother in PARTLY CLOUDY, I used to hate the idea of a season for wildfires. Fire doesn’t seem like a natural part of the natural world – but it is. Fires, insects, and tree blights are part of a natural cycle of replenishment and growth in a forest. Lightning ignited wildfires used to simply burn, but now people go through a lot of effort to make sure that don’t … and without wildfires to scour the forest floor to thin out the deadfalls and competing vegetation, to encourage certain tree species seeds to fall and certain flowers to bloom, to break down and return certain nutrients to the soil, the forest isn’t as strong and healthy of an ecosystem as it needs to be.

Even knowing all of this, it’s hard not to hate the fires. The climate changes that create severe drought make them worse, and the fires are burning hotter and longer, creating a changed landscape and ecosystem as trees don’t have time to grow back before the next big blaze. On top of all the other changes we’re facing as a society, this comes with the additional trauma of people losing their homes. It isn’t within our natures not to fight for what is ours, and it’s going to take a lot to move past our ingrained responses to fire and loss. But every time this seems like a hopeless tangle, I remind myself that human beings are flexible and creative, and because we are also deeply stubborn creatures, we will figure out a way around this. We’ll relearn managing the forests and learn new ways of using water and our natural resources to everyone’s benefit. We will manage this. We don’t have any choice.

In the meantime, we welcome autumn – a chance to breathe and recover, and hopefully, to await the rain.

Bradbury Season: Butler’s October Country


“I lost an arm on my last trip home.”

“Look, your ancestors survived that era—survived it with fewer advantages than you have…”
“Strength. Endurance. To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could.”

(Quotes from Kindred by Octavia Butler, p. 9 and p. 51)

Octavia Butler’s imaginative and thought-provoking Kindred might seem a strange choice for Bradbury Season, but I guess chills – spooky feelings and shivers are where you find them. I don’t usually waste my fear on amorphous things in the dark. The things I fear are real, and the depravity of an inhuman being enslaving another leaves me with a sort of bottomless horror, a horrible cold tightening of my heart as if it were an exposed nerve painfully jangling.

Many of Butler’s novels carry similar themes of abuse of power, gender role issues, and racial conflicts. Kindred carries all of these within the loosely science fiction package of time travel. A 20th century woman, Dana Franklin, is ripped from the present into the past every time a young man’s life is in danger. In the 1800’s, though light-skinned, Dana is seen as African, and Africans in 1800’s Maryland were slaves — and nothing else. Her first meeting with the boy, Rufus, she saves him from drowning. Subsequent meetings with him reveal to her that he is her ancestor, and she must save him. If she does not — she will not have been born, and history will unwind, losing her within it.



Kindred depicts clearly the ways in which the American system of slavery was complex. Dana’s great grandmother, Alice, is adept at running away, far more adept at it than Dana. But she, together with Rufus, are the key to Dana’s own existence. Dana is torn between wanting to help bright, determined Alice in any way she can, all the while knowing that any help she gives may mean she ceases to exist anywhere but in the 1800’s, a horrifying thought, as her husband, Kevin is back home, beside himself as his wife fades in and out of the present. Kevin coming with – in an attempt to understand and solve the issue of her vanishing – proves even thornier — he is Caucasian, and is immediately in a position of power over his own wife. He wants to be with her and to protect her — but she’s obviously “sleeping with the enemy,” losing the trust of her ancestors, and causing a rift in her own marriage, as the imbalance of power begins to take its toll on Kevin and Dana in relation to one another. The whole tale twists in ways the reader never expects, wounding, warping and mutilating everything — as slavery does — forever.

Butler came up with the idea to write the story in college after hearing one frustrated young man, humiliated and embarrassed by an ancestry he saw as weak and servile, frustrated by their acceptance of disgusting and disrespectful behavior in the workplace and in other areas say, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.”

