Welcome to another Poetry Friday Poetry Peeps Adventure!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of July! Here’s the scoop: We’re indulging in ekphrastics – poetry based on pictures. We’ll be exchanging images from our personal stashes, but we’re also free to use photo from sites like Unsplash or the Library of Congress’ pictorial library to help us out. From there our poems will grow out of whatever form, topic, length, or theme. Are you game? Good! You have a month to craft your classified creation and share it on August 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.
Poetry Pea podcast: “Hino Sōjō observed that senryū are poems that make people nod in agreement whereas haiku make people feel.” Don’t you love that? I hope you feel that nod happen for you today!
The last time we did this exercise, in 2012, I moaned about it a great deal, MOSTLY because I’d just finished an international move and still had book deadlines, but also, because haiku ads only SOUND easy, or clever people would put them in the paper and online all the time. Such a short form you’d think you could make effortlessly clever and fun, but the haiku/senryu syllabic rules are definitely working against you. Last time I tried haiku ads, were doing a “12 Poems in 12 Months” challenge that, little did we know, would end up being something we’ve done for years now, and we had a Google doc where we could all comment on each other’s work – and fuss about it. This time, we were all so busy we couldn’t even get online together for our meetup. So… everyone’s poetry today is a full on surprise. That’ll be fun!
From Process…
Since I was missing the meet-up energy I usually get in the hour we spend talking about the challenge, any form issues, and our plans, I went back to those older blog posts, where I could, and reread our clever work. I actually really liked several of them, and it reminded me of the breadth of what counts as classified ads and how we could make them a bit more mysterious (Laura’s Riddle-ku style) and less straightforward. I also brushed up on senryu – what it is, and what it focuses on – because, despite my best efforts, I don’t think I’ve written a real haiku ever in my life. Finally I perused other people’s efforts. Haiku Society of America’s senryu winners came with some really enlightening judges comments. The Atlantic’s contest was a lot of fun – some of them really made me chuckle. I feel like I’ve gotten a bit of a better feel for what the emotional range of senryu can be… even though that doesn’t mean I can definitely write it.
…To Poetry
One thing I read and observed is that the syllable form is much less strict with senryu – and I immediately decided that this time, I was going to have vari-syllabic verses. That… didn’t really happen. I tend to become very fixated on the structure of a thing, so I kept having to remind myself that “it doesn’t have to be 5-7-5. Of course, the minute I abandoned the rules, I didn’t actually like anything I wrote anymore. ☺ Typical. The second challenge was finding a leftover scrap of imagination as the next heat wave roared upon us. I began and discarded poems about breezes, wind, and cold air (there was quite a theme going on). Finally, I stepped away, determining that my best bet was to simply try writing one haiku a day, until I got more of a feel for what I was after.
I enjoy writing short poetry like this over a period of days sometimes because I can remember what I was thinking when I wrote it – and do that “nod in agreement” thing that senryu provokes in the best ways. For instance:
In search of the scoop
the straight dope from dawn’s chorus:
tweet me all the tea
This bird poetry comes courtesy of sleeping with all the windows and the slider open – and realizing just how early those little featherwits get up. I remind them that the dawn (gossip) chorus begins when there’s, you know, dawn? They disagree.
Unsought opinions
(Occasionally unhinged)
Averse ears only
Yes, these unsought opinions come in their original packaging, and they’re completely content-free!
Ah, we love an election year, don’t we? Bleh. Some of my acquaintances could really stand to keep their political texts/email forwards/comments to themselves…
Keen-eyed critic seeks
Unsentimental gazes
Hey – look me over.
I was writing a scene wherein a girl gets her first look at the engagement ring her mother’s boyfriend shows her, and I asked my writing group to gush-check me, because I am TERRIBLE at swoony scenes. I’m still the girl who asked her boyfriend, “So… are we doing this, or what?” Yes, that’s what he got for a proposal. Unsentimental gazes FTW!
