{pf: Henri on the internet}

Happy Poetry Friday! I’m at Laura’s today, being interviewed about my latest middle grade book – wherein I have the students participate in Poetry Friday.

Poetry Friday is kind of a funny thing for me – because I never was quite sure how I got involved. I did a little bit of posting, and enjoyed writing the odd haiku, but when an actual published picture book poet approached me about being part of a poetry group, I was… shocked, to say the least. And it’s happened twice now! Do I yet consider myself a poet… Not…really? Even though I just wrote a novel that has original poetry of mine (in the voice of my middle grade character) all the way through it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to narrow anything down. I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer. Sometimes, I just write poetry.

To that end, here’s a semi dansa:

So, How Are You…? and Other Question Pitfalls

We say “Good” and mean “Well…”
Polite insists on “fine:”
(If heartsick, give no sign
It’s in poor taste to dwell,
We say.) Good and mean? Well…
While no one’s all sunshine
It just seems asinine
To beam while we’re in hell.
We say “Good” and mean, “Well…”
Are we to “fibs” resigned,
So no one says we whine?
On this point I REBEL —
Say good, and mean it. Well?


Hope you’re happy and you know it this weekend. Or else if you’re grumpy, you don’t tell people you’re doing fine. Poetry Friday today is Marcie Atkins’ blog, where she is ironically featuring one of Laura’s books today too. Happy Weekend.

{welcome, poetry peeps! the roundup is here!}

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of September! Here’s the scoop: We’re drawing a form from within our community and doing a Definito. Created by poet Heidi Mordhorst, the definito is a free verse poem of 8-12 lines (aimed at readers 8-12 years old) that highlights wordplay as it demonstrates the meaning of a less common word, which itself always ends the poem. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on September 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.


Welcome, Poets, to the liminal season, where we are on the threshold of seasons, standing between the last gasp of summer, and the first breath of autumn. The Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month was a good one for a moment of transition, as it was a new-to-us form called the Bop. Created by poet Afaa Michael Weaver, the Bop is a kind of poetic argument, with the first stanza setting up a complaint, the second expanding on it, and the third either providing resolution or a narrative of a failed resolution. You can read Laura‘s poem, Mary Lee’s, Tricia and Liz’s poems here. Michelle K. joins us here. A few more Bops might pop up throughout the weekend, so stay tuned.

For more Poetry Friday offerings, and to share your own click here. Thanks for stopping by.


With my affection for the villanelle and the sestina, you’d think I’d be at ease working with a refrain, but perhaps it was something about a group-sourced refrain (hat tip to Poetry Sister Sara) that tripped me up. For whatever reason, the refrain in the Bop seems wholly separate from the stanzas… so much so, that I ended up hitting a wall at the end of my first stanza. Suddenly the fourteen-syllable lines seemed clunky, and the beats fell oddly. I started over, trimming my lines, but then the rhyme felt forced. Another draft, now completely unrhymed, but the internal rhythm and more polished language of my lines felt off when faced with that casually worded refrain. Isn’t that just the way it goes when you have a poetic form you’re certain will be simple? Eventually I got it to where I was …just done messing with it. I left the rhyme imperfect, with an off-meter step near the end of each stanza to signal that repeated refrain coming to pause the discussion again. Reminding myself these poems are meant to be exercise and not perfection, I stumbled and limped into my imperfectly perfect topic… housekeeping.


Click to enlarge

(Ashes to Ashes, and) Nuts to Dust

Disorder settles like the dust
Drifts into velvet piles
In quiet corners. Laundry Lurks,
disheveled. All the while
Freedom peers in through glass panes
Begrimed by birds. It waves hello….

Let’s kick that can down the road.

“Filthy” is not the kind of word
That tells the tale. There’s no mildew.
The difference between “clean” and “neat”
is miles apart. The follow-through,
Is that perfection never lasts:
A moment’s lapse, and things explode.
Chaos comes roaring, moving fast,
disrupts, dismays, and discommodes…

Let’s kick that can down the road.

Through window streaks you’ll see sunrise
And sunbeams dancing on the air.
A wrinkle will not scandalize
A meadow when you’re walking there.
That cabbage moth’s not judging you,
So, take today, get out and go.

