NPM: Day 9

This link from Tabatha Yeatts' blog is one I've had open since last May. It's not a poetry link, but an art one - go on, click on over and look. It's about the color blue, and I was so taken by the image and idea of a cyanometer - a tool developed in the eighteenth century by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure to measure the shades of blue scientifically. I wanted - and still do want - to write something about that. But I am closing the link, and just writing "cyanometer" in my list of writing ideas.

Fortunately, many others have written about the color blue. I went looking, and here are some of the ones I found that I liked best:

"Blue," by Sidney Wade
An excerpt:

we watch a cormorant
whose eye is ringed
in blue diamonds,
a shimmering lure,
and we love this blue
and this dark bird
and this deepening sky
that pinks and hums
in the west

"The Blue," by Camille T. Dungy is a wonderful narrative poem about the discovery of a butterfly called the Smith Blue, and what happened to the scientists who discovered it.

"Kind of Blue," by Lynn Powell, is also wonderful, and the link includes a recording of the poet reading it. This one may be the most appropriate to the cyanometer because it talks about varying shades of blue. I tried to excerpt it but I can't - go read it all! It's short!

Tabatha inspires me often with the poems and art that she posts on her blog, The Opposite of Indifference. She finds the most amazing things in her journeys, and writes her own original poems beautifully too. She edited Imperfect, an anthology in which I have a poem. And for NPM, she produced a new treasure, "Poetry in the Halls," a free printable to print out and put up on the wall. These poems are on the middle school and high school hallway walls in our school in Haiti - thanks, Tabatha! This week, she produced even more printables for poetry teachers. You can see that post here.

Today's line of the Progressive Poem is here.

Bruise

One day recently I got home from school in a grumpy mood; never mind all the reasons why. My husband and son left to do their thing, and I stewed at home by myself. I decided this must stop and took myself out for a walk, changing my shoes but otherwise just in my teaching clothes. My sole purpose: to become a happier person.

I was still within sight of my house when I slid on some sand in front of someone’s gate and landed, hard, on my knee. I tore a hole in my work pants and staggered to my feet with a large black stain on the green linen. Fortunately there wasn’t a crowd to see this happen; a man inside the gate began to talk about how dangerous it was to walk around, and I agreed with him, and kept going, embarrassed and with a smarting leg. I was tempted to head back home, but I had definitely not achieved the purpose of my walk, so I didn’t. I kept on.

Before long the fall began to seem emblematic of the walk. I encountered a dead dog that someone had apparently hit with their car. I stepped over it and kept going. I passed a funeral home and began to think even more gloomy thoughts. I passed the first apartment where my husband and I lived when we moved to Haiti 26 years ago. Instead of focusing on happy memories from those times, I began to scorn my younger self, so full of hope and idealism and cluelessness.

Life is all disappointment and loss, I told myself, as I finished up my walk and headed home. I didn’t even take pictures as I normally do; I’d seen it all before. Why bother?

A few days later, as I soaped myself in the shower, I took a moment to examine my wounds a little more closely. My bony elderly knee was bright yellow, almost a primary color in its brightness. It was covered in spectacular scabs such as I used to have all the time when I was seven or eight years old. I bent it experimentally, but it wasn’t sore, just ugly.

Suddenly I saw that my walk wasn’t about the fall, but about the healing from the fall. Yes, I keep losing and messing up and falling down, but I also keep getting back up. Sometimes people make comments, and I answer them in Kreyol. If they make fun of me, I scold them for talking like that to a granmoun, an older person. But usually they are friendly or indifferent, informing me that I am out walking, or asking me why I am taking pictures, or just ignoring me. They mostly tolerate my oddness and seem to feel I belong here, or at least that I’m not a horrible interloper. 

I’ve been walking in this neighborhood for half my life, alone and with others, pregnant and with babies, grumpy and cheerful. Am I a happier person because my walk, both literal and metaphorical, has taken me down these streets? Who knows? That’s maybe not what matters so much; what matters is that I don’t stop. I keep going, and I keep greeting people, and looking for beautiful things, and healing and getting hurt again and healing some more. This yellow bruise won’t last; it will give way to other yellow and purple and red coloration. But I'll keep going. For as long as I can, I’ll just keep walking down the road.

NPM: Day 8

The Lost Art of Letter-Writing
by Eavan Boland

The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,

Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory....

You can read the rest of the poem, and listen to the author reading it, here. That's a link I've had open for a long time, and I've read this intriguing poem again and again. I'm still not sure I completely understand it, but it has so many beautiful lines.

Speaking of lines, you can read today's for the Progressive Poem here.

NPM: Day 7 (My Line of the Progressive Poem)

Here is The Progressive Poem thus far…

Endless summer; I can see for miles…
Fun, fun, fun – and the whole world smiles
No time for school- just time to play
we swim the laughin’ sea each and every day
You had only to rise, lean from your window,
the curtain opens on a portrait of today


Found Lines:
L1 The Who, ‘I Can See for Miles’ / The Beach Boys, ‘Endless Summer’
L2 The Beach Boys, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ / Dean Martin, ‘When You’re Smiling’
L3 The Jamies, ‘Summertime, Summertime’
L4 The Doors ‘Summer’s Almost Gone’/ Led Zeppelin ‘Good Times, Bad Times’
L5 Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine “You had only to rise, lean from your window,”
L6 Joni Mitchell, “Chelsea Morning”


Like every year, writing my line for the Progressive Poem has made me reflect on how I normally go about writing.  It's all up to me: mine is the only voice that's heard, unless I choose to write in another's voice, and even then, it's my choice, nobody else's. As always, I feel disoriented as I look at what I have to work with; there are already six other voices involved, and before we're done, thirty people will add to this poem. Thinking about all those voices made me imagine the other writers, across the US and the world, writing. In my case it always includes giggly discussions with my children. My son suggested an Ice Cube line: "Today I didn't even have to use my AK." (Note to gentle readers, children and children's poets in particular: don't Google the rest of that song.)

