Welcome to another year of Poetry Peeps Adventures!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our poetry challenge for the month of FEBRUARY.
Here’s the scoop: we’re composing poetry in response to a poem of Arthur Sze, former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and current United States Poet Laureate. Arthur Sze is very much interested in poetry in translation, and during his term hopes to bring more opportunities for both reading and writing it to the American public. I’m excited to dig into a new-to-me voice in Asian American poetry, and look forward to meeting this challenge. Are you in? Good! You’ll have the month to craft your creation and share it on February 27th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We hope you’ll join the fun!
This was such a great poetry form to kick off the year. It’s …kind of a joy to stride into our shared poetry space without my usual whinge of, “Oh, deary me, I thought this would be easy, and it turns out…” Haha, let no one deceive you: tricubes are dead easy. No, seriously. They’re easy and I love them. Of course, easy doesn’t necessarily mean simple. Those three syllables per line take simplicity right off the table. Making sense in a tight space, and saying something that isn’t choppy or trite… is a challenge. Aaand, it didn’t always happen for me, but a tricube’s saving grace is that it’s so short that one can write twenty or thirty and pick the ones that come out the best. At least one of my poetry sisters simply wrote a bunch of trisyllabic lines on a theme and picked and choose from among them to compose a whole. That sounds so easy that it feels like cheating. I found myself breaking the world into those three syllable phrases – I even wrote a tricube with my fingertip on a phone notepad at 4AM sans glasses (and as nearsighted as I am, that was quite a feat). All this to say: tricubes are addictive. If you’ve never before, try one today.
From Process…
2026 is lining itself up to be a poem-SUFFUSED year. Living through fascism isn’t something we always notice (we have always lived in the castle, friends, don’t mistake it), but the times when we are forced to acknowledge it unequivocally require… more time to process. Poetry helps me regulate mentally and my journaling usually turns into some kind of couplets, at minimum, so the ease of writing for a tricube really helped me to lean into that. Of course, I don’t always like to use my Poetry Peeps time for …like, a reality play-by-play so I made a deliberate effort to use our shared space in a kinder way this month. We can’t escape entirely from negative feelings, but I am sharing this space with some of you who need a flipping break. (I see you, friend.) I made conscious choices not to use certain names or words or concepts in what I shared today, and to lean in the direction of simply using the first stanza of my three stanza poem to explore an idea in a vague and general way, and then to intensify it by the end but to still keep it universal. And, I tried to keep the first three syllable line… simple-ish. (Again: didn’t say easy.) The very first tricube I wrote was on January 7, and the first three syllable line was “A cannon.” That object spoke well enough to my feelings that the rest of the poem could fall into that line. So my plan for all of them became a.) Focus on an object/statement topically. b.) Add intensifier or clarifying lines, and then, c.) a succinct Fin. And then I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Seventeen tricubes later…
…to Poetry
…I have a few to share.
CATENIGMA
Matter’s states:
Solid, gas,
or liquid,
Yet the cat’s
puddled sleep
doesn’t match.
Solid sound:
Contentment’s
liquid purr.
Pear – Shaped
Lovely pear:
Round-bottomed,
Pale, sweet, mild.
British slang
notes ‘pear-shaped’
means awry.
Distortion:
one round world
falling flat.
This was a definition poem. I idly wondered why things that were ‘pear shaped’ were so bad when a pear is half the social ideal for a good figure in modern society (the whole is an hourglass, of course. Or a violin? So hard to keep track of what random shape we’re supposed to be today). And then I read that it was a phrase coined during WWII when Royal Air Force pilots were making loops… if you came out of your loop and the vapor trail behind your plane wasn’t circular, but pear-shaped? You needed to course correct, or you were going to hit the ground…
Lift, Every Voice
When singing,
buoyant breaths
lift our hearts.
Metaphor?
This truth is
literal:
Keep breathing.
Let your soul
elevate.
To sing we have have to inhale before we begin. A deep breath expands the diaphragm, and the heart, which rests directly atop the diaphragm, connected by the pericardium, rises. Literally. Lift every voice, indeed.
My Poetry Sisters tried out tricubing as well this month. Liz’s post is here. Sara’s trio of tricubes is here, and Cousin Mary Lee’s is here. Tricia’s poem is here, and Michelle K’s tricube is here. Margaret Simon’s tricube is here, and Carol V’s are here, and Rose’s tricube is here. More Peeps may show up throughout the weekend, so don’t forget to check back to see their links rounded up here.
Our lovely hostess this Poetry Friday is Amy VanDerwater at the Poem Farm, so don’t miss stopping by for more poetry! Thanks for hosting, Amy.
What a month. As it limps to a close, I’ll reiterate the Encouragement³ tricube I posted on Instagram:
A small thing
can change worlds.
One small change.
One small spark
ignites fire.
One heart warms.
“There are things
I can do.”
Repeat it.
Believe it.
No matter what the weekend brings, no matter the next loss or shadow that steals your breath, no matter the Sturm und Drang, be anchored. Be held. Be sure: You are so well-loved.