Having no real understanding of the lengths slaves went through to keep their children “safe,” within the flimsy protection of their home plantation, and alive, this confused young man actually blamed people he assumed to be meek, bowing, scraping “Uncle Tom’s,” who had “held him back.” Butler carried this conversation with her for thirty years, and wrote her book in 1979. She said,

‘And I thought about my mother, because she used to take me to work with her when she couldn’t get a baby sitter and I was too young to be left alone, and I saw her going in the back door, and I saw people saying things to her that she didn’t like but couldn’t respond to. I heard people say in her hearing, ‘Well, I don’t really like colored people.’ And she kept working, and she put me through school, she bought her house – all the stuff she did. I realized that he didn’t understand what heroism was. That’s what I want to write about: when you are aware of what it means to be an adult and what choices you have to make, the fact that maybe you’re afraid, but you still have to act.’‘

(Charles H. Rowell – An Interview with Octavia E. Butler – Callaloo 20:1)

Butler’s creativity is even reflected in the title. Kindred not only has the obvious meaning of ‘family,’ kindness and a fellow spirit, but there’s an aural aspect of the play on words – kin dread. Finding that your ancestry includes both slaves and masters certainly produces dread in Dana, and gives the novel a pall of Gothic darkness and grimness as Dana is buffeted by things outside of her control – just like a slave.

Butler forcing us back in time, together with her character, symbolize our repeated visits to the past, trying to make sense of what was and what is now. Through Dana’s eyes, we see the slaves make the choices that they can, within the circumstances that they have. We better understand that the decisions before them were more chilling than any ghost story, and the heroism they showed was more than simply defying death — but was defying life, grinning into its polished fangs, and living anyway.

Between 1997 and 2001 The SciFi Channel put together an amazing thing called Seeing Ear Theater, an audio theater. Kindred was recreated starring Alfre Woodard as Dana, Lynn Whitfield, and featuring the actress Ruby Dee. Arguably one of the best audio adaptations of any book, this version is no longer available, as Seeing Ear became defunct in 2001. Still, hopeful fans poke around SciFi’s abandoned website with optimism.

“In Kindred,” Robert Crossley wrote in his introduction to the novel, “Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.” The work of Octavia Butler certainly does that. This is my tribute to her, as a woman whose writing I have loved and whose creativity I can only hope to imitate. Some said she took a sensitive subject and trivialized it, writing a “sci-fi novel” about slavery. I believe instead she took winding cloths off of an old wound, and showed that it still festers, and needs to be cleaned…

If you haven’t yet experienced Kindred, choose a quiet night with a lot of wind, and jump in.

Happy Bradbury Season.


There are more stars in this crisp Bradbury Season sky. Don’t miss two from the Interactive Reader, the cutest monster ever from the 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast crew (and MAN does that monster need a sandwich — and a better agent!), the TERRIFYING Neil Gaiman at Writing and Ruminating, and more Bradbury Season type book reviews for all ages as they sparkle throughout the day at Chasing Ray — the blog that started it all.

Starry pic taken by Ray Bradbury; appears here courtesy Little Willow.

Bradbury Season: Butler's October Country


“I lost an arm on my last trip home.”

“Look, your ancestors survived that era—survived it with fewer advantages than you have…”
“Strength. Endurance. To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could.”

(Quotes from Kindred by Octavia Butler, p. 9 and p. 51)

Octavia Butler’s imaginative and thought-provoking Kindred might seem a strange choice for Bradbury Season, but I guess chills – spooky feelings and shivers are where you find them. I don’t usually waste my fear on amorphous things in the dark. The things I fear are real, and the depravity of an inhuman being enslaving another leaves me with a sort of bottomless horror, a horrible cold tightening of my heart as if it were an exposed nerve painfully jangling.

Many of Butler’s novels carry similar themes of abuse of power, gender role issues, and racial conflicts. Kindred carries all of these within the loosely science fiction package of time travel. A 20th century woman, Dana Franklin, is ripped from the present into the past every time a young man’s life is in danger. In the 1800’s, though light-skinned, Dana is seen as African, and Africans in 1800’s Maryland were slaves — and nothing else. Her first meeting with the boy, Rufus, she saves him from drowning. Subsequent meetings with him reveal to her that he is her ancestor, and she must save him. If she does not — she will not have been born, and history will unwind, losing her within it.



