HAPPY NOVEMBER…! I always love to see this Auden quote, because truly – we’ve got mixed feelings this month, and I think autumn is a great time for that. Ah, November – the month wherein we can give up on hosting summer and urge it gently, but firmly, out the door. Of course, Utah and […]
February already. What a long, strange trip its been in 2017. Each day I wake and… function. And feel such empathy for those who have to function in public, especially teachers, who have to shine and smile…but how? Those were the thoughts with which I greeted the second month of the Poetry Sisters’ annual Year […]
I’ve always loved the Navy Hymn, possibly because all the uncles on my mother’s side, plus my Papa, were all insufferably proud Navy men. This poem takes elements of that old prayerful song – allegedly sung onboard the Titanic by the last gents who went down with the ship, and by sea-going soldiers since the […]
The villanelle is one of those forms which has a lot of repetition, so on the surface, it looks easy – I mean, how hard is it to write nineteen lines when you get to reuse two of them, one every stanza? Harder than it looks. My advice? Start out with a good couplet — […]
The Poetry Sisters’ recent pantoum project reminded me of how much I have disliked repeating poetry forms – but the pantoum was fine. However, I recently compared the pantoum to the villanelle. For a rigid topic, a villanelle works SO well – short lines, direct ideas. It’s good for inescapable truths. A pantoum sometimes leaves […]
Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday! Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of July! Here’s the scoop: we’re writing monotetra poems. This four-line stanzas form is in tetrameter, with a total of 8 syllables per line, and can be a single quatrain, or several. Each stanza is […]
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 […]
Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday! You’re invited to try our challenge in the month of August! Here’s the scoop: We’re 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. Our topic is What […]
Greetings! Welcome to another Poetry Peeps adventure on Poetry Friday! You’re invited to try our challenge in the month of July! Here’s the scoop: We’re writing villanelles on the topic of dichotomy – or, true opposites, if you will. Bifurcations. Incongruities. Paradoxes. Contradictions. We’re talking Luke/Darth (or is that a false dichotomy, and they’re two […]