All of the participants in this Progressive Poem come from different backgrounds; we all imagine different scenes out that mythic window of a childhood summer. That "portrait of today" could be anything at this point in the poem; the only specific we have of the landscape is that there's a "laughin' sea." My problems (again, the same ones I have every year): I have no picture in my head of what is going on here, no idea of who the persona of the poem is, a strong desire to inject some action, a need to respect the rhyme scheme and structure, but not much sense of what they are. Oh, and it's supposed to be a found line. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to do all of that. In fact, I know I can't.

I knew early on I wanted to find my line from Paul Simon, since he's the one I love ("You're the one," yes, you, Paul Simon, "you broke my heart, you made me cry...") who's the same vintage as most of what my predecessors picked, so I've written it from two of his songs, though one of them is from much later. I really wanted to know what was outside that window, that portrait of today, and what makes up portraits except colors? So here goes:
 

Endless summer; I can see for miles…
Fun, fun, fun – and the whole world smiles
No time for school- just time to play
we swim the laughin’ sea each and every day
You had only to rise, lean from your window,
the curtain opens on a portrait of today:
Kodachrome greens, dazzling blue


Found Line:
 L7 Paul Simon, "Kodachrome," "Dazzling Blue"

As usual, a whole lot of fuss and bother about a line that ends up being four words.

Tomorrow's line is from Mary Lee, and you can read it here.

April

1 Matt @ Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

2 Kat @ Kathryn Apel

3 Kimberly @ KimberlyHutmacherWrites

4 Jone @ DeoWriter

5 Linda @ TeacherDance

6 Tara @ Going to Walden

7 Ruth @ thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown

8 Mary Lee @ A Year of Reading

9 Rebecca @ Rebecca Herzog

10 Janet F. @ Live Your Poem

11 Dani @ Doing the Work that Matters

12 Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche

13 Doraine @ Dori Reads

14 Christie @ Wondering and Wandering

15 Robyn @ Life on the Deckle Edge

16 Carol @ Beyond LiteracyLink

17 Amy @ The Poem Farm

18 Linda @ A Word Edgewise

19 Heidi @ my juicy little universe

20 Buffy @ Buffy's Blog

21 Michelle @ Michelle Kogan

22 Catherine @ Reading to the Core

23 Penny @ a penny and her jots

24 Tabatha @ The Opposite of Indifference

25 Jan @ Bookseedstudio

26 Linda @ Write Time

27 Sheila @ Sheila Renfro

28 Liz @ Elizabeth Steinglass

29 Irene @ Live Your Poem

30 Donna @ Mainely Write

Reading Update

Book #30 of 2019 was Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, by Dani Shapiro. In her fifties, Shapiro took a DNA test on a whim and found out that the man she always thought was her father actually was not. This fascinating, well-written book explores identity, the effects on a family of secrets, and the history of reproductive technology. I very much enjoyed it.

Book #31 was Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain. I picked this up because of the author, after my husband and I read a book of his short stories and loved it. (I wrote about it here.) I read this one aloud to my husband, too, and it was brilliantly written, but I got a little tired of the profane and obscene language, especially as spoken aloud in my voice, and started editing it as I read. The word choice is extremely realistic for the characters, who are soldiers in the United States on a kind of victory tour after their heroism in Iraq is accidentally caught on film by a team of journalists embedded with another company. The whole book (now made into a movie, rated R, which I haven't seen) is set at the Super Bowl, where the guys of Bravo are being honored and fawned over by people who value patriotism as an ideal, but really know very little about the harrowing day-to-day experiences of soldiers. They are also traveling with a Hollywood producer who is trying to negotiate a deal to make their experiences into a movie. There's a lot of content here I wouldn't choose to read about: battle, football, the movie industry, young men bonding. But it's so well done that we both enjoyed it.

Book #32 was The Other Side of the Island, by Allegra Goodman. This was my third Goodman book, and I will definitely look for more of hers. This one reminded me of The Giver, but with climate change.

Book #33 was Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, by Ingrid Fetell Lee. I wrote quite a bit about this great book here.  Here's part of what I said:

"Lee has a lot to say about design and color, and how our surroundings influence how we think and feel. She discusses ten aesthetics of joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal."

Book #34 was Stella Bain, by Anita Shreve. I picked this up because I read it told the story of All He Ever Wanted (which I wrote about here) from the wife's side. That is true, though it took quite a bit of reading before I figured out how the books were connected.

Book #35 was Nine Perfect Strangers, by Liane Moriarty. This was a fun, though with some heavy topics, read about a group of people who go separately to a health spa and then are drawn together by the events that take place there.

NPM: Day 6

This poem wasn't open in a tab, so it's sort of cheating on my project, but since I made up the rules myself I guess I can break them. I took some photos this week of cleaning supplies on our campus, and that made me think of this Pablo Neruda poem I had saved on my hard drive. I don't know if the Chilean brooms he was thinking of are similar to our Haitian ones, but I love - and relate to - the way he expresses how he feels useless because he doesn't work with his hands.

Guilty

Pablo Neruda, tr. John Felstiner


I declare myself guilty of not having
made, with these hands they gave me,
a broom.

Why did I make no broom?

Why did they give me hands?

What use have they been
if all I ever did was
watch the stir of the grain,
listen up for the wind
and did not gather straws
still green in the earth
for a broom,
not set the soft stalks to dry
and bind them
in a gold bundle,
and did not lash a wooden stick
to the yellow skirt
till I had a broom for the paths?