Well post-bud bloom seeks
Sharp-honed shears, and speed
For circumspect snips.
Ohhh, I wanted to use secateurs – it’s such a delightful word! Sadly… far too many syllables!
July was a great month for a concise poetry form, as we’re all hip-deep in the requisite rounds of visitations and vacations that make up summertime. The brevity and the theme meant that many of us at least had a minute to try some, which makes it fun. Laura’s poem is here. Mary Lee’s poem is here. Tricia’s poem is here. Michelle K’s ads are here, Denise’s ad is here, and Jone’s ad inviting us a riparian life is here. More Peeps may haul out a haiku or two before the end of the weekend, so don’t forget to pop back to see the senryu/haiku ad round-up. Meanwhile, Marcie Flinchum Atkins (who has an interesting looking YA novel in verse upcoming!) is our Poetry Friday hostess today – thanks, Marcie! You’ll find the full Poetry Friday panoply @
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of July! Here’s the scoop: We’re writing …Haiku/Senryu classifieds. Reprising our 2015 want ads project, we’re combining our love of Missing Connections, Desperately Seeking______, For Sale, and other random Penny Savers, Craigslist, and back-page-of-the-newspaper weirdness into deliciously brief poetry bites. Are you game? Good! You have a month to craft your classified creation and share it on July 28th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. Friends, this is not a real poem. As long as we’re clear on that, okay? In the past, I was the person Most Likely To Rant about our poetry challenges, and heaven knows I’ve tried to tone that down a bit so Certain People stop giggling (looking at YOU Sara Lewis Holmes), but BOY did this one bring on the urge to scream. UGH.
I mean, technically it’s a poem – it’s …Poetry Friday and I posted it. But, that’s about all that went the way I wanted it to. Very rarely am I really, really, REALLY unable to put together words into something that at least resembles a poem… but whenever the Poetry Sisters say “no rules,” I hit a wall. This business of using the same title, but doing our own thing with no rules on form or content I KNEW was going to be a pain in the neck — so I started writing about what I wanted to write immediately. This…should have worked. In a way, it did work – I wrote a long poem in blank verse. However, I couldn’t tell when I was …done. After a while, I realized it was simply shaped prose instead of a poem. I scrapped it. I wrote a ghazel. Then two ghazels. All of them were terrible, but they had absolutely robust vocabulary, and best of all, they rhymed, which… tells some part of my brain that I’m Doing It Right. …except that Ghazels don’t rhyme (except internally), so… I scrapped those, too. Plus, did I mention they were terrible? I kept getting overly invested in the turns of phrase, and forgetting that the theme was wabi sabi. Paying attention. Transience. Imperfection. Change. I was like a kid who had the assignment – to write a paper about the Second World War and got stuck in a discussion on military haberdashery in 1944. It’s adjacent to the topic, but not there at all. After more reflection, I figured out that the real issue is that I don’t like wabi sabi as a… concept. I mean, it’s fine, but hello, it’s the melancholy awareness of the transience of living things. It’s a reminder that all things metamorphose, adapt, and die; a reminder that nothing is permanent or will stay the same or will last. Oh, goody, all of the things that the human brain is hardwired to ignore. Was this just an emotional wall I hit, a tantrum because I didn’t like the topic? No…? I mean, I wanted to write about having a big anniversary the year my brother is getting married – year one and year thirty, a month apart. That’s not a bad topic – but it’s personal. Maybe the struggle came with adding the personal to the transient – on a week when my Dad’s been hospitalized yet again. My literal baby, as in, “woke up with you, carried you, changed your diapers” baby brother is getting married. I know this is a tectonic change – that’s quite clearly being rubbed in my face. Maybe it’s just right now too much to put on one poem. That happens sometimes.
