Month: February 2021

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

You’re invited to try our challenge in the month of March! Here’s the plan: We’re going to dance forth with some “dizzying dizains.” Never heard of a dizain? Not sure why you’ll be stumbling and spun? The short version is: it’s a French form from 15th-16th c., with a 10-line stanza · 10 syllables per line · And an ababbccdcd rhyme scheme. A bit longer of an explanation can be found at Writer’s Digest, with a few helpful tips and an example. Interested? Good! You’ve got a month to spin your poem(s), then share your offering (or someone else’s) with the rest of us on March 26 in a post and/or on social media – #PoetryPals.

Our second challenge of 2021 was to roll the metaphor dice, digitally or in person if we had actual metaphor dice on hand, then write a poem – full stop. There were no other rules nor themes this month. Fortunately, the Perchance metaphor generator is …full of delightful chaos. Today’s Poetry Friday hostess, Karen Edmisten’s first metaphor made me snort-laugh – I look forward to seeing what (if anything) she comes up with. You should read Sara’s here. Tricia’s is here, and this is Liz‘s. Laura’s is here, and here’s Kelly’s. Michelle’s metaphor is here, and Mary Lee’s is here. More Poetry Peeps will be checking in throughout the day, so stay tuned!

Metaphors are wild – there’s no plausible deniability as with similes – no cushioning “like” or “as.” No, no, my dear, you ARE my sunshine, full stop, you ball of flaming nuclear goodness. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, but the rest of her…? She is FIRE…apparently literally.

While also a number of other things, metaphor by definition is a descriptive device, used for rhetorical effect. While I started out trying to use blank verse, the more rigid, syllabic form felt best – and don’t ask me why, except maybe it is just that metaphor is so whimsical (read: IRRATIONAL) I felt it needed some guide rails. The guidance-heavy form I selected was the Zeno, created by poet J. Patrick Lewis. As a ten-line poem with a syllable pattern of 8/4/2/1/4/2/1/4/2/1, it seemed most like time – mathematical and divisible. The fourth, seventh and tenth lines – all those with single syllables – rhyme, making it deceptively simple looking, but wresting sense and emotional resonance from such firmly structured lines is the tricky part. I found that after the first one, the next came much more easily, and the form matches really well with something so variant.

Go Set A Watchman

Honesty is a watch, well-honed,
its pendulum
gleaming:
sleuth-
hound, two-edged sword,
ticking.
truth-
piercing, marrow
cleaving –
toothed.

This next poem is from the metaphor dice, and is a phrase I was initially against using. It seemed to obvious, too easy – and yet, when I asked myself why, I had no good answer. Some questions… don’t.

chronic

Home is a mad thunderstorm. Wild
intermittent
tempers
fly.
Hurricane stills –
Clearing
skies?
Is this the eye?
The end?
…Why?

And for all that it felt “too obvious,” and the form possibly too confining for emotional resonance, I think this one edges toward being my favorite.

Finally, this last effort was from a phrase that initially was poetic right out of the box. “Talent is a birdcage.” As a kid, I loved singing, but my distaste for ‘performance’ seeps through from being trotted out at church like a beribboned Shetland pony. “Oh, of course she’ll sing!” my parents gushed, smiling without asking, somehow pleased to be asked. “Why did we pay for voice lessons?” they asked in sharp whispers, when my tiny rebellions emerged. (What? Bitter? Me?) Throughout my life, I have been involved in countless thousands of performances, but there’s a way to sing without it being performance, I think? Something between sharing your soul and selling it…

These are my first try at zenos, and I’m really pleased with them, for all that syllabic poetry occasionally presents me with some real difficulties. Poetry Friday is hosted today, as I mentioned, over at Karen’s. Thank you, Karen! I hope the rest of you will take your sunshine-y presence on over that way and enjoy some more poetry.

In just a few days, it’ll be March, and we’ll have officially passed A Plague Year. It feels odd to think in terms of “celebration,” when despite several vaccines emergent, it’s not over, and its distanced-and-masked reality – and its global impact – will yet be with us. So, while we cannot truly celebrate, can we commemorate our resilience? Our neighbor’s courage? Our loved ones’ lives, lost, or carried on, though slowed and changed? Think about it… every day of a life well-lived is worth remembering. Happy Weekend.

I don’t often read the acknowledgments in the back of books. Do you?

Perhaps an unpopular opinion from the writer who just showed you the one she wrote, but I don’t actually… like acknowledgements. While they’re expected in a nonfiction book that requires a lot of phone calls, interviews, research, and borrowing offices and documents, in fiction, they can feel extraneous. Some go on, unlike a dedication, which is generally no more than a sentence or two. They’re often deeply self-deprecating, emotional or personal, and give a true behind-the-curtain glimpse of the author. However, unlike many people, I …don’t always care about the author.