So it went.
How did my life
get by
without seeing, and learning,
and gathering and binding
the basic things?

It's too late to deny
I had the time,
the time,
yet the hands were lacking,
so how could I aim
for greatness
if I was never able
to make
a broom,
not one,
not even one?


Today's Progressive Poem line is here. Mine is tomorrow!

Poetry Friday: Spring (NPM: Day 5)

For National Poetry Month, I've been doing daily posts of tabs I had open on my desktop. Sometimes I save things for a very long time because I have plans to reread them or want to use them as mentor texts. Sure, I could bookmark them to come back later, but I tell myself that keeping them visible will make me more likely to return to them. Somehow posting them on my blog has enabled me to close many of the windows this week. Call it spring cleaning.

Here are the week's posts:
On Monday I posted an Andrew Peterson song, "To All the Poets."
On Tuesday I became an Irene Latham fangirl, posting links to several of her posts I'd saved. I also added an original poem I wrote using one of hers as a mentor text.
On Wednesday I wrote about Tracy K. Smith's poetry podcast. (I didn't close this window, though.)
On Thursday I posted about memorizing poems, with an essay by Billy Collins and a YouTube channel chronicling Steven Wasserman's memorization project.

Today's poem is one I first encountered in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day email. (You can sign up for that here.) I love how Ada Limón uses the metaphor of spring, making it not just about rebirth and renewal but about healing and persistence and not quitting.

Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

I love a spring poem with a little edge to it like this one.  I paired two spring poems in this post back in 2010, one by Edna St. Vincent Millay which is sharp and bitter, and another by Gerard Manley Hopkins, gushing about how lovely it all is (though Hopkins certainly wrote lots of much darker poems). This one seems sort of in-between, with its surprising word choices like "obscene" and "shoving," "shock" and "aftermath," but then its (sort of) hopeful acceptance at the end: "a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite/ the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,/ I'll take it..."

I've been enjoying the NPM activities.  Today's Progressive Poem line is here. Mine is coming up on Sunday! Here's the full schedule:

April

1 Matt @ Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

2 Kat @ Kathryn Apel

3 Kimberly @ KimberlyHutmacherWrites

4 Jone @ DeoWriter

5 Linda @ TeacherDance

6 Tara @ Going to Walden

7 Ruth @ thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown

8 Mary Lee @ A Year of Reading

9 Rebecca @ Rebecca Herzog

10 Janet F. @ Live Your Poem

11 Dani @ Doing the Work that Matters

12 Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche

13 Doraine @ Dori Reads

14 Christie @ Wondering and Wandering

15 Robyn @ Life on the Deckle Edge

16 Carol @ Beyond LiteracyLink

17 Amy @ The Poem Farm

18 Linda @ A Word Edgewise

19 Heidi @ my juicy little universe

20 Buffy @ Buffy's Blog

21 Michelle @ Michelle Kogan

22 Catherine @ Reading to the Core

23 Penny @ a penny and her jots

24 Tabatha @ The Opposite of Indifference

25 Jan @ Bookseestudio

26 Linda @ Write Time

27 Sheila @ Sheila Renfro

28 Liz @ Elizabeth Steinglass

29 Irene @ Live Your Poem

30 Donna @ Mainely Write

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at Karen Edmisten's blog, which does indeed have a shockingly clever title.  

Spiritual Journey First Thursday: Renewal

Dani Burtsfield is our host this month for Spiritual Journey First Thursday, and she's asked us to reflect on the topic of Renewal. I bet I know why. Dani lives in the United States, well north of me, and there, spring is coming. It's a time when the monochrome of winter gives way to bright colors and Lent gives way to Easter. It's a time of rebirth, resurrection, renewal.

Since I live in the Caribbean, a place where the seasons don't change much over the course of a year, you'd think this focus on spring wouldn't mean much to me. But what I've learned is that when you're paying attention, both to nature and to the ways of human beings, there are seasons here too, way more than just four.

Recently I was reading the book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, by Ingrid Fetell Lee.

Lee has a lot to say about design and color, and how our surroundings influence how we think and feel. She discusses ten aesthetics of joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration, and renewal. See that last one? There's our topic! And Lee associates this aesthetic partly with seasons. She talks about how life organizes itself in cycles. I was particularly fascinated by what she says about seasons in Japan:

“The Japanese are particularly good at creating moments of anticipation. Instead of having only four seasons to look forward to, they have seventy-two. The ancient Japanese calendar divides the year into a series of micro seasons, each only four or five days in length, with names that capture small changes in the surrounding environment. Hibernating Creatures Open Their Doors marks the tail end of winter, followed a bit later by Leaf Insects Turn into Butterflies. In June, the Plums Turn Yellow, and in October the Geese Arrive and the Grasshopper Sings. The names made me think of other seasonal moments that naturally seem to stir feelings of renewal: the whiteout blanket of the first snowfall, the hard drenching of an April rain, the blush of sunrise, and the golden glow of a harvest moon. There is a joy in the first day cold enough to light a fire in the fireplace, the first one warm enough to go outside without a jacket, and the first blinking of fireflies in the summer yard. By building excitement for these subtle transitions, we can invite more cyclical-anticipation into our lives.”

I haven't identified seventy-two seasons here in Haiti, but there are many. We have some plants that bloom all year round, like bougainvillea and hibiscus, but many others take turns. Right now the African tulip trees and the frangipani (plumeria) are gorgeous, and soon the flamboyant (poinciana) will cover the city in red.

I live in the city, so I'm not really in tune with crop activity like planting and harvest, but I do watch the goat population on my walk to school with great interest; right now there are a lot of pregnant mamas, so soon there will be nursing kids. Since I started paying attention to these natural events, I often notice that when I post a photo of the latest flowers or livestock on Facebook, the Memories feature shows me that they appeared the same week as the year before.