…And kick that can down the road.


Just now, we all have so much to do – classes to start, books to buy, odd socks and lunch dishes to find, dust bunnies to rout, and water bills to pay. I hope we can find a moment to take stock and figure out which cans can be kicked down the road indefinitely – and which cans are absolutely only for right now, and must be cracked open immediately to let the full fizz of life bubble out. Carpe diem, poets. Don’t let that just be a catch phrase, life is way too short. Grab all the joy that you can – and splash it out. Happy Weekend.


(Commenting snafus: Commenting issues are an artifact of a sometimes aggressive spam filter. If your comment seems to vanish, it likely got caught. No worries, I’ll fish it out shortly!)

{whither creativity}

Every year I find I’m knee-deep in spring or early summer, stuffed with farmer’s market produce and sunny days with no idea how or when I got there. I just look up, and boom – this is my life, squeezing to see if the plums are ripe, filling the bird feeder and their bath, watering, weeding (so. much. weeding), slicing up apples for the deep freeze or the dehydrator and doing The Garden Thing that takes up more of my brain every season. As water restrictions and an earlier and earlier growing season changes traditions, I’m attempting to actually notice things and be more present this time around. It, like everything else with me, is a work in progress.

In the last couple of years I’ve been REALLY privileged to have several projects sell, one after the other. I suddenly went from a pause of about two years between books to having books come out three autumns in a row. In a pandemic. And every book, I discover myself knee-deep in revision or writing in ways to expand and bright forward hidden theme, or listening to audio book artists to give my two cents to my editor, and look up and think – wait, how did I get here? Outside of Julianna Baggott’s seminar that I took with my writing group a few years ago (It’s called Efficient Creativity – and it was truly worth our time), I don’t look much at my process. I have Ideas, they become books, The End.

With a smaller world, fewer opportunities taken to just get out and observe humanity, and more time by myself, though, I’m noticing that my creativity has taken a hit. Not a huge one – but I’m conscious that with the increased monotony of my days that the Random Idea Generator has slowed. I’ve always enjoyed rainy, gray days as a time to cocoon in and dream, but the past two years seem to have provided a plethora of that, and this winter hasn’t been as fruitful as I’ve expected. I find myself floundering. Part of it is the inevitable Doing Anything fatigue with the autoimmune thing, but it’s also that I find myself dodging commitments and feeling enormous pressure when I have to do even small things. It’s funny because we all know we have ‘seasons of life’ blah-blah-blah, but I think I’m finally connecting the dots with the garden – if we don’t have seasons we fertilize, we have seasons where nothing grows.

So, it’s time for finding fertilizer.

It’s a strange place to be. I’m good at creating assignments for this sort of thing – poem idea generators or something – but for ways to generate creativity in general? I’m kind of stumped. I’m trying to make more time to color, daydream, look at clouds. I’m not convinced that won’t work, but it doesn’t seem it will work in a hurry. In the meantime, the trees are budding, and I’m trying to pay attention and be at home in this world. Right now, that has to be enough.

{gratitude: 11:23}

Probably the best and worst thing about having a job writing is that there are so few… constraints. Time constraints, as in when I should show up to the office. Outfit constraints, because who cares what I wear? The only constraint I’m really up against is what I want to and am able to do… but sometimes ability – thanks autoimmune disorder! – is where it falls apart.

After being lectured by my endocrinologist about “you don’t complain enough,” I’m trying to be more… open about bad days, about the times I want to lie on the floor and weep. I wasn’t raised with floor weeping being an… acceptable attitude? So, I don’t do it, I often don’t often even take a painkiller, I just grit my teeth and bear it. Which is, quite frankly, imbecilic. For goodness sake, let’s take chemistry up on its promise to provide better living, no?

better living through…

Science is a magic word:
The Latin ‘scire” means “know.”
Knowledge is a magic that
with work and time will grow.
Science sits with ‘s’ and ‘c’
In words like ‘sick’ and ‘sad,’
And cures the symptoms of a cold
Before it gets too bad.
Shout-out to science, ‘specially
the science of the cell.
Shout-out to skill in germ-defense,
And here’s to getting well.

