Weather Report

Steady rain today. Family and friends in Wisconsin report snow. For them, the poem "Snow" by Naomi Shihab Nye. Here you will find an interview with Nye, in which she says:

Number one: Read, Read, and then Read some more. Always Read. Find the voices that speak most to YOU. This is your pleasure and blessing, as well as responsibility!

It is crucial to make one's own writing circle – friends, either close or far, with whom you trade work and discuss it – as a kind of support system, place-of-conversation and energy. Find those people, even a few, with whom you can share and discuss your works – then do it. Keep the papers flowing among you. Work does not get into the world by itself. We must help it.

...

There is so much goodness happening in the world of writing today. And there is plenty of ROOM and appetite for new writers. I think there always was. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Attend all the readings you can, and get involved in giving some, if you like to do that. Be part of your own writing community. Often the first step in doing this is simply to let yourself become identified as One Who Cares About Writing!

Giving Thanks

The poem "A List of Praises" by Anne Porter.

Happy Halloween

"An Epiphany," by Ted Kooser.

First Bats, Now Cats: The Countdown to Halloween Continues

"The cat's song," by Marge Piercy.

Countdown to Halloween

"Bats," a poem by Paisley Rekdel.

The First of Autumn

To Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

A Poem for the Season

Linda Pastan's "The Months" on the Poetry Foundation web site.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

First Poems

For Leatha Kendrick's Revision as Regeneration class this week, she has asked us to bring in the poem that first made us want to be a poet.

I'm not sure I can pinpoint one poem that made me want to be a poet. Perhaps the nearest thing I can do is reflect on the poems that I've stashed away as part of my earliest remembrances of "getting" poetry, or rather having it "get" me; these poems were among the first to take hold, steering me into the language of other poets and poems (and eventually the desire to be a poet):

• "Fog" by Carl Sandburg
• "February Twilight" by Sara Teasdale
  
• "Young" by Anne Sexton

Meditation on a Meditative Form--The Villanelle

I met with a couple of the lovely and talented writers of KaPow! yesterday to discuss two villanelles I had written recently. (Poets.org gives this explanation of the form.) As we were talking about the form, I was trying to articulate why the form sometimes works so well. Because eight of the 19 lines are repeated lines and the entire poem hinges on two rhymes, it seems to me that when a villanelle works:

• The repeated lines change or deepen in meaning as the poem progresses.
  
• The variable lines support and push on the repeated lines.
• Much energy comes from the union of the repeated and variable lines.
  
• Its subject matter is usually not narrative in nature but meditative.

For me, this last point is important. In much of my poetry, particularly free-verse, I am trying to get from point A to point B in a clear and linear manner (blame my training as a technical writer). However, this is probably impossible to do with the villanelle. Its nature is to double-back and wind around an idea. So the villanelle seems an especially apt form to work in when I have a subject that I need to meditate on, a subject that feels more like prayer or song than story.

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Artists Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (The University of Michigan Press), Maxine Kumin concludes about the contemporary villanelle:

It's my thesis that we don't need to ossify these ancient French forms by slavish imitation. We can enliven and enhance them with our own approximations. By resorting to the ingenuities of our own time and place, American poets in the last fifty years have turned a stultifying and restrictive form into an elastic, even gymnastic one. Perhaps in the twenty-first century others will remake the villanelle in ways as yet unthought of.

An excellent point of which I need to remind myself from time to time. When I work in form, my goal is to let the form be flexible, elastic, let the form serve the poem and not the other way around, but sometimes, particularly during the revision process, I lose this flexibility and find my allegiance has shifted from the poem to the form. I think there is a way (there must be!) to honor the spirit of the form while maintaining the integrity of the poem. Such is my quest.

Here are some of my favorite villanelles:

• One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
• Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
• Little Miracle by Molly Peacock
• Villanelle for D.G.B. by Marilyn Hacker (scroll to end)
  

Poems Speak to Us...If We Listen

If you're lucky, you'll read a line in a poem and know it is speaking directly to you. That's how I felt when I read these lines at the end of Linda Pastan's poem "Women on the Shore":

If death is everywhere we look,
at least let's marry it to beauty.

This could be the manifesto of why I write poetry. Read the whole poem here.

List Poems

Following up on an earlier post, here is a list poem I found on Poets.org.

And I can't talk about list poems without referring to Whitman. At the Poetry Foundation, you can read Song of Myself. Among the cadence of the poem are lists, varied and beautiful.

Fried Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty" has always been a personal favorite. Maybe because it's a sonnet in disguise. Maybe because that crazy sprung rhythm keeps me on my toes when reading it. Maybe because it flies in the face of one of the "rules" hammered into beginning poets (i.e., be wary of adjectives).

A playful adaptation by R.S. Gwynn can be found on Kooser's American Life in Poetry site.

What I want to learn from this is how to write playfully, with humor and lightness, and to do so with grace and ease.