It's not just nature, it's the way people react to it, like this season's kites in response to the windy weather.  Easter weekend is traditionally the biggest kite-flying time of the year.

And then there's the renewal inherent in the school calendar. Each year I get new classes. Each Monday starts a new week of instruction. Each quarter their grades start fresh. Each new class period is an opportunity to try again, no matter how frustrated we were with each other last time. From the overawed seventh graders who join us in August, experiencing their first lockers, their first forays into the secondary building, to the jaded eighth graders who in May are ready to move on to high school, and then to the ninth graders who come back to visit me like the swallows to Capistrano every year, huddling in the doorway and whispering nostalgically about their memories of middle school, conveniently forgetting the way they slumped sullenly in their seats some days the previous spring: these are some of the predictable seasons of my school year.

But the best renewal every year is Easter, Resurrection Sunday. After the contemplative weeks of Lent, the lament and self-denial, Easter comes with delight, reminding us that death is not the end. Here's a Jonathan Martin quote I found last year: "The sense of foreboding can be trusted -- a faithful witness to Good Friday. It doesn't feel like everything will be okay, cause it won't be. The message of Good Friday is that things aren't going to end well -- things just end. Violence will always run its course, hope bloodied. The message of Good Friday is that death has the last word, on all of us. The message of Easter is that the last word isn't the final one. Easter doesn't lie to us, doesn't say our own stories won't reach dark ends. Only that our dark ends won't be Love's end, God's end. On Good Friday we remember that death is an inescapable cold, hard fact. On Easter we remember that the mere facts may not yet be the story. Death is reality, just not the ultimate one. Easter is the proclamation that even death must bow, to possibility."

Three weeks from today is Maundy Thursday; three weeks from tomorrow is Good Friday; then the waiting of Saturday and the rejoicing of Sunday.

Here's Jonathan Martin again, this time from How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help is On the Way and Love is Already Here: "In whatever remains in you that wants to create, to make, to birth something new, in whatever corner that longs for some kind of resurrection on the other side of death, something divine quietly snaps, fires, clicks, flickers. This is the Spirit of God, lurking in your own broken spirit."

Welcome, renewal! Welcome, again and again! I long again for Easter, for Jesus leaving the tomb empty. 

Be sure to visit Dani's blog to see what others have to say about this month's topic!

NPM: Day 4

My seventh graders are providing our daily poems these days by reciting poems they have memorized. In other years, I've let them choose their own, and their choices were straying further and further from what I considered good. This year I picked out a pile of short poems I thought worth memorizing, and passed them out. They were allowed to trade with someone else, but other than that, they got what they got.

Yesterday I shared Tracy K. Smith's podcast; on one of her episodes, she talked about memorized poems. She said that a poem you know by heart is "an arsenal of insight and delight." I love that, and have found it true in my own life. I am thankful that I was forced to memorize a variety of poems, and so I feel only limited guilt about forcing my students to memorize poems similarly.

I've had this article open on my desktop for a while; it's a Billy Collins article about the poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." First he writes about why he likes the poem, and then he describes how the poem saved him when he had to have an MRI before he knew what that was.

Here's a snippet:

"Once you’ve installed the poem in your memory, it’s there to comfort you—or at least distract you—wherever you are.

I think that’s one reason I’ve always made my literature students choose a poem to memorize, even if it’s just something short—a little poem by, say, Emily Dickinson. They’re very resistant to it at first. There’s a collective groan when I tell them what they’re going to have to do.  I think it’s because memorization is hard. You can't fake it the way you might in responding to an essay question. Either you have it by heart, or you don’t.

And yet once they do get a poem memorized, they can’t wait to come into my office to say it. I love watching that movement from thinking of memorization as a kind of drudgery, to seeing it as internalizing, claiming, owning a poem. It’s no longer just something in a textbook—it’s something that you’ve placed within yourself."

Another tab is this YouTube channel, "52 Poems in 52 Weeks." I haven't watched all the videos, but I love the idea of memorizing that many beautiful poems. Talk about an "arsenal of insight and delight!" It looks as though he only got about halfway through his project, but still, 26 poems is impressive. I don't know why he stopped and while I found his professional website, it hasn't been updated in a while. Here he is reciting the "Time for Everything" passage from Ecclesiastes.

The fourth line of the Progressive Poem is here.

NPM: Day 3

I don't know much about Tracy K. Smith, the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Before she got her job, I hadn't read any of her work, and now I've only read some of what's available online. (Here's one poem, "The Universe as Primal Scream.") But I feel as though I've been getting to know her by listening to her podcast, "The Slowdown."

Every weekday, Smith publishes a five-minute podcast that includes a poem she's chosen and a little commentary. You can see the poems, plus subscribe to the podcast, here, but unfortunately her remarks aren't included in the written version. That tab is open on my desktop because I like to go to the website and reread the poems I particularly like. I always get more out of them with my eyes than my ears.

Smith's choices are eclectic. Most of the poems are contemporary, but she's featured Langston Hughes, George Herbert, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and many other classic poets. I highly recommend this podcast if you're looking for a little more poetry in your life, not just now, during National Poetry Month, but all year long.

Today's Progressive Poem line is here. You can see the full schedule here.

NPM: Day 2

When I started taking stock of my open links, I was sort of embarrassed to realize I had three from Irene Latham's blog, Live Your Poem. Plus a poem of hers on someone else's blog. I decided to combine all of them into one post, lest Irene feel I was stalking her. If I am, Irene, it is only in the most admiring way. But then, that's a pretty stalkerish thing to say.

