Three cheers for Poetry Month!

April, with its reputation for cruelty and taxes. What better time to celebrate poetry?

The month is chalk-full of events, including readings galore. On the Poetic Asides blog, Robert Lee Brewer again hosts the Poem-a-Day challenge. And Michael Spence has a lovely, taut poem in today's Seattle Times.

Over on Facebook, Dana Guthrie Martin is again hosting FaBoStaMe (Facebook Status Message), in which one writes a poem by updating the Facebook status every minute for 30 minutes. Without being able to back and revise.

My minutes got a little stretchy (I think I'd get so excited about writing the next line that I'd forget to click Condividi--which I think means Share). But here in its rough, raw status state is my effort:

How bridal the veils that rain silver out of today’s gray sky,
water slim as feathers from some slender bird
migrating, shreds shed from the clouds that shelve the sky
a book of words for weather, a mirror of the lake, and the lake’s name,
a reign of cormorants and coots, wings folded
in April’s sodden grace, proof that floating
between worlds marries them both, the deep air, the cool waves
a green beatitude--
When you dream of birds, the night swims around you.
I wake to the sound of horses, hooves pounding away from the morning,
silver bridles jangling back through vales of sleep.
Thin whicker, the splash in a stream,
mist coating the minutes softly, the dapple of water on water,
a galloping as April thickens its cloak
and the fat robins wake us before dawn opens its throat.
Take the reins
down the scattered shore
and feel the stones, the young blades of grass,
the willow’s skirt sweeping, a green shower.
Erasing, drawing again,
the rain writes its history and the lake
is a palimpsest, a shifting parchment
making its stories up as this low-pressure front
shatters in the west. You can’t count
on anything today, not even a storm
can linger long enough for coffee.
From the sea of our bed we can see four panes
of weather hemmed by old lace
and the neighbors’ birch that dances
without being asked. Lean in
and let the rain river on alone.

Every month can be poetry month, but let's live it large this month.

Cheers to you!

NaPoWriMo recap: A month of titles

I posted a few of the poems during the month, but I thought I'd follow Kelli's example from a year or two ago and post all the titles for the month:

At Another Beginning
Waikoloa
The Problem with Whining
Bad Kitty
Seven Feathers Casino
In Our World
Spring Cleaning
After Work
Labor Day, 1994
Your Girl Friday
Mouse
So We Decided to Crash the Party at Walter's House
Savoring
Roost
On the Fence of Marriage
Gray
All I Want Is to Grow Tomatoes
In the Modern Dance Class
In the Face of It
After Death
(haiku: no title)
Always More
Here and Gone
From the Gate
The Croquet Tournament
What Is This New Language?
Where I Would Live, How I Would Write It
Do What You Can
Never Forget
Farewell, My Forties

I need to work on my titles!

NaPoWriMo: Sestina #2

Here's the draft:


It's Just a Day or Two


A red-winged blackbird perches on a reed.
I've waited long for spring to come, to warm
the early morning, bring the light. I need
to walk outside, let go of the long storm.
I watch the water's mirror stirred by wind,
a changing patch of cat's paw ripples pinned

to the surface like a reminder pinned
to a cork board--Don't Forget--that I read
and don't remember, mind blown clean like wind
swept afternoons. I try to think, to warm
these fingers in between pockets of storm.
It's just a day or two--a week--I need,

a month or a year to catch up. I knead
my tired hands through the thin gloves, palms pinned
by damp cold, try to chase the shadow storm
that lingers after night recedes. A reed
stands like a lucky flute. The sun looks warm
enough to matter, but the steel-blue wind

picks up my skin, scrapes at my face. I wind
my scarlet scarf around my neck. I need
to button up, let my worries down, warm
the same old poem over and over, pinned
like a flower on my lapel. A reed
becomes an instrument. A thunder storm

sounds like a symphony. I want a storm
of oboes, want the melodies to wind
like water while my feet stay dry. A reed
makes a baton or a slim stake. I need
to be anchored fast, settled somewhere, pinned
but with a little room to move, to warm

up to my middle age. I want to warm
these tendering years after the flash storm
of hide and seeking, four decades pinned
to growing older, feel my days unwind,
give into time, stand as still as a reed
in this short field of my dreams. Yes, I need

spring to warm the pond and its ducks, to wind
through each reed shoots of green, even pinned
by winter's fists of storm. I need this poem.

