Welcome to another year of Poetry Peeps Adventures!
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our poetry challenge for the month of MARCH.
Here’s the scoop: we’re writing tight little bundles of poetry called Ovillejos! That’s exactly what the word means – a bundle of yarn. This Spanish form bundles together ten lines, made up of 3 rhyming couplets interspersed with three verrrry short lines, and a quatrain. The last line is a “redondilla,” a “little round” that collects all three of the short lines and casts off the poem, as it were. The Ovillejo plays with repetition in a way that will allow some cleverness and wordplay. I’m excited to dig into a new-to-me poetic form, first popularized sometime between the late fifteen hundreds by Miguel de Cervantes (he lived between 1547-1616 so it’s been a minute – may as well make it popular again) – and might even throw in a Spanish word or two, just to challenge myself. Are you in? Good! You’ll have the month to craft your creation and share it March 27th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. This form looks like fun, so we hope you’ll us!
From Process…
“That’s one of the things poetry does,” Sze says. “We’re not writing in competition—we’re all trying to create poems, and they’re all shining light on each other.”
Thanks to Poetry Sister, Sara, who listened to a podcast and urged us towards this man, it has been our honor this month to learn a bit more about our newly appointed poet laureate, Arthur Sze. We all admitted to feeling a little awkward that we knew NOTHING about him. While the work of Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Ada Limon, our previous three laureates, were already known to us, I know I came to Mr. Sze’s poetry only knowing that he is a translator whose early focus was translating classical Chinese poetry. Mr. Sze’s previous scholarship shows in his attention to words, his ability to both dial in and step back while retaining an immense focus on his subject, and his facility with using simple words to paint emotionally lush, immersive pictures. I really enjoyed reading his work. Finding a mentor poem of his wasn’t difficult – rather, narrowing his body of work down to just ONE was the issue.
Though this month was full of topics which easily lend themselves to poetry, I found that I didn’t quite know where to begin with Arthur Sze in conversation with any of these. It’s not that he doesn’t write about daily life in the world, but it’s more that he hyper-focuses on tiny bits of it that really wrest the ordinary from the daily. Subjects which reappear in his poetry come largely from the natural world – various leaves, lakes, celestial bodies – but he also has a fascination with hands. He repeatedly mentions X-rays. His poetry is stillness that moves, movement made meaning – impact and explosion, sting and spin – and always, grasping at understanding the internal through the lens of the external. Eventually I limited myself to the first few poems of his that I’d read and decided to try two forms – one, creating a Golden Shovel from an especially toothsome line, or two, trying to recreate relief and resignation using an ordinary life moment turned to metaphor and given substance as he so often does.
…To Poetry
The first mentor poem I chose was about smoke. Living in the Western U.S., this was an easy choice; having had the experience of being downwind of fires in Canada or Alaska or Washington State – or even further north in my own state. The repetition of the first line and the phrase ‘days of smoke’ reflects the multiplicity of days we’ve endured this, and the final stanza resigns itself to knowing that we can’t slide back the moves on time’s Rubik’s Cube from yesterday – today requires a new solution.
Downwind
from Into the Hush by Arthur Sze,
Copper Canyon Press, 2025; *Winner of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement*
When the air clears after days of smoke,
you yearn to swim in an alpine lake
that mirrors clouds and wash the scent
of burned pines from your hair;
from the west, smoke has traveled
a thousand miles, the point of ignition
where a pine snapped a transmission line.
When the air clears after days of smoke,
you notice the serrated edges along
apple leaves, locate a point of ignition
in a word, a jab: a man chalks
a cue stick and, slamming the white ball
into a pyramid of balls, feels for a millisecond
a point of ignition and surge in the clatter.
When the air clears after days of smoke,
you believe you were simply casualty
downwind, but, as you hold
a Rubik’s Cube of time in your hands,
the orange sunrise is nowhere,
everywhere, and—damn—that the pieces
are pieces you cannot flip back.
To find my own place with this poem, using Arthur Sze’s style as my mentor, I needed to use his deliberate, expansive phrasing, leaving room for my immediate meaning, and other weights of meanings a reader would bring to the piece. Each stanza needed to tell a story, complete within itself, of a moment or action. …And I needed to avoid rhyme like my life depended on it. (Guess which one of those was really trying.😖) In a nod to his translations, I threw in a couple of undemanding-to-non-speakers Spanish words.
At present, I find fire and its environmental impacts too grief-inducing, so I tried for a lighter direction. I chose a positive moment – small and internal – and then tried to use a less heavy hand in describing regret and resignation.