I've been reading Irene's blog for years now, and I own several of her books (reviews here, here, and here). She's a lovely writer and a generous soul, sharing her time and talents freely on the internet. She's also the founder of the Progressive Poem. But what I admire her for the most is her delicate hand with a metaphor.

So here are my tabs.

This is my favorite of Irene's poems from last year's NPM, "Let There Be Poetry." Beautiful! This year she's doing ARTSPEAK again, with happiness as her theme.  Here's the first one. This post from Tabatha's blog has been open on my desktop for a while. It has several wonderful poems in it, but my favorite is the one Irene wrote called "Thirteen Reasons Why Not." My favorite part is the end:

and most of all
because I want to know
what it's like

to be an old woman
who loves an old man.

The fourth Irene tab is from 2016, and it's a creed poem. She has several of these in her poetry books, and I've always admired them and wanted to try one. This one is called "I Could Say I Believe in the Ocean." You should definitely follow the link and read it, and/or listen to Irene read it, before you read mine, written with hers as a mentor text. I'm not entirely happy with mine, because my metaphors seem so much more obvious than what she's done, but it was fun to write anyway.

I Could Say I Believe in Flowers


But what I mean is,
I believe in color:
red and yellow and orange,
blue and purple and screeching pink,
combinations no designer would dare.

I believe in roses
and dandelions,
bougainvillea of every shade,
orchids and daffodils and
Queen Anne’s lace and
blowsy zinnias.

I believe in being big or small,
showy or shy,
posing boldly for Georgia O’Keeffe
or hiding in the undergrowth
where nobody finds you
unless they’re quite persistent.

I believe in blooming
when it’s time.

I believe in greenhouses
and hedgerows,
medians left unmowed,
formality like Versailles and
riotous chaos of weeds.

I believe in growing
and wilting,
in dying
and coming back to life.
I believe in fertilizer
and tender loving care,
but also in being left absolutely alone sometimes.

I believe in the Gardener
ambling among the flowers,
loving each one.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Thanks, Irene, for everything you do to promote poetry on- and offline. Happy National Poetry Month to you!

Here's today's line in the Progressive Poem, on Kathryn Apel's blog. You can see the whole schedule here.

NPM: Day 1

National Poetry Month is a month-long frenzy of poetry that I enjoy every year, but also I find it exhausting. I read a lot of poetry all year round, but during NPM there is just so much of it. Creative types are doing amazing projects and my inbox has extra poems in it (I get some daily poems all the time, but more in April). I wish I had time to read everything and marvel over all of it, but I also have to keep working during NPM, and I have a family, and life goes on in all kinds of time-consuming ways.

Some years I have attempted to do a daily post in NPM, and some years not, and this year on the whole I thought not, but then I realized that I have so many open tabs on my desktop that contain poems that I could probably post for two weeks just by sharing those. This would allow me to close the tabs, and also it would allow others to see what I've kept open over the last few months. Sometimes I save something because I just want to read it again, sometimes because I want to write something similar. My husband is endlessly horrified by how many tabs I have open all the time. When I run out of open tabs, I have poems I've saved in email that I can share, and by that time I'll have new tabs open, anyway.

The thing is, I know I'll be mostly talking to myself in these posts. All my poetry-loving friends are just as busy during NPM as I am. If you are stopping by to read, welcome, and leave a comment to let me know you've been here.

Today I'm going to start with some song lyrics by Andrew Peterson. I know my life would be much poorer without the poets, the ones I know personally and the ones I just know from their words. As usual, Andrew Peterson expresses well how I feel.


To All the Poets
by Andrew Peterson

To all the poets I have known
Who saw the beauty in the commonplace
Saw incarnation in a baby's face
And in a drop of rain the stars
When there was mud and blood and tears
You sang a song at night to calm our fears
You made a moment last a thousand years
You are the poets I have known

To all the poets I have known
You built a kingdom out of sea and sand
You conquered armies with a marching band
You carved a galaxy in stone
You built an altar out of bread
And spent your soul to see the children fed
You wove your heart in every story read
Thank God for poets I have known

And you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed
You are the poets I have known

You turned your tears into a string of pearls
You held your sorrow high to light the world
When I thought I was alone
In every man you saw the boy
The hidden heart the dark could not destroy
Slipped past the dragons with a tale of joy
Thank God for poets I have known

'Cause you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed

You walking wounded of my life
Who bled compassion in the heat of strife
You stood between my heart and Satan's knife
With just the armor of a song
You are the heroes and the brave
Who with a slender pen our passions save
And chisel epitaphs upon the graves
Of all the poets I have known

So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'

Some other goodies for today: Jama has rounded up some of the incredibly creative things people are doing for NPM this year. There are teaching tips and poem-a-day projects and videos and it's all amazing. I am so impressed by everybody and happy they let me hang out with them.

And today you can read the first line of this year's Progressive Poem here at Matt Forrest Esenwine's blog. He's encouraging us to try found lines this year. Hmm. We shall see what develops. Meanwhile, I like how he's started things out.

I posted the whole schedule yesterday; you can see it here. My line is coming up on the 7th.

It's National Poetry Month! Welcome to the Progessive Poem!

It's National Poetry Month, and that means it's time for the Progressive Poem! This is the eighth year, and I've participated in all of them so far. Here you can read all the previous ones. While the finished result is always quite quirky, the collaboration is so much fun every year.