After this sprawling mess of realizations, one thing I also examined was why the first poems had disgusted me so much. I don’t usually …fling poems from me quite so energetically. Most of the time I make things work – and our Poetry Friday exercises have, for the last how many years (since 2007!?), been strictly about the PRACTICE of poetry, and not the PERFECTING thereof. But the poems struck me as slick, glib – and wordy. I can do that – I can produce words that sound good, at least – as tuneful as a drawer full of cutlery, if nothing else. But like that bright clatter, they’re basically meaningless. There’s a difference between wordplay and poetry, and too often, I err on the side of wordplay. Normally that’s fine – you can use wordplay to elevate your poem, but it’s a mistake to rely on it, and think it’s the same… Anyway, I knew I wasn’t really digging in and putting in the work to get to any Actual Feelings (TM) or Insights about the things my poem allegedly was about. So. I stopped writing. Honestly, it felt like my house was sitting on the surface of the sun, and it was too flippin’ hot to think straight anyway.
**** Fortunately, OTHER PEOPLE DID NOT POUT AND KEPT AT IT! **** Laura’s poem is here. Liz’s poem is here. Sara’s poem is here, and Mary Lee’s poem is here. Here’s Tricia’s poem, and she’s got the full Poetry Friday roundup today. Michelle K’s poem is here. Linda B’s broom wabi sabi is here. More of the wabi sabi-ing may be wafting in throughout the weekend, and I’ll post their odes to transience and imperfection as I find them – stay tuned for the roundup!
Okay, here it is, Thursday evening, and I’m left with what I’m left with – finally a lovely, temperate day and… a word salad. Flawed. Unfinished. Abandoned. As Richard Powell put it, “Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” Wabi sabi on the nose. WABI SABI: A Word Salad A squalid stuff, word salad – Imperfect and unfinished in still seeking distinction Clever clatter cannot cure If you can’t find the right words to write something this weekend – don’t despair. Remember that the genius is within you. The words are there – give yourself the time to think them. In the meantime, lying down with an ice pop certainly won’t hurt … Remember those Nike ads from the late 90’s that demanded, “Is It In You?” I never think of those without thinking of Dr. Ruth O. Saxon, one of my brilliant writing professors at Mills College who insisted both literally and metaphorically that we “define the it” in our writing. Graduate school has so much reading and writing that it’s easy to slide into a kind of academia voice wherein you use a lot of words but basically communicate nothing of substance. Ruth rained fire on that, and is often who I think of when I find myself writing around something. So here I am to define my “it.” Asked, “Is it in you?” And yes: it’s National Poetry Month, kids. Beware that every interaction with me this month WILL, in fact, turn into a poem…) Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of May! Here’s the scoop: We’re writing in the style of Lucille Clifton’s homage to my hips, and choosing our own body parts to pay homage to. Are you a fan of your neck? Have you always wanted to write a sonnet to the bumps on your tongue? You can read a few body part poems to get your motor running (or, listen to Miss Lucille read! You’ll get goosebumps). Are you game? Good! Whatever song of yourself that you sing, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on May 31st in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. Welcome to the wondering, as we sit in this space of unanswerable questions. This month’s challenge might have been a bit more complex to me if I hadn’t already been in a sort of… unfettered frame of mind. One thing that committing to writing a poem a day for NPM does for me is break me out of “regular” lines of thought, and make me fall swiftly into a state where I can dive deeper into words. A whole month of thinking sideways made unanswerable questions a little more accessible, a little more instinctual to me. There are others who grapple with the unanswerable this month. Sara’s poem is here. Tricia’s is here. Here’s Laura’s poem, and Liz’s poem is here, and Mary Lee’s poem is here. Michelle K’s poem is here. Other Poetry Peeps may be checking in throughout the weekend with their poems, so don’t forget to stop by for the roundup. In the meantime, Poetry Friday is hosted today by Ruth, @There Is No Such Thing As A Godforsaken Town. Thanks, Ruth! Our process was less straightforward this time, and more… gauzy. To begin, the Poetry Sisters got together and made lists of unanswerable questions – or what they felt were fairly esoteric questions in the moment. The list was long, but they were a delight to read through. How many rings in a doorbell? Where does an echo go? What