Updraft
When the sky clears after days of clouds,
you yearn down steep staircases
once known but long left unexplored
as whetted, curiosity bustles back up again –
And pausing, with winter no less present,
el clima’s daughter gestures to her brother.
el niño y la niña’s salsa spins scour the floor.
When the sky clears after days of clouds,
you notice that viridian is Gaia’s favorite shade,
followed familiarly by fern, or maybe sage.
exclamations of dun birds – sparrows? – are lime limned,
though faintly heard by the slow-sap forest;
evergreen rising, a point of departure,
draping the hills, a softening, moss-fuzzed mantilla.
When the sky clears after days of clouds,
you believe you feel potentiality’s
updraft, but as the acetic
wind curdles the clouds, vernal promises
of equinox diminish –
while hollow bellied thunder growls,
a ‘not yet’ that can’t be unheard.
I liked the word ‘updraft’ because, like ‘downwind,’ it is a minor thing that speaks to something huge. An updraft is a small, rapid, upward current of air, caused by wind rising from warmed ground, or forced over topography – and it’s the engine behind clouds, moisture formation, hail, and thunderstorms. It gently sends regrets as I think of spring, and plunges us back into yet another tormenta.
My final poem I wasn’t going to share, but I really found far too many neat turns of phrase in Sze’s work NOT to mess with my Shovel idea. “Winter Wishes” borrows from the poem, “X-Ray,” the first line of which reads In my mind, a lilac begins to leaf. I went again with a lighthearted approach, sticking to my theme of kind of not complaining about rain (nobody with any sense who lives in a drought-prone place does that), but merely suggesting that I’m really ready to start (very sloooowly) digging out the hillside for my garden if we could have a few days pause early next month? Yes, Dr. Nimbus, thank you.
Winter Wishes
on the store front, signs smile, “welcome In,”
while bagged soils, stacked, find my
fingers fidgeting. It’s TIME – past time, to my mind
though mind over matter can’t leave the land less a
lake. yesterday the first lilac
hyacinths raised bowed heads. Crowing, “Now it begins!”
I scrambled to the garden center, anxious to
find the finest fertilizer to fortify my be-leaf.
My Poetry Sisters are scintillating on the poetry of Arthur Sze from wildly different directions this month. Liz’s poem is here. Laura’s poem is here, Cousin Mary Lee’s is here, and Sara’s poem is here. Tricia’s poem is here, and Susan’s poem is here. Michelle K’s poem 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 Ms. Margaret, at Reflections on the Teche, so don’t miss stopping by for more poetry! Thanks for hosting.
Book Giveaway! You have 31 days to win copies of BERRY PARKER DOESN’T CATCH CRUSHES. A book club, school library, or home school group is eligible to receive ten copies, which was published by Harper Collins in September of 2025, and is all about a young woman growing up and learning that love is not pie, and that sharing it out doesn’t require it to diminish. It’s a book about love and growing into change and compromise, through the lens of middle school. If you’re a book club host, or know a teacher or librarian who could use a boost this very long winter, don’t hesitate to sign up. Continental U.S. only, please, with apologies and acknowledgment of the murky tariff situation – may it clear soon.
We’re finally seeing the calendar and astronomical end of winter in a few weeks, though meteorological winter has yet to give way. In month two of this year, it seems we are already we’re in the stutter stop of weeks that extend years long, followed by days that just blink past. This was somehow the shortest Olympics, EVER, and yet, it’s been another endless month of this national moment. It’s so strange how time both shrinks and stretches, warps and morphs, all inchworms and seven-league boots. I longed as a child to be the magical ages of both seventeen and thirty-six (?? no idea), and then – life leapfrogged a decade and some, and now neither of those is even visible in my rear view anymore. Psychologists suggest that the more information the brain processes, the slower time seems to move, and as we age, much less seems like new information. When we’re kids, time moves like those deposit cans they used to send along through pneumatic tubes at the bank; a whoosh and the packet of our days is delivered elsewhere – grades and birthdays brought forward in a flash.
While we’re being both stretched and stationary, remember – b r e a t h e. On this ride, may you stop and look, cramming your moments with new faces, new textures, and new experiences, expanding the river of what you think you know down through its tiniest tributaries. May your brains have to slow down so that you can step deliberately into new understanding – giving depth and new dimension to knowledge you thought you’d already learned. And as you suck down cold, fresh mouthfuls of this spring to come, may you remember that no one will experience the new season just like you – so celebrate your original self because you are so well-loved.
