Category: Part and Poetry

Grr. I’m so discombobulated today I thought it was Friday. It’s the noise. I’m going to really need the neighbors (and the HOA) to coordinate on a day when they have the yardwork done, because the minute it stops raining it gets ridiculous…

suburban nuisance

“Don’t chase poems,”
let them come,”
I insist.

Arriving
afterwards,
an assault –

Leaf blowers.
Honestly,
What’s the point?!

SOMEONE is a little grumpy this morning. I really hope it’s going to go better tomorrow – on the plus side, the verse portion of today’s project went very, very quickly…

Seeing as its nearly Poetry Friday (sigh: not Friday yet. Alas), I am leaving myself a reminder to check in on the Kidlit Progressive Poem. This annual creative exercise, ably organized by poet Margaret Simon, is fascinating for someone who hated group projects in school. Somehow, even with all of our varied styles, the group pulls it off, though the verse takes frequent(!) unexpected (!!!) turns. I find the whole process enormously entertaining, so I’ve joined this year again, next in line after my play cousins Karen, Heidi, and Mary Lee. The theme this year is metaphorical, and so far it’s very… avian? in the Land of Poetry. Today kicks off a second stanza – I expect we’ll take another of those unexpected turns, so I look forward to seeing where we all end up…

crowded table

Imagine
holidays
by Hallmark –

color-drenched
celluloid.
Realism

is crowded:
just space for…
…everyone.

There’s a song by The Highwomen called “Crowded Table” that was on my mind this morning (we’re doing a double quartet choral version sometime later this Spring, and the chorus is an incredible earworm), and it seems appropriate, as yesterday the niecelet informed the family group text that in a couple of Sundays at brunch she’ll be introducing us all to Someone Important. My little sister is buying matching hoodies with her Someone Important (they are tooth-achingly sweet), and it really does seem like in the next year or so the family will grow by two. There’s already seventeen of us for dinner when we’re all there, so… time to actually buy extra seating instead of making do with the piano bench and various office chairs.

It’s so different from when I came home from college with Himself – they’re well into their thirties and not shaky twenty-year-olds cringing in advance of the inevitable judgment. They’re giving us a chance to be part of their lives, not hat-in-hand asking for… anything, really, but their due: being treated like grown women with their own business to mind.

Vive la différence. You go, girls.

Today seemed a good day to try again with the original prompts brought to me by Grant Snider’s POETRY COMICS prompts. As in his first example, I looked for a window to draw… Of course, because I’m difficult, my first window is the dining room’s glass door. (And nope, I couldn’t figure out how to draw the spherical prism hanging outside, either.)

I tried to let the poem come to me, rather than chase it or impose myself upon it, keeping in mind I also was trying to both be present and not succumb to the nagging feeling that I Ought To Be Doing Something more important than writing an imperfect poem. (Laundry. Dusting. Groceries. Novel word count…)

Sunday afternoon I watched a great little video on… practicing. We’re all acquainted with the idea, and we’re really good at telling children to do so, but it’s astonishing how bad we can be at just… consistently trying as adults. For myself, a few years ago I was so relieved to have a name and a diagnoses for my spatial perception (etc. etc.) issues. Whew, it’s a learning disability, I don’t have to try anymore! Which hasn’t made my desire to be able to stitch an even seam, visually judge distances, estimate distance and time, parallel park, use a sewing machine, draw straight lines or round circles, or to do All The Things that so many others do with such thoughtless ease. I’m having to try, armed with the knowledge that I will have specific kinds of failures – plus others I don’t even know to expect. Though this is daunting, if I merely accepted my brain’s limitations, I’d stay exactly where I am – wistful. And, eventually, resentful.

Thus this month I practice being better at being in the moment and letting poems come to me. I will dismiss my self-discipline and wordplay brain and just… sit. And color. It’s both entertaining and excruciating. Contradictory – the story of my life, and probably everyone’s.