NaPoWriMo: Sestina #1

Here's the draft:


Do What You Can


Tuesday's assignment: Write a sestina,
a sextet of chosen words at the end
of each line, over and over. Now bend
the meanings, keep the music, make it lean,
lead the reader. A 36- line form,
it travels on and on, a rushing swarm

of words. This repetition makes a swarm,
the same words flying through the sestina
like birds above a field. You need to form
new images, discoveries to the end.
Take a deep breath, take another, don't lean
on your elbows, don't roll your eyes. Just bend

your creaky old knees a few times, then bend
your brain to the task, enter the wild swarm,
follow what narrative you can, and lean
against experience, ride this sestina
like a greedy crow to the corn row's end.
Feel the summer wind in your head and form

the thinking you've hidden in black wings, form
dreams buried by night. Maybe you land, bend
to the earth, dig with your fingers to end
the work, the guessing, the questions' cold swarm.
Do what you can to find that sestina--
don't scrimp and let your harvest come lean.

When you started, the first few words looked lean
as a fence post and fettered by this form,
but see--you're nearly through this sestina.
You've written your way around the last bend,
scribbled harder into the stanza's swarm.
Flex your hands. You can almost taste the end

of the afternoon when you'll reach the end
of this poem. Dusk will fall and you can lean
into evening, forget about the swarm,
loosen your dinnertime thoughts from the form,
say hello to your beautiful wife, bend
her ear, tell her about this sestina

while in the lamplight gnats swarm and the form
rests. You bend your heart, lean into her hair,
end the evening, start your next sestina.

So a man walks into a bar...

So I'm trying to write a sestina (a form I normally love), and I decide to write two (because I'm having so much trouble with one), and I write through both of them (in a very rough, drafty way), and then I realize I've forgotten about the three lines at the end!

It's like that bit about the song that never ends...

Yeah...

NaPoWriMo continues to kick my, you know. One more day.

But first, I must finish those sestinas.

NaPoWriMo: Tuesday's haiku

Tuesday's prompt was to write a haiku or to write about a haiku.

syllables confound
images lost in counting
cherry blossoms fall

wild japonica
blooms deep red by the roadside
as in other years

The first red tulips
open to rain and in shade
bright white trillium

duck under the bough
that crosses the walk, heavy
with petals and rain

let go the number
feel each poem fill you like breath
spring will not linger

More NaPoWriMo (from a few days ago)

Saturday's prompt from Poetic Asides was to right about an intereaction. It could be between two people, or it could be between two animals (or Robert used the example of the interaction between a bee and a flower).

Here's my draft.


In the Modern Dance Class


The body meets the floor, melts its shoulders
and spine into smooth wood, fans its arms
as though to fly, presses palms and thighs.
The body loves the floor's firm plane
on stomach and breasts, knees
and carefully the back of the head.
On these worn boards, the body curls
like an embryo, unfolds in a star,
gathers itself and leaves the floor, leaves
only its two distant feet on the floor
and the floor calls out for it. The body
has met this floor before, the body
has the map of gravity and knows
how to go back, how to spiral-glide down
into a sea shell, lolls its haunches,
rolls and stretches, feels what it's like to touch,
to caress the floor as long as it can.

More cat love

Today's prompt over at Poetic Asides was to write a poem about an object. Immediately, I thought of a salt shaker. (There is a shaker on the cover of my copy of Pablo Neruda's Ode to Common Things.) But as much as I love salt, the shaker was not an evocative image for me.

Then the cat began to get restless, which means that the cat began to get into trouble. I thought about what might make him happy, and I had my image.