{poetry peeps challenge: what the ___knows}

It’s STILL the month of August, simultaneously the longest and shortest month of the year! This month, the Poetry Peeps are writing after the style of Jane Yolen’s eight line, unrhymed poem, “What the Bear Knows,” a poem written in honor of her 400th book, Bear Outside. Poet Joyce Sidman, who started it all, gave us some neat guidelines for thinking and writing through this poem: a.) Choose your subject, b.) think about the overarching Truths relating to your subject, c.) state six of the strongest truths into two stanzas, and d.) find an end rhyme – but you don’t have to. This sounds straightforward, but why do I have a feeling we’re all going to have so many good ideas we’ll trip over at least four of them???


There’s still time! We’re sharing our pieces August 27th on blogs and social media with the tag #PoetryPals. Hope you join the fun!

{#npm: 29 – dissatisfied}

Though I am heartened by the Sheenagh Pugh poem to which I linked yesterday, I acknowledge that Ms. Pugh wishes… she could divorce it. She feels she didn’t write it well enough, since some people read it as a piece of joyous and unalloyed optimism. She meant it more as “a good deal of the time things are catastrophically bad, but if only people put in a bit of effort, that can generally change,” but … we human beings can be rather black-and-white, with no shades of gray. And, as writers we know: we don’t get to decide how people read our work. So, let the words gladden you – sometimes nothing goes wrong. Or, let them remind you – usually, everything goes wrong, and we should acknowledge the bare few times they don’t. Words, once you find them, are yours alone… poets or no.

through daily battles
poets aim fearsome weapons
used as paper weights

    

…just don’t forget we make cement out of gravel.

{national poetry month: solus}

Irvington 283

{2020}

a windy Spring day
flings scent of dryer sheets and
last month’s first hindsight

It’s NPM, wherein we celebrate having our way with words. March lasted forever, but someday we’ll look back at it with longing for how good it was, I’m afraid. I’m definitely sticking to haiku this week, as I search for something to say that isn’t… what everyone is saying. I don’t want to make yet another journal of a plague month – but neither do I want to forget everything that’s going on. Instead of chronicling what I’m feeling – which is the same thing everyone is feeling, existential dread – I’m instead going to try very hard to finding something new to see – or a new way to see it – every day. There’s no point promising not to be morose or sad, but I’m encouraging all of us to try and really see things just now – things we should remember.

Something I wrote for a virtual concert our choir is having: It is a paradox that as the pandemic forces us as the world into our separate corners, it highlights the ways in which we are all interconnected. We have all become woven into a tapestry called ‘society’ without even really noticing how our threads cross… and it’s painfully evident how broken we become when we abandon that interdependence and try to live without it. Homeless or homed, rich or poor, infected or well, are all in the same leaking boat. We need to see what it is that put us here, critically examine the leadership that kept it going, and look for a way out – together. Tall order, but, I think, doable.


People have always been walkers in this neighborhood – we have a lot of families who walk as a group – and now they’re circling all hours of the day. Sometimes they chat, and always, we wave, but it’s both uplifting, and heart-twinging. When they’re out of sight, sometimes their voices float back. How we stretch to listen to conversations not our own! I feel like we’ve all turned to ghosts; only our voice carrying proof of life…

Irvington 310

masked

can you see a smile
obscured by a folded mask?
look: my eyes smile back


Poetry Sister Liz is also doing her annual haiku project this month, as is Sister Tricia, Sister Laura, and Poetry Cousin Mary Lee. Don’t miss their original poetry this month.

{sensitivity, cultural portrayal, and revisions}

A morning near the end of the last gasp of my revision:

It’s been an interesting process to me with my newest work in progress to use a sensitivity reader in conjunction with a publishing company. While I have used one before – a previous manuscript included me hiring someone from The National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) to check out a black character with albinism – I’ve never had one paid for by someone other than me, nor have I ever dipped into trying to portray a culture wholly other than my own. My other character was black – I can write a black person of at least similar class and education as my own. Writing someone from an Asian culture with which I thought I was familiar has been a revelation. My reader was positive – I hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly, but I hadn’t been more than not disappointing.

Balboa Park 63

Cultural representation is …tricky.