is the best time to lose? How do you know when you’re grown? Who loves you best? What color is a mirror? How much change is enough? Why now? What does the oak know? Last month, Padraig Ó Tuama’s prompts for the pantoum really resonated with me. We were instructed to write a line about something that’s become ordinary for us, or to write a line showing us an object that’s associated with this ordinariness. In answering the prompt, I wrote about dirt, about dust and birds, fence posts, and the horizon through the window. What else, I wondered, could I expand on in a way that embraced the ordinary? People are cottage-core fixated on the After of the Before & After phases, when things are pretty, when the flowers are blooming and the honeysuckle is curling ’round the door. Cottagecore doesn’t seem to encompass sweating and tripping over dirt clods. The question that appealed most to me was a variation on the last… What does the oak know…about me? A few years ago, I wrote a mask poem about a plum tree which narrated its concerns (or lack of them), about the phoebe which lived in its branches, its human, and the world around it. I think of this poem as in conversation with that one. What does the garden remember of us? The weeding, turning, digging, and planting? The watering, sweating, grunting, squealing (in joy or dismay when spiders or crane fly larvae make themselves known)? The sighing, early morning stumbling, surly muttering or full-voice singing over the noise of the tiller? What do any of us know of this season, in comparison to what it knows about us? The bite of a hoe, bright, invasive fang, The fork and the tines, the lift and the turn A flop, falling flat. CO2 cloud exhale, Padraig’s last questions in the prompt list are, “What is a single feeling you have about this ordinary thing? What do you most wish to say about this ordinary thing?” To which I can only answer – it is, and I am, and together, we are – a living thing. May you raise your own hymn to the living this weekend, revel in your ordinary extraordinariness. Today is one in a series of drearily overcast, windy, drippy with fog, and chilly, but not really that cold days that are just… depressing. It’s a day to light candles and try to think of lighter things, as the heaviness of the sky presses in. In Scotland, we called days like these – with the requisite added rain – dreich. (Digression: I always wonder why some things catch on and others don’t – we’re all about our hygge [though I know very few English speakers who pronounce it properly], but people don’t seem to have found dreich as easy to love. At least it’s easier to say!) I think my rather low state of mind is in response to a conversation. Several friends having recently received adult diagnoses of neurodivergence are navigating the responses and processing the news – and the reactions. While some embrace getting those diagnoses in adulthood, others are deeply resistant, holding a “What does it matter now? We’re out of school!” attitude. I get it: a diagnosis today won’t yank us back through a time machine and allow us the scholastic accommodation we needed, no. But, when I tried expressing some of what it does give people to discover – at last – that there’s a name for what they’ve struggled with their whole lives, and that there are reasons behind their feeling out-of-step, I heard, “I’m not going around telling people I’m defective. You can tell everyone on the internet that you are, and that works for you, but not for me.” As my friend Claire always says, Jeez O! Ouch. Here’s the thing: telling “everyone” on the internet that I’m “defective” does not, in fact, “work for me.” Every single time I use the word ‘dyscalculia’ or speak openly about my repeated failures to pass the state exams to teach in a public schools, for instance – it is hard. Every interview for Henri Weldon where a classroom teacher or librarian asked if the character was grounded in anyone I knew or my own life, it was hard. No one enjoys exposing failures. But if we don’t normalize disability through visibility, it will always be stigmatized. We will always rob people of feeling acceptance and joy in their identity. We will continue to allow people to blame themselves for a perceived deficit and internalize feelings of worthlessness to the “normal” neurotypical world. We will always have people hiding what they see as anomalous parts of themselves that are merely different, not bad. We will always continue to fail as a society. It doesn’t “work for me.” Most of my life, it’s worked against me. But, it’s me – and I claim all of me, even the parts that don’t work like everyone else’s. Fear not: we are unbroken, Truths we hold our only token: Though we’ve only just awoken Our new-born courage oaken, We cannot waste time soft-spoken. Let acceptance you find soak in, Whew! So glad we