Kindred depicts clearly the ways in which the American system of slavery was complex. Dana’s great grandmother, Alice, is adept at running away, far more adept at it than Dana. But she, together with Rufus, are the key to Dana’s own existence. Dana is torn between wanting to help bright, determined Alice in any way she can, all the while knowing that any help she gives may mean she ceases to exist anywhere but in the 1800’s, a horrifying thought, as her husband, Kevin is back home, beside himself as his wife fades in and out of the present. Kevin coming with – in an attempt to understand and solve the issue of her vanishing – proves even thornier — he is Caucasian, and is immediately in a position of power over his own wife. He wants to be with her and to protect her — but she’s obviously “sleeping with the enemy,” losing the trust of her ancestors, and causing a rift in her own marriage, as the imbalance of power begins to take its toll on Kevin and Dana in relation to one another. The whole tale twists in ways the reader never expects, wounding, warping and mutilating everything — as slavery does — forever.

Butler came up with the idea to write the story in college after hearing one frustrated young man, humiliated and embarrassed by an ancestry he saw as weak and servile, frustrated by their acceptance of disgusting and disrespectful behavior in the workplace and in other areas say, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.”

Having no real understanding of the lengths slaves went through to keep their children “safe,” within the flimsy protection of their home plantation, and alive, this confused young man actually blamed people he assumed to be meek, bowing, scraping “Uncle Tom’s,” who had “held him back.” Butler carried this conversation with her for thirty years, and wrote her book in 1979. She said,

‘And I thought about my mother, because she used to take me to work with her when she couldn’t get a baby sitter and I was too young to be left alone, and I saw her going in the back door, and I saw people saying things to her that she didn’t like but couldn’t respond to. I heard people say in her hearing, ‘Well, I don’t really like colored people.’ And she kept working, and she put me through school, she bought her house – all the stuff she did. I realized that he didn’t understand what heroism was. That’s what I want to write about: when you are aware of what it means to be an adult and what choices you have to make, the fact that maybe you’re afraid, but you still have to act.’‘

(Charles H. Rowell – An Interview with Octavia E. Butler – Callaloo 20:1)

Butler’s creativity is even reflected in the title. Kindred not only has the obvious meaning of ‘family,’ kindness and a fellow spirit, but there’s an aural aspect of the play on words – kin dread. Finding that your ancestry includes both slaves and masters certainly produces dread in Dana, and gives the novel a pall of Gothic darkness and grimness as Dana is buffeted by things outside of her control – just like a slave.

Butler forcing us back in time, together with her character, symbolize our repeated visits to the past, trying to make sense of what was and what is now. Through Dana’s eyes, we see the slaves make the choices that they can, within the circumstances that they have. We better understand that the decisions before them were more chilling than any ghost story, and the heroism they showed was more than simply defying death — but was defying life, grinning into its polished fangs, and living anyway.

Between 1997 and 2001 The SciFi Channel put together an amazing thing called Seeing Ear Theater, an audio theater. Kindred was recreated starring Alfre Woodard as Dana, Lynn Whitfield, and featuring the actress Ruby Dee. Arguably one of the best audio adaptations of any book, this version is no longer available, as Seeing Ear became defunct in 2001. Still, hopeful fans poke around SciFi’s abandoned website with optimism.

“In Kindred,” Robert Crossley wrote in his introduction to the novel, “Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.” The work of Octavia Butler certainly does that. This is my tribute to her, as a woman whose writing I have loved and whose creativity I can only hope to imitate. Some said she took a sensitive subject and trivialized it, writing a “sci-fi novel” about slavery. I believe instead she took winding cloths off of an old wound, and showed that it still festers, and needs to be cleaned…

If you haven’t yet experienced Kindred, choose a quiet night with a lot of wind, and jump in.

Happy Bradbury Season.


There are more stars in this crisp Bradbury Season sky. Don’t miss two from the Interactive Reader, the cutest monster ever from the 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast crew (and MAN does that monster need a sandwich — and a better agent!), the TERRIFYING Neil Gaiman at Writing and Ruminating, and more Bradbury Season type book reviews for all ages as they sparkle throughout the d
ay at Chasing Ray — the blog that started it all.

Starry pic taken by Ray Bradbury; appears here courtesy Little Willow.