What we may think of as just… tchotchkes in someone’s house, for instance, might be a representation of cultural pride. What we might assume is just a stereotype of ‘everyone from this place eats this food,’ may be, in fact, another touchstone that connects a people to a place of importance to them, their parents, their grandparents, and generations back. Shoes left outside? That’s what people do. Also what I found out? What I thought was going to be a slam dunk… isn’t.

I’m grateful for my reader’s direct words. She was straightforward and helpful – but I find I’m smarting a bit that I’m not as smart about this as I thought I’d be. I’ve never served as a sensitivity reader – the potential for emotional labor and the recoil from a bad rep and a tone deaf author is REAL – but someone bravely and graciously stepped up to the plate for me, and I’m so grateful to this person I want to send them flowers. Reading for cultural representation is a difficult job.

Balboa Park 62

Because what is cultural representation, really, but a collection of… little details that are nearly imperceptible to outsiders? It’s hard to put a finger on, hard to define, hard to say “THIS” is cultural rep done right, and “THIS” is not… because everyone’s personal culture, expectations, educational levels, class and aspirational class is wildly variant. For instance: I grew up in a home with the Ten Commandments on the wall – and a framed copy of “Amazing Grace,” while other black Americans grew up with photographs on the wall of Martin Luther King, Jr., “black Jesus,” the Lord’s Prayer, and during the holidays, “black Santa.” We were vegetarian in the 80’s when few people were, and my parents were vegan off and on in our lives – so while I’ve never had fried chicken, have no particular opinions on potato salad, baked mac and cheese and dislike bbq sauce, I’ve had tofu and vegetarian gumbo my whole life. We were discouraged from using slang or swearing, but had a family… shorthand dialect of things probably only we said. I have some family members who can fall into African American Vernacular English with ease, and some who have no intuitive understanding of its rules.

Balboa Park 17

I know that some people – and I’ve seen sweeping statements like this routinely on social media – don’t believe that a black character can be correctly portrayed if they do not eat the “right” foods, use AAVE, and have none of the “right” pictures. And yet… not only were those images not in my house, they were absent in the home of my maternal grandmother as well. (My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, had… hundreds of porcelain roosters, a prayer card Jesus looking kind of emaciated, and sad clowns on velvet in the bathroom… her cultural aesthetic being another blog post ENTIRELY.)

Writing a cultural representation which would feel “normal” to me would have walls crammed with bad family photos and a couple of religious touchstones, but nothing representative of “black America,” exactly, except… a washboard. My great-grandmother’s washboard, which she still used well into the time when people had washers, hangs as a reminder of the extreme poverty of the past, but the assurance that one can manage. At least, that’s what I take it to be – a reminder that Miss Emily made do with her own two hands. Is that properly “black?” Is that Americana? Cultural representation is personal – and specific. And honestly? There is no way to get it right for everyone. NONE. There is nothing that will protect the writer from criticism and disappointing someone.

That is quite a thing to sit with, friends.

Balboa Park 54

So, we sit with it.

And then, we take the word of the lived experiences of others and spoon in generous helpings of their good sense, and … leap alone into the ether from there.

Now all of my own nitpicky little revisions have been laid to rest, and today I embark on the most difficult ones of all… And yet? Looking more closely and trying to see through a cultural lens just provides opportunity to lean in… and open my eyes wider. I am grateful to my reader for another chance to get it (closer to, in the neighborhood of, adjacent to) right.

{“…after the watermelon thing.”}

I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind.

And I said you have to put that in a book. And she said, you put that in a book. And I said I am only writing a book about a black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying,”This guy’s okay. This guy’s fine.”

Yeah, remember that? 2014, the National Book Award, televised on C-SPAN and elsewhere. People are so heartened to see African Americans on the National Book Award finalist list. Poets and writers and people of letters are tuning in. In the children’s lit community, we’re thrilled that Jacqueline Woodson, one of our steady bright lights in YA literature, has won. She’s earned that BIG award, one which will thrust her outside the quieter waters of children’s lit, and… in that moment, the professional crowning pinnacle of her success thus far, the presenter makes …a watermelon joke.