got the Progressive Poem launched yesterday and is on its way! Long have I admired people who can write collaboratively, because of how cruddy I normally am at doing so… I have tried writing linked short stories (a shared town/setting), flash fiction (a shared six words), and a novel with other people. ALL OF THEM were dismal, abysmal failures. (Imagine hyper-controlling child me complaining to an adult that So-and-so’s not PLAYING RIGHT!” Yeah.) Maybe the trick is only to contribute a couplet at a time. Or, maybe the trick is for me not to be in charge in any way, shape, or form, and take such ownership of a thing I’m unable to be flexible and collaboratively open with it. Hmmm. I have a good friend with whom I share this tendency – but it’s a teensy bit ironic that neither of us likes public speaking, we don’t crave leading, and we’re both always rattled and in need of a quiet padded room when it’s over with. However, when things are disorderly and shambolic, neither of us can stand THAT. Like so many women, I will wade in and DO. Even when it’s not my circus and not my monkeys. This is a bad habit. No, really – despite all the people glad to see me coming: this is a bad habit. People should sort their …um, stuff, and the longer I enable them to go without doing so, the worse I make it for everyone. ::sigh:: You don’t have to be the boss, Despite how you come across, Heed the voice inside of you – Don’t brace yourself and join the fight – Not every burden’s yours to “Bear,” May ignoring everyone running around like headless chickens be your forte. Yesterday I lost two — TWO!!! — needles whilst working on an embroidery project. I’d been doing some yard work, and the sequel to all of the hoeing and weed-ripping was The Body Strikes Back (kinda like the Empire, but hopefully somewhat smaller). My joints swell, and holding onto small things becomes challenging, much to my annoyance. Himself has a cure for this – he’s rigged up a little plastic box with two rows of magnets inside, which he happily runs along the floor until he can find the errant slivers of metal. It’s nice to have someone always handy with a solution. And look – I’ve lost two needles – and somehow mislaid a poetry post – and yet the planet still spins. Imagine that. Guess it could be worse: You know you’re a match Okay, this is WILDLY off-topic for my project this month, but I have to do it anyway, because Reasons. Author Charlie Jane Anders did a brief series of reviews for ‘terrible gender-swapping’ films in her newsletter this week, and admitted that she’d never seen the 1993 Robin Williams comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Neither does she want to see it, but invited reviews of it on her behalf – in haiku only. See what I mean? I need to write this haiku because REASONS.* fat folks in films, and he was a “bad” dad: a diamond in mud *With apologies if this is your all time favorite film. It wasn’t terrible, exactly, it was just… a 90’s movie… reflecting an epically wretched, horrifying era. I kind of hate the waste of a waxed amaryllis. It’s such a popular holiday gift, but the wax renders the plant useless for composting, and also creates an impenetrable boundary for the roots to cross. People watch them bloom, and throw them out. I’m sure I’ve whinged about this before. I’m relieved that the ones I rescued survived to go outside. I’m thrilled that one is standing tall. greenery brilliant Happy Poetry Friday! I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Brené Brown’s TED talk from a few years ago wherein she mentions a Christmas movie – a family in a car singing carols, the camera panning over the individual faces, and then — she stops the imaginary movie, then she asks people what happens next. People immediately say “car crash.” Others add to that, imagining oncologist based bad news, serial killers – menace. I heard this in a talk, and laughed out loud. Like, what the heck?! Who are the people who think that?! And what the hell is wrong with them? Um…? The people who think that is …us. Me. Brown talks about how many people feel like ‘the worst’ is always going to happen. We are fear-based society, raised in fear-based systems – even our faith is fear-based. Joy is greeted with foreboding, and disappointment is a state of being. When I got done laughing about this, I had to cry. I struggle to believe My faith confesses fact: Gifts get taken away Fear makes us grip too tight My one foot’s out the door, I felt this TED talk rated another repeating poem – but just to be difficult, I have returned to pantoums. Jone’s our hostess today, with a smart interview with the author of a most gorgeous ekphrastic anthology – and Jone herself has a photograph included. Thanks, Jone, and Happy Poetry Friday.{pf: poetry peeps wabi their sabi}
Welcome to another Poetry Friday Poetry Peeps Adventure!