Mouse


It came with 11 others,
a small white mouse alone
on the kitchen floor.
For now, it has two red eyes,
two pink ears, and its own leather tail.
All of these may come off
in a day. It will fray to a wad
of soft and battered fur
and still the cat will spring
like an acrobat, body twisting, chase
this catnip prey
as if it ran by itself,
The rest of the package
stays in the drawer,
and the cat knows where that is
just as he knows I keep
extras in my pockets. He crouches,
tense, as soon as I reach my hand in
(even I just want a tissue
or a note I wrote,
even if the mouse I threw before
sits no more than six inches from him).
He is obsessed with his wealth
of mice just like this one,
and they disappear.
Somewhere in this house
is his abundance.

NaPoWriMo poem #6, sort of

Yesterday was a disappointing poem-writing day, but a good family day. The prompt was to write a poem about something that was missing.

I got two ideas on my way home from the store, and then I did my P.T. and cooked dinner and ate and cleaned up the kitchen and then we ended up having a family conversation about all kinds of things for over an hour, and by the time I was able to write, I had only four very spare (or highly compressed?) lines left.

In Our World


Five lives lost—six,
if you count their father.
When did his gun
become an answer?

I didn't write about the death of a family, because I was spending time with my family, and that's a trade I'll make. But there is so much more to say about this. Too much.

If I'm in the same situation tonight, I might sit down right outside the backdoor and write before my evening begins.

NaPoWriMo poem #4

Today's prompt from Poetic Asides is to write about an animal.

I immediately had grand thoughts about Great Blue Herons and went nowhere.

But my sister is in a band called Bad Kitty, and that inspired me to write about my own felonious feline. Here's the draft:


Bad Kitty


O, my glorious pet, my pest,
your morning claws climbing
the back of my pink bathrobe.

My mouse chaser skittering
across the kitchen in fierce pursuit,
dropping the catnip bounty

on the floor for me to throw again,
then sprawling with your prey gripped
between your teeth like a fat cigar.

Guardian of the front door,
your long tail switches as you spy
on the sparrows outside.

Tramper of counters and mantles,
all territories forbidden, opener
of cupboards, hunter of rubber bands

and other hazards requiring surgery,
your imperative meow insisting
on treats and all doors ajar.

Then you slip into a paper sack,
or curl up in a basket, soak up
the light in a square of sun.

You of bell and purr, soft fur, curl
next to me when, finally, you fall asleep.

NaPoWriMo poem #1

Well, not exactly. I'm writing a poem a day based on the prompts that Robert Lee Brewer is providing over at his Poetic Asides blog.

Day one's assignment was to write an origin poem, and I was stuck at the start. After I got going, I wrote three, and asked my husband to help me choose which fit best. He thought that this poem was more about food than origins (is this ever a problem?) so I'm posting this draft of it here instead:

Where These Come From


You ask about the origin of my hips,
a generous genesis coming from bacon
and pancakes at breakfast, a bit extra
added by that pina colada at lunch,
a mai tai or four on the cocktail cruise,
Kalua pig quesadilla,
wasabi macadamia nuts and even the peas,
goat cheese as smooth as butter,
fish bits crusted in coconut and served
with a sweet chili sauce the color of sunset,
lobster bisque, cole slaw with avocado,
and then there was the banana cream pie.
I was born with these bones
but the rest is a menu to relish.

Bienvenu a la Camargue

In sixth-grade French class, I saw a movie called "La Criniere Blanche" (The White Mane) about a boy living in the Camargue region of southern France.

Being a horse-crazy young girl, I was transfixed by the idea of a wild region where herds of white horses ran free. The images stayed with me for decades.

Then, one day as I was driving into the parking lot of the neighborhood QFC grocery store, I encountered a wild-eyed musician. In my head.

One poem grew into another. One character led to another. And that landscape gave birth to a made-up myth about the lost daughter of Ra. All absolutely fiction (although friends and Internet research helped a lot).

The poems work best together, and so I've put In the Mane of a White Horse up on the sofa. I hope you enjoy the poems. And I hope someday to visit the Camargue.