The action starts April 1st at Matt Forrest Esenwine's blog. My line will be right here on the 7th. And here's the rest of the schedule:

April

1 Matt @ Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

2 Kat @ Kathryn Apel

3 Kimberly @ KimberlyHutmacherWrites

4 Jone @ DeoWriter

5 Linda @ TeacherDance

6 Tara @ Going to Walden

7 Ruth @ thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown

8 Mary Lee @ A Year of Reading

9 Rebecca @ Rebecca Herzog

10 Janet F. @ Live Your Poem

11 Dani @ Doing the Work that Matters

12 Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche

13 Doraine @ Dori Reads

14 Christie @ Wondering and Wandering

15 Robyn @ Life on the Deckle Edge

16 Carol @ Beyond LiteracyLink

17 Amy @ The Poem Farm

18 Linda @ A Word Edgewise

19 Heidi @ my juicy little universe

20 Buffy @ Buffy's Blog

21 Michelle @ Michelle Kogan

22 Catherine @ Reading to the Core

23 Penny @ a penny and her jots

24 Tabatha @ The Opposite of Indifference

25 Jan @ Bookseestudio

26 Linda @ Write Time

27 Sheila @ Sheila Renfro

28 Liz @ Elizabeth Steinglass

29 Irene @ Live Your Poem

30 Donna @ Mainely Write

What I Learned in March

In March we entered the season of Lent. Here in Haiti we celebrate Carnival, except not this year; the main state-sponsored festivities were canceled because of the political situation. We did get our week off school, not that we really needed more days off. We entered Lent with ashes as we did last year, and as Christians have been doing for centuries. We remembered that we are dust. Here's something new I incorporated into my Lenten worship this year: a liturgy of Lament offered as a free download by Aaron Niequist.

This month I thought about this podcast in which Krista Tippett interviews Alain de Botton about love and relationships. He talks about how we often are solely focused on the beginning of love in our literature and movies, when really the interesting part is how people work things out, make things last. I started making a musical playlist called "Old Love," named for the Mary Chapin Carpenter song.

So far I have Huey Lewis and the News, Sara Groves, Audrey Assad, Jason Mraz, Over the Rhine, Josh Garrels, Anderson East. Any suggestions to add to my Old Love collection?

I learned about the church forests in Ethiopia in this National Geographic article. In a time when environmental news is almost exclusively terrible, this was a much-needed ray of hope.

This report from Boston University about EDH, the Haitian electric company, came out a year ago, but for some reason it was only this month that the local press reported on it. This made very depressing reading. It has a lot of statistics in it, many of which mean little to me. One, for example, was that the average Haitian person consumes 37 kWh per year of electricity. Because I have a limited idea of what a kWh is or how much is a lot, I googled US statistics for comparison purposes. The average US resident consumes 11,980 kWh per year of electricity. I mean, c'mon now. At this point we are not even talking about the same planet. Thirty-seven versus eleven thousand nine hundred and eighty? And guess which one of these two countries, 700 miles apart, will suffer worse results from global climate change?

In March, a Facebook friend posted this article about civility of discourse. Here's a little taste: "The ego utilizes cruelty because cruelty provides drama, chaos, hate and division - all the ingredients that the ego needs to remain in the driver’s seat; all at a low cost. But is the cost really so low? Our ego feeds off the ego of others. The back and forth we engage in only grows the ego, drains energy, and perpetuates a false feeling that unless we keep going, we are creating a deficit in our identity. To starve the ego, we have to pay the low, low price of compassion. It’s actually not as costly as cruelty in the long run. Compassion produces a tangible return, with interest. In fact, investing compassion into a conversation is about one of the most lucrative investments a person can make."

I learned this month that according to one of my eighth graders, I am a "lit teacher." That's not lit, short for literature (though I am that), but lit, meaning cool and shiny. Or something like that. And she's probably already changed her mind. But it was still nice to hear it.

I learned that according to this article in French from Le Monde, the Haitian cohort in their thirties now, so in their early twenties when the earthquake of 2010 happened, is being called by some people "la génération fin du monde," the end of the world generation. They watched the apocalyptic events of 2010, and survived them as so many others did not; they expected things to change, but somehow that didn't happen. Now, according to the article, they are the ones orchestrating some of the current political upheaval.

After a conversation with a friend in my writing group about narrative arcs, I clicked on this article about other metaphors besides arcs we could use for how fiction progresses. Crystalline? Orange-shaped? Labyrinthine? Spiral?

What a bizarre collection of new directions my mind went in this month! I wonder what April has in store?

Poetry Friday: Discard

Discard

Someone discarded
this library book
Somewhere else.

It wasn’t the latest thing.
It was old and needed replacing
with
Something better.

Someone stamped it
DISCARD

and then
discarded it.

Through
Some alchemy
of pity and generosity
It ended up here,
Somewhere else.

If only
Someone
hadn’t stamped the word
DISCARD
here on this page.

That word
distracts my eye
from the
delicate
painting of
red and yellow and white tulips
with stripy green leaves.

Someone picked those flowers
Somewhere else.
Someone put them on the table,
dewy from the garden.
Someone painted them,
adding each line with a careful hand.

In my mind I redefine
DISCARD
and say instead

transplant

transplant 

to
Somewhere tulips do not grow
where we do not have the latest thing
and

where I take a moment to appreciate
the slender stems
and bright petals
of flowers which were
discarded
Somewhere else
long ago
but which art has preserved
for me to see 

here

this morning.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

You can find today's roundup at Carol's Corner, here.

Poetry Friday: Birthday Edition

I got some music for my birthday this year, and I've been listening to it a lot, so from my new albums, here are some song lyrics for today's Poetry Friday. You know how some people say - and, apparently, mean - that they don't pay attention to the words when they listen to music? I just don't get that. To me, the words are supremely important, and both of these albums have fabulous words. I chose these two songs to share today because they both seem appropriate as I start a new year of my life. The world is a whole big mess, with tragedy and grief everywhere I look. And yet there are glimpses of God's goodness everywhere, too. This year I'm continuing to find beauty and to grow - shedding my snakeskin, as the Over the Rhine song puts it. Continuing to be astonished. Continuing to bet on the muse.