(Shhhh! I told you: unpopular opinion. Some of you I can just see giving me side-eye for my ungenerous spirit. I feel the heat of your glower, but I’m not wrong. No, seriously…)

Fellow middle grade author, Kate Messner, wrote about the pitfalls of acknowledgments years ago, though coming from a different – and not often thought of – area of concern. Another piece I saw a years ago in School Library Journal or Publishers’ Weekly described acknowledgments as “acceptance speeches without an award.” Even the New Yorker has had their say (and they are clearly the last word on everything). Acknowledgments are not always near to thanking The Academy, of course, but… sometimes it’s a near thing. And, every book I write – with disbelief I’m finishing up number nine now – I’m met with that moment at the end of going over Master Pass and seeing those little TK’s glowering at me. TK is publishing speech for “to come,” or “Where’s the acknowledgements, ye wee numpty?”

I’ve only really happily accepted the summons to acknowledge… once. And it was called an “Author’s Note,” and it was more an opportunity to talk about the book more than to thank anyone.

It isn’t that I don’t believe in giving thanks – nobody who reads this blog and sees the years I do a November month-of-gratitude post-a-day thing could believe that. But, saying a public thank-you that has nothing to do with owing gratitude for documents or time, to people and institutions or playlists that supported you during the work… it just feels very public to me, very exposed. That an acknowledgement is enshrined forever on the pages of a book makes it even worse… “Social media is forever”, we’re told. Yes, but for me books in print feel even more permanent still.

Today, the TK I encountered was limned in yellow, with the words “Pls supply,” an imperative highlight that made me feel like I needed …ammunition to ignore its summons. I felt like my pipsqueak sullen mutterings of “I don’t wanna” wasn’t enough, so I went looking at other recently published middle grade novels.

…Aaaand they all have them. Every one. Author’s notes. Acknowledgments. Sometimes just pages and paragraphs long. I had to go back to a novel published in 1984 before I could find a novel without acknowledgements – and that novel might only have skipped them because it was a paperback copy, fifth printing or something.

SO.

Looks like I’m on my own, here.

With love and gratitude, I’d like to acknowledge all of the cheerleaders and silent supporters who have helped me write this novel.

I’d like to thank my mother, who listened to me whine about editorial notes without fully knowing what I was talking about, or paying that much attention, to be honest, but if pressed, would be firmly on my side anyway.

(Maybe.)

Thank-you to the whimsically lovely James Margaret, whose silent support comes in the form of adorably shaped sticky notes that are pretty much everywhere, bearing lists, reminders, snippets of story and, oddly, the address of a total stranger in Ashland, Ohio. *unsticks this and examines in bewilderment*

Thank you, Tech Boy, for always trying to help me do technical things beyond my ken much, much faster; for periodically dragging me on walks; for standing in the hallway listening to me prattle when you only got up to pee and weren’t calling a basic cessation to the work day, and for not reading my manuscripts because you’re really busy, and I don’t actually want to discuss the points of punctuation you’d want to get into because I already have copy editors. Apparently three of them this time.

Gratitude to those people with babies or bunnies – and apparently loads of free time – who send me heart-melting pictures of their cuddly, chubby spawn that revive me when my brain is imploding. Ditto to the senders of Instagram memes.

Thank you to the makers of Ibarra hot chocolate, Prednisone and Imuran, the unholy trinity which occasionally keeps me upright, and to June’s Journey, the game on my phone which provides helpful hidden object puzzles for me to do while my brain plays the Jeopardy! theme and a little loading hourglass spins.

You are all, in your own way, truly helpful, truly special, truly necessary, and I adore you. Thank you all, so very, very much.

And now that I’ve thanked you here, I can skip writing an acknowledgment. Right?

RIGHT???

Lightning couldn’t strike twice, could it?

After a terrible year, Madalyn needs clear skies desperately. Moving in with her great-uncle, Papa Lobo, and switching to a new school is just the first step.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine, though. Madalyn discovers she’s the only Black girl in her class, and while most of her classmates are friendly, assumptions lead to some serious storms.

Papa Lobo’s long-running feud with neighbor Mrs. Baylor brings wild weather of its own, and Madalyn wonders just how far things will go. But when fire threatens the community, Madalyn discovers that truly being neighborly means more than just staying on your side of the street — it means weathering tough conversations — and finding that together a family can pull through anything.

So, without further ado…here’s Madalyn.

Look at that face – those eyes! I love how …serious she looks, yet how adorable. Madalyn is, like many middle grade protagonists, all heart. She cares a LOT about friends, family, fairness and doing what’s right. The more human beings we get on a topic, though, sometimes the more “right” is a hard word to figure out!

But, like most middle graders, Madalyn tries to figure it out anyway – ’cause that’s part of figuring out yourself.

Isn’t it beautiful? September 7, 2021 is coming sooner than you think!

Whether you’re counting your chickens before they hatch, or if you’re a fish out of water, there’s a way to make metaphors into poetry – even if they don’t make much poetic sense at first. Hope you’ll join us and try it out, just for fun!