“In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I’ve ever written, a step back from the power and meaning of the National Book Award, lest we forget, lest I forget, where I came from.” – Jacqueline Woodson, quoted in the New York Times.

He had an hundred million reasons why, later, he had remarked so disparagingly on the poets who were nominated, why he had told jokes and tried to wrest the attention of the crowd from the nominees onto his vast and hungry ego. But, it wasn’t personal; he cried no foul, she’s my friend! a thousand times, and yet, that moment, those sly, knowing words sliced thousands of us to ribbons, as the audience laughed, and a tall, serene woman had to stand – and yet again, endure. Endure. Endure, with her face at peace, as if the buffoonery of the man before her didn’t reach her.

I don’t support hate, and yet, in that moment, that dizzyingly visceral emotion shivered in my sight. Gut-punched, I wanted to both hiss and claw, scream and spit. As far as I was concerned, that man was finished, and I was done with him and all his works, forever. I never bought, reviewed, read, or talked of anything else he said or did. It made no difference to his life, I am sure, but it seemed right, to me, to simply use my internal Wite-Out and blot him from my notice for the rest of forever. I was fully over this “problematic” favorite.

It’s clear that I’m still sitting with our current moment in the children’s lit industry, trying to work through it, and thinking about the last time that so many voices came together to exclaim in disgust. It was for our Ms. Woodson, and rightly so. The commentary was sharp, and loud – and ultimately… was placated by the huge monetary donation Handler gave to We Need Diverse Books. And then, most of the voices were hushed, pressing their hands against the shoulders of those who still rose up, and their hands over the mouths of those still bitterly protesting. He apologized. He made it right. You can’t judge people on what they say.

But, yesterday, after Handler wandered flat-footedly into the pages of children’s lit history again, this time into the earnest signatories of the #ustoo pledge, wherein members of the children’s lit industry pledged to hold accountable conferences and gatherings, and not attend those which have no clear sexual harassment policy, people took him to task for his very clear participation IN the harassment. The very innuendo-laden jokes, in front of children and adults. The demeaning sexual talk. But — he apologized. He made it right. You can’t judge people on what they say.

It seems clear that you can, unless what you say is racist.

In my small and petty way, I blocked Daniel Handler from my sight years ago – but he’s still been doing things, writing, being invited places, feted within the industry, and I’m the doofus who didn’t realize that his “little faux pas” on Ms. Woodson’s big night had long been forgotten.

But, as Heidi so succinctly asked, didn’t we figure out this guy was trash after the watermelon thing? What are we doing still courting that kind of person to be a speaker and to visit classrooms? Why don’t we seem to take the humiliation, shame, and harm of racism as seriously as we’re all endeavoring to take the #metoo harassment thing?

In all seriousness – is a #metoo movement going to actually succeed if, once again, racism is instructed to take a seat at the back of the bus?

1897. “The day before the inauguration of the nation’s 28th president the Congressional Committee of NAWSA hosted a large parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The idea behind this was to maximize onlookers who happened to be in town to attend the inauguration. Woodrow Wilson expected a crowd at the train station to greet him; however, very few people actually showed up to greet the president, the largest part of the crowd was his staff. The parade was led by the beautiful lawyer Inez Milholland Bouissevain upon a white horse. This image of her as a warrior atop a horse is what made her an iconic image in the fight for womens’ right to vote. This massive parade consisted of no less than nine bands. It also included four brigades on horseback and close to eight thousand marchers. The parade was cut into sections: working women, state delegates, male suffragists, and finally African-American women.

The point of the parade was “to march in the spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist who led an anti-lynching campaign in the late nineteenth century, organized the Alpha Suffrage Club among Black women in Chicago and brought members with her to participate in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. The organizers of the march asked that they walk at the end of the parade. She tried to get the White Illinois delegation to support her opposition of this segregation, but found few supporters. They either would march at the end or not at all. Ida refused to march, but as the parade progressed, Ida emerged from the crowd and joined the White Illinois delegation, marching between two White supporters. She refused to comply with the segregation.”

– Excerpts taken from One of Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black and White Women by Midge Wilson & Kathy Russell, Anchor, 1996, and PBS.org.

I think I’ve been naive, and pretty quiet – but it’s clear the time for my naive assumptions is way over.