Windows in the World 

So you're sitting at the movies.
You're watching how the story finds a way.
And you've seen it all before,
Still you love to see the hero save the day.

It's a window in the world,
A little glimpse of all the
Goodness getting through.
And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments of truth.

Oh and every Sunday morning
You can see the people standing in a line.
They're so hungry for some mercy,
For a taste of the Communion bread and wine.

It's a window in the world,
A little glimpse of all the
Goodness getting through.
And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments of truth.

It's the way the clouds are burning
From the angle of the light
As the earth is slowly turning you to meet it,
And you're watching at your window
At the ending of the night
--It's as plain as day
So any fool could see it:
It's a window in the world.

I can see the groom is waiting,
He's watching for the moment she appears.
They are laying down their lives for love
And Love is laying waste to all my fears.

It's a window in the world,
A little portal where you get a better view.
And the wonder of it all
Is all you need to see the goodness getting through.

And all along the way the days
Are made of little moments--
All along the way the road
Is paved with little moments of truth.

Andrew Peterson

Betting on the Muse

Another golden evening is dying on the vine
A rehearsal for the final act
When the light that's lost is mine
All this blinding beauty has left me no excuse

I know the sun is setting
Who knows where it’s heading?
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

My courage often staggers but still we climb the stairs
I lie awake and wonder, are they songs or are they prayers?
This beautiful delusion
If it's all a ruse

It’s such a lovely setting
For my snakeskin to keep shedding
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

You've got to die inside so many times
While you're trying to learn to live
You've got to get taken for everything
To have anything to give

Your signal is receiving
Some days it's called breathing

I'm remembering your kisses
Our lips raw with love
But the fact that you still make me laugh
Is what I'm most proud of
You learn to be astonished
That’s how you pay your dues

What am I forgetting?
Nothing I’m regretting
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse

What am I forgetting?
Nothing I’m regretting,
I'm letting go
What I'm not getting
I'm still betting
Betting on the muse.

Linford Detweiler (Over the Rhine)

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

Here's what I've been reading lately:

Book #17 of 2019 was Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. I was curious to learn more about Princess Margaret, but it was a little hard to keep track of what was real and what was invented in this "biography."

Books #18 and 19 were a couple of novellas by Diana Gabaldon, The Space Between and Virgins. Gabaldon puts these out in between her monster (800+ page) novels in the Outlander series. I found them in the library while looking for something else and they were quick reads that gave additional background to the series.

Book #20 was Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing, by Glenn Packiam. Packiam's ruminations on how we express our beliefs in worship and how our worship informs and shapes what we believe were thought-provoking.

Book #21 was Hank Green's novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. While I didn't especially enjoy this (though I'll probably read the sequel so I know what happens), I did like this quote from the acknowledgements: "I also want to thank every single person who ever says, ‘You have to read this book!’ to a friend. I don’t care if it’s this book; I just want people to remind each other how wonderful books are." (Books are wonderful, friends!)

Book #22 was Many-Storied House: Poems by George Ella Lyon. This book began as a writing assignment, where students were supposed to write about a room in a house from their childhood. Lyon, the teacher, did the same and ended up writing about the house where she grew up in a lot of detail. I enjoyed reading this.

Book #23 was A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God's Sovereignty, by Joni Eareckson Tada. If anybody has earned the right to talk about these issues, it's this author, who has spent the last fifty years in a wheelchair after breaking her neck as a teenager. In addition to quadriplegia, she also has suffered for many years from chronic pain, and more recently breast cancer.

Book #24 was A Great Reckoning, by Louise Penny, the twelfth Inspector Gamache book. I liked the new setting of this novel, the police training college that Inspector Gamache is supposed to clean up, but I didn't understand why several characters had to head to Three Pines midway through the book and hang out there.

Book #25 was All He Ever Wanted, by Anita Shreve, a sad, depressing story of a marriage based on a complete lack of communication.

Book #26 was The Chalk Artist, by Allegra Goodman. I really enjoyed this story about creativity, how our brains work, what we get or don't get from our families. I especially liked the teacher character, Nina, and the realistic, sympathetic sections about how she is learning her job. There aren't many books that mine the emotional territory of how hard it is to teach, especially at the beginning.

Book #27 was Out of the House of Bread: Satisfying Your Hunger for God with the Spiritual Disciplines, by Preston Yancey. I liked this, especially the extended metaphor of baking and spirituality. (I'm not a baker, but I live with one.) Yancey is very reflective and goes beyond the obvious. Here he is on prayer: "Kneading is a work of wrestling, of working out something from chaos into something that has form. Intercessory prayer is like that. We are working out with God the mess of things, the chaos of being, and seeing what shape and form it could take on when we turn it over, again and again, back to God." Elsewhere he writes: "Icons are the ordinary signs of miracle. There is never just a cup in this world when every cup brings to mind the cup held by Jesus on the night he was betrayed, when he said it held his blood shed for us. There is never just a bed when every bed brings to mind the command of God to speak of the stories of God at all times and in all places, in our lying down and our rising. There is never just a basin of water when all water is called holy because Jesus entered the waters of baptism with us, called himself living water at the well of Jacob." I will probably read this one again; there's a lot to think about here.

