CLEVELAND ROCKS.
Also: what attractive and business-like looking students!
{west tech high, cleveland, thanks to Ms. Wheeler}
Month: April 2014
{nat’l poetry month: champagne celebration}
launched
smash champagne against
hardback spine. Wait for edits —
“rewrite everything”
Sorry to be cheating nature again, but I’m knee-deep in other work. I did look at the roses this morning, and found a purple-and-lavender surprise in my front yard — no roses out there, so I don’t usually linger long, but I did want to see if any of the agapanthas had bloomed. When I found the “volunteer,” I gasped, oohed, and aahed, and you will soon see pictures. A shout-out to Andromeda, who first photographed HER purple-and-lavender ruffled surprise, framed it, and sent it to me. Lovely irises…
Awaiting an editorial letter — and girding my loins for a big rewrite — but, it’s a happy place to be; editorial letters mean that, at the end of the road stands your contract. Carry on, writer!
{nat’l poetry month: research}
Shout out to Jean, Keara, Amanda, Donna, “Mr. C, Carlos,” Carmen, Jessica, Melissa, Erika, Donia, Terissa and Wren, and the other students in Ms. Wheeler’s sophomore group at New Tech West High in Cleveland, with whom I chatted this morning! Since it’s both National Poetry Month, and a good time to study history and talk about primary sources (I know, Erika, I know. Primary sources make you sad. However, they also make you ACCURATE!), today’s first poem is for the sophomores:
Al Gore did not invent it
Wikipedia
is both truth and wild theories
confirm your sources.taxonomy
are you sure this head
did not spring, fully formed from
Imagination?
And, for the rest of you, here are some poets tweeting – well, their poems are tweeting, anyway; I doubt Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes and others are really out there on Twitter. At least, man, I hope not… Hat tip to Book Riot.
{nat’l poetry month: night}
“>
This is the symphony hall… in December, because none of us carried a camera last Sunday.
A week ago, I spent a Sunday evening singing with members of the SF Symphony Chorus, singing with their director, who is a man of enormous patience and enormous energy, and rather quirky metaphors for just about everything. He was all things charming, it was a lovely evening spent with good friends, and we had a short walk through the fresh evening to our modes of conveyance, and a short journey home.
I thought of that night last night, when I stepped to the slider downstairs to close the door, and the most gorgeous scent of night-resting flowers brushed in on the breeze. There is something about a cool Spring night after a warm Spring day. What blasts us in the summertime certainly tempts us in the spring.
night fey
beguiled by rich scents
tempted to leave doors open —
April, it is too soon!
{nat’l poetry month: rodent}
to the squirrel
long-tailed, furry pig:
we do not love rodents here
your kind caused the plague.
Oh, ALL RIGHT. So we can’t blame rodents for the Black Death anymore, nor the fleas on which they rode into town. I’m still not very happy with having to move the feeder AGAIN. ::sigh:: Look Squirrels, JUST LET THE GOLDFINCHES EAT IN PEACE. Is it that hard????
{nat’l poetry month: “Dear Ursula,” by Melissa May}
I was so touched and disturbed by the last poem from “Button Poetry” that I looked them up to see who the heck they are. Man, was I impressed.
I can’t do “spoken word” anything – I would either vomit or burst into tears on stage, and ranting whilst sobbing or spewing is just not anyone’s idea of a good time. Maybe. But, I am so — so overwhelmed by the talent and articulation of these two women, and the rest of the poets, male and female, who take their courage in their hands and stand up and speak. This time, we’re speaking truth to power. You may have not loved Urula the Sea Witch. You may have been forced to BE her, every time the kids played “Little Mermaid” — but she existed as she was – kind of amazing, with that eye-shadow, with that power. There was no other Disney broad like her. Will there ever be again?
{nat’l poetry month: “Shrinking Women,” by Lily Meyers}
Lily Meyers, age twenty, performing for Wesleyan University at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.
“…That’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit, weaving silence in between the threads, which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house.”
{nat’l poetry month: zzzzzzzip}
Laura’s “riddleku” yesterday was lovely – the imagery of I’m singing/ the room full of breeze reminded me both of a fan’s atonal song, and of today’s subject — the tiny flying piggies that live in the yard — and think it’s theirs.
Our friend “Moll” visited us from Scotland last month, and her reaction to them was open-mouthed wonder. “Real, live hummingbirds!” she breathed, and we smiled. (Of course, she’d had the same reaction to Mennonite ladies with their headcoverings -“Oh, just like in a book!” – and to the various fountains and wineries and vineyards and other touristy things we’d taken her to see. She actually jumped up and down at the Jelly Belly Factory.) Moll is just like that; full of enthusiasm, though we agreed with her about the hummingbirds. They were a hard loss for us when we lived in Scotland – bluetits, while fast and beautiful, are just not the same. There’s just something so cheering about a hummingbird’s little greedy, flashy, and most of all, speedy interactions with us, helicoptering around our heads as we fill the feeders, bickering bitterly with each other over whose turn it is to drink, making tenuous treaties which are almost immediately broken in a hail of tiny, shrill squeaks as the aerial battles engage again and again — that makes us glad to be home, where they live.
bejeweled
a blur –
at edge of sight –
its electric flight, dance.
effervescent. iridescent.
bejeweled.
Cinquain is hard for me, because it has Rules and I generally dislike Rules and Poetry at the same time. Classic cinquain, as we were taught them in school, anyway, uses the first word and the title as the same; the third line usually ends in -ing, and is descriptive verbs. Sometimes the fourth line is a full sentence. Well…I tried to follow the descriptive feel of the cinquain, and to respect the stresses and syllables in the line, but — as usual — not much else of the rules got through. Oh, well. I’ll try this form again, when I’m feeling less rebellious. ☻ Whenever that might be.
Meanwhile, all hail the tiny, flying pigs.
{nat’l poetry month: scented}
Yesterday, we had a couple of brief periods of hail, which means that this wee beauty, opened a bit more than it is in this picture, became a tiny bit battered. It is in my vase now, but it smells no less sweet.
The roses in my garden are amazing – some of them smell a bit citrus-y, others smell faintly like wildflowers, while others are richly drenched in a lingering, almost cloying scent like lilacs and lavender all blended with roses. I find them intoxicating – and a little worrisome. Because when I have my nose in a flower, eyes closed in rapture, is really no time to discover its resident earwig or damply plump albino spider. And yet, this keeps happening to me. And, I keep having to resist the instinctive shriek-and-fling routine.
Ah, nature. Better left the heck outside.
things around the rosies
whorls of heady scent
secrete multi-legged hosts
Spite your nose. Raise your face.
With apologies to the little millipede thingy who has just met A Bad End (and who was probably eating my roses anyway).
{nat’l poetry month: other}
So, you know how I’m always going on about people doing a good job writing the other? Andre gets it.
Go to the whole cartoon. Click to embiggen.
Read the whole cartoon? Note the recurring theme? What must you start with???? A GOOD CHARACTER. No matter, then, if you’re also making them blind, Cambexican, chair-bound, bipolar, werewolf, purple-with-pink-spots, lesbian, pregnant, marathoner, arc-welders, mitten-knitting, bus-riding, knock-kneed, tea-sipping, English-side-saddle-competitors. Once you start where you need to start, the rest falls into place.
above the gates of Story, the password
Once Upon a Time
Portals beckon – Choose Your Own.
Any hand. One key.