Post-April wrap-up

I spent April writing a poem a day based on the prompts at Poetic Asides. A while back, Mr. So-Cal made the comment that I always say I'm going to write X amount, and then a few days later I say that I didn't or I haven't yet (he's right, by the way).

But in April, I did it, and some of those draft poems might be worth revisiting (and some I've already posted in draft form here). In the meantime, these are my titles from the past month:

1. First House, on First Ave.

2. Icarus's Mother

3. (a haiku, but it was about plumeria)

4. Briefly (okay, that's a pretty short title)

5. Her Usual (a Woman Who Is Afraid of Everything poem)

6. A Day of Resting

7. After Dinner

8. If I Must Paint You a Picture

9. When the Whistle Blows

10. Up on Kail Road

11. Spoon

12. Always

13. Water Also Flows Downhill

14. How the Mother Behaves (this title was required by the prompt)

15. Taxing, 1985

16. Tenderly

17. Sunday Visit

18. Schism

19. In the '60s

20. After the Whole Day

21. Dealer's Choice

22. Where Is the Nature

23. Crockery

24. Yellowstone, Already Years Ago

25. The Job I Could Not Keep

26. I Am So Over Dinner (another title required by the prompt)

27. Time to Hit the Ground Growing

28. At the End of a Winter and a Day

29. Trying to Keep Up

30. Not Such an End

I've learned quite a bit, including the insight that I need to work a little harder on my titles!

Happy May!

Yesterday's poem

Yesterday's National Poetry Month prompt on Poetic Asides was to write a sestina. It was fun! (True confession: I love sestinas, even though they always seem daunting at first.) I decided to choose, instead of six random end words, three pairs of rhyming end words.

Here is my attempt (or my draft):

At the End of Winter and a Day


An April wind may blow
no ill, or summon gray weather,
rain on the trees, one lone crow
winging west. Gone is the flock,
a sleight of bone and feather.
The clouds pile up and knock

into thunder, a rumbling drum, knock
on a copper kettle, a blow
to evening's descent. You find a feather
lost in this darkening weather
and look for the circling flock,
bird shadows in the shape of crow

but the wings elude you, each crow
gone to roost, and you knock
at the door of dusk, flock
to the porch light, a glass of wine, blow
out the candles and watch weather
bruise the sky, feather

the light to shreds of wind. You feather
your hand through my hair, crow
feet perching at my eyes. You weather
my storms, watch me knock
over my glass, trash my dreams, and blow
up sometimes. I flock

to the lights and then return like a whole flock—
birds of a black feather,
posse of crows, even pigeons. I blow
off my steam, my storm, eat my crow
and you, quiet now, knock
a rhythm on the table, Stormy Weather.

We will wait out this spring, whether
the wind gives out or not. We'll flock
to the wild side, knock
on wood, on birch bark, wish on a feather
watch for each midnight crow
and listen to this cruel month blow

into May. Listen! I'll blow the candles, knock
three times, hold you in sunset weather.
Flock to the west, wish on a feather and crow!

Happy Poetry Month!

It's April. Cruelest month, tax deadline, and perhaps lilacs. (Will they really be this early?)

In the U.S., it's also Poetry Month. But what about elsewhere? Is April a poetry month for Canada, too? Do other countries have poetry month? When?

When will we have a world poetry month?

Over on Poetic Asides, Robert Lee Brewer is hosting a Poem a Day, and will provide prompts for the entire month. He explains that these are drafts. If April is for writing, May is for revising. With that healthy spontaneity in mind, here is my first draft of my first attempt:

FIRST HOUSE, ON FIRST AVE.


A little girl in a little room
up the narrow stairs--an attic,
the ceiling comfortably close
and a crack in the closet
that revealed the garage below.
A big madrone cursed for its mess,
a large yard with raspberries
and a swing set. Then, when
the interstate came through,
my father walked me down
to the end of the street
to see the construction
and the cement outlines
of the homes that had to go.