Book #28 was A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015, by Wendell Berry. I think this is the first time I've read a full book by Berry. He is so good to read in this time we live in, when the planet is choked by plastic and heating up and it feels as though we all need to climb on a spaceship and go somewhere else. Berry is so much more in touch with agriculture and the earth than most of us will ever be, and although he is completely clear-eyed about the mess, still he has hope. In addition to the poems in the book, there's an extended essay on Nature, and I loved the discursive commentary about Chaucer and Spenser and Wordsworth and others, and the combination of poetry and farming, philosophy and where you should wipe your feet if they have manure on them. I kept having the feeling about Berry that I used to have when I read C.S. Lewis in my teens and early twenties: that the author would not approve of me at all due to the trivial, frivolous nature of my inner landscape. But I enjoyed the book anyway.

Book #29 was Free Verse, by Sarah Dooley, a middle grade novel about seventh grader Sasha and her tragic life in Caboose, West Virginia. Sasha loses members of her family, ends up in foster care, runs away, and writes poetry. She is a sympathetic character, if a little old-seeming.

I'm in the middle of several books right now, so there should be a new update fairly soon!

Poetry Friday: Sunshine

In Haiti we have lots of problems; perhaps you've heard? That's what we're known for. On Wednesday I read an article in a local newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, summarizing a report that came out a year ago (I'm not sure why they are just now writing about it) from the University of Boston about our local electrical company. (Here's the report if you want to go read it.) That talked about problems, lots of them. An editorial showed that the paper found all of it as depressing as I did; it refers to "the desire of all of us to go looking for light elsewhere" ("notre envie à tous d'aller chercher la lumière ailleurs").

My first thought when I read that was: "Let's look for light here!" but I know how privileged I am to have some backup electricity for those long nights with no city power. The report says that only between 20 and 40% of the households in this country have any electricity connection at all. (And please, what kind of range is "between 20 and 40%?")

I went looking for a Caribbean poet writing about the extraordinary light we have here, fading our clothes as they flap on the clotheslines. That's the kind of light we can count on, because nobody can corrupt it or steal it and keep it for themselves, and I can count on Derek Walcott to write about it:

from The Prodigal

by Derek Walcott

A grey dawn, dun. Rain-gauze shrouding the headlands.
A rainbow like a bruise through cottony cumuli.
Then, health! Salvation! Sails blaze in the sun.
A twin-sailed shallop rounding Pigeon Island.
This line is my horizon.
I cannot be happier than this.

Derek Walcott isn't writing of Haiti, but of his own beautiful island, Santa Lucia, but the quality of the light is much the same. I don't want to downplay Haiti's problems, because they are many and people's lives are terribly difficult. I don't want to pretend that the sunshine makes up for the rest. Of course it doesn't. But the sunshine is beautiful, just the same.

Here's another poem to underline some of the things the rest of the world could learn from the Caribbean, or specifically Barack Obama from Derek Walcott:


The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems

by Yusef Komunyakaa

Was he looking for St. Lucia's light
to touch his face those first days
in the official November snow & sleet
falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?

If he were searching for property lines
drawn in the blood, or for a hint
of resolve crisscrossing a border,
maybe he'd find clues in the taste of breadfruit.

I could see him stopped there squinting
in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street
touching clouds of double consciousness,
an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he's looking for tips on basketball,
how to rise up & guard the hoop,
he may glean a few theories about war  
but they aren't in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,
searching for clues to govern seagulls
in salty air, he'll find henchmen busy with locks
& chains in a ghost schooner's nocturnal calm.

He's reading someone who won't speak
of milk & honey, but of looking ahead
beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream
where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,
leaking deeds, songs & testaments.
Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,
& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,
their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf
& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact,
craving wisdom, he bites into memory. 

The President of the United States of America
thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie
to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus
for its ink, how a man's skin becomes the final page.

I found that poem here.

And here's Heidi's roundup. She's taking on the destruction of the planet today, and who better to do it?

Poetry Friday: Dave Dreams About Carnival

A friend told me about a dream he had, and gave me his blessing to mine his subconscious for a poem. I write about my own dreams often, but rarely about other people's. I wish I had a photo or painting of this one, but I don't, just words - words which I had a lot of fun writing.

Dave Dreams of Carnival

My friend Dave dreams he’s at my house in Haiti
and just as he’s about to knock on the door
it opens
and a Carnival procession cavalcades out,
led by a man on a donkey
and accompanied by raucous rara music. 

Dave wakes up as the revelers push by him,
(I imagine the donkey,
costumed in satin and sequins),
and hours later,
in the pale northern afternoon,
Dave realizes
that today is Mardi Gras.

In New Jersey where Dave lives,
snow still covers the ground this Fat Tuesday
and the particular energies required for a Haitian Carnival
remain frozen.
Meanwhile, here in Haiti,
while it’s a breezy eighty eight degrees,
and the palm trees and tropical backdrop sparkle,
political problems have cancelled this year’s festivities.
In short, Mardi Gras twenty nineteen is rather thin.
It’s Tuesday,
but Wednesday’s coming with all the ashes.

Dave stayed in my house once for about a month,
in twenty ten, another time when Carnival didn’t happen;
that year we’d just had a huge earthquake.
I wasn’t there, since
I’d gone to the US with the children;
my husband hosted him, sort of,
and Dave slept in my daughter’s room
and read books from her shelves in the evenings
after working all day in disaster relief,
while she went to seventh grade in Kentucky.

My house in Haiti is still part of the landscape of Dave’s dreams
just as he somehow knows without knowing that it’s Carnival time
the same day he wakes from the sound of drums and bamboo trumpets
and looks out his window at March in New Jersey.

Fifteen hundred miles away,
I stand startled, watching
merrymakers parade out of my door
dressed in the red and blue of the Haitian flag,
their tall headdresses swaying
as they sashay into the neighborhood
leaving behind the donkey poop for someone to clean up.

Let’s face it, I think,
annoyed by the effects of other people’s imaginations:
that someone will probably be me.

Mardi Gras, 2019

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Today's roundup is here.