From Process…
…To Poetry
A wabi sabi wasteland.
A welter of syllabic stress
songs sounding dissonance.
its point lies in acceptance:
Release of our own relevance
as center of the mass.
And means of contribution,
we try for conversation,
to compel connection
what yawns, hungry, for a Word
That lasts through transiency’s attempts
to be the last thing heard.
{npm24: 27}
questions
We demanded, “Define ‘it.'”
Questions are a way
To evade assumption’s claim
Forcing “it” to speak its name.
(Explanation: a lot of people don’t know that the first recorded use of the word “microaggression” was in 1970, in an essay by Black American psychologist Chester Middlebrook Pierce (1927-2016). In the case of this poem, the “it” being forced to speak its name is whatever reasoning lurks behind the microaggression of even people who know and love me occasionally assuming that I can do something better than they can, because I’m Black. No: I can’t. I have to practice like every other human being, thank you.
{pf: poetry peeps answer the unanswerable}
Welcome to another Poetry Friday Poetry Peeps Adventure!
From Process…
…To Poem
A Garden Remembers
The dull grind of knees against soil,
Back-and-forth boots, combative, they bang
The grunts born of splinters, sweat, toil.
(The YEEEUCH! as fly grubs are flung far)
The scent of the balm smoothed on for windburn,
The brown of earth easing our scars.
A silence of survey benign.
A humming that swells into chorus full scale,
A hymn for the living enshrines.
{npm24: 25}
and untitled draft
Though the world tried teaching shame,
Standing, we’re still outspoken.
Who we are is all we’ll claim.
Unbowed, we are unbroken,
To a Self we used to blame.
Stand, and remain outspoken,
Solidly intent declaim –
“Fear? Not we. As the unbroken,
Too much is riding on this game.
Stand and remain: outspoken.
Stretch tall, fully as you claim:
Fearless, we are, unbroken,
Standing, we will remain outspoken.{npm24: 24}
NOT MY CIRCUS: A Meditation
Despite how you come across
Sometimes your best work is backstage,
So, find a chair and disengage.
Heed the voice inside of you!
Go find a chair and disengage.
Let that wisdom carry you.
Don’t “gird your loins” and “join the fight.”
Let this wisdom carry you:
Set “heavy” down, and pick up “light.”
Not every burden’s labeled “Bear.”
Set “heavy” down, and grab some “light.”
Not everything is your affair.
Sometimes your best bet is backstage.
Not everything is your affair,
You do not HAVE to be the boss.{npm24: 20 & 21}
Thoughts on the Occasion of Losing A Needle, Again: A Tanka
You could have lost your flosses,
Or misplaced your eyes.
Stitches affix the fiction
That you haven’t lost the plot.Marriage
Their pluses match your minus
The math just works out.{npm24: 16}
A 90’s Movie Truism
women of a certain age:
interchangeableLevel Up Your Parenting: Do Drag!
but such a stellar nanny…
was it just the dress?The Reason We Watched
shines despite its circumstance:
We loved you, Robin.{npm24: 14}
leafed
glowing red petals, spattered
and weather-beaten:
sturdy beauty’s cultivar
affirms what it takes to bloom.
{npm24: 12}
Do You Believe in Love?
My faith lingers in facts:
Time moves on. People leave.
I live with my bags packed.
Gifts get taken away.
I live with my bags packed –
“Nothing gold can stay.”
Fears, holding them too tight,
Since “nothing gold can stay,”
Dread keeps us from delight.
And, one foot out the door,
Dread blotting out delight,
Does absence faith restore?
Time’s moved on. People leave.
Losses leave my heart sore.
I struggle… I believe.