National Poetry Month Issue 30

It's the last day of April. National Poetry Month 2011 is already in the rear-view mirror. Before we rush on to May, let's pull over and take one last breath of poetry.

Today's Maryland poet is Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka. She is hosting a reading of contributors to Life in Me Like Grass on Fire May 26 at the Carroll County Arts Council, Westminster, MD.

Driving on the Beltway                                                                                 

by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

On the Beltway

I miss the earthliness.

Instead of the buoyant

steadiness

of forsythia's yellow, expectancy

of apple tree buds breathing

their white insides open

in fragrance, the coolness

of tulip leaves slowly unwrapping

in wisps of laughter,

I feel the push

of passing cars, the uneven

pavement, borders

of broken lines,

concrete barriers. While I count

the exits, the minutes crawl

along my spine, deposit lead

in my thighs. I long

for a whiff of chocolate mulch

freshly piled around the trees. 

To stop.

To touch the porous skin.

To be touched.

Posted with permission of the author. This poem first appeared in  Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology.

One of  Danuta's poems will be in Little Patuxent Review, Make Believe, out in June.

Writing Exercise:

Do you have a poem that takes place in a car? If not, write one. If so, ask yourself if the poem balances (or contrasts) what's happening inside the car with what's happening outside the car.

Tomorrow, I'll post a full list of the Maryland poets I featured this month. On to the darling buds of May!

National Poetry Month Issue 29

Happy last Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month 2011!

All this month, I've been featuring poets from my home state, Maryland.

We've been feeling at sea in my house lately. Both of my children are winding down at their schools and getting ready for their next adventures: high school and middle school.

It's meant ups and downs as frequent as the tides. My son auditioned for his future high school's band and was thrilled to be accepted, but is so over 8th grade projects.

My daughter can't wait to join her middle school TV studio and book club. But today, she was embarrassed when all the fifth grade girls were lectured about appropriate dress (if you have cleavage, keep it to yourself).

In Lalita Noronha's poetic hands, "At Sea," has a very different meaning from the one my family is experiencing. The ocean in her poem is real -- alien, but comforting in the sense of welcome the speaker feels.

AT SEA

by Lalita Noronha

Buoyed by memory,

we float a hundred feet beneath the sea,

arms spread wide to glide past years that

disappeared into a long good night.

Beating like soft hearts,

clouds of jelly fish rise.

Sea lions come to tickle our hands,

whiskers soft as hair.

Behind the kelp,

suspended like a question mark,

a sea horse stares

and dares us to forget.

And in this blue cosmos,

at least for one moment,

the skin of a sea-tulip blooms pink,

a hundred feet beneath the sea,

without corners,

without edges,

without ends.

Published with permission of the author.

This poem first appeared in JMWW, Winter 2008; http://jmww.150m.com/Noronha.html (A great journal to submit work to, by the way.) 

Writing Exercise (Upper Elementary - Adult):

Many of us have had these "without corners/without edges/without ends" moments when we connect with animals.

When the speaker in "At Sea" touches sea lions and comes face to face with sea horses, it gives him or her a sense of timelessness.

Write about a time when you connected with an animal (or other living creature -- a tree?) and felt this way. 

One of my favorite poems on this theme is "A Blessing" by James Wright. It's posted at the Poetry Foundation.

Another Maryland poet is hosting Poetry Friday today! I can hardly stand the serendipity. Please visit Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference for the last round-up of NPM 2011.

National Poetry Month Issue 28

For National Poetry Month 2011, I've been posting a daily poem by a Maryland poet.

Each day, we've had a writing prompt based on the poem.

Writing Exercise (Middle School and up):
One of my favorite writing prompts is to take the title or first line of a poem and without reading the poem itself, free-write.


Let's do that today. Our exercise is a list poem/writing brainstorm with the title: What Is Possible at 6 A.M.

No cheating! Scroll down and read the model poem only after you're done writing.

Done? Okay!

Maryland poet and author Ann A. Philips is a dear friend of mine. Her poetry is dense with images and ideas. She is a master at looking at the world through different points of view.

She's also the author of a middle grade novel, If You Believe in Mermaids,,,Don't Tell. It's a gentle look at a 'tween who is questioning society's gender roles. I like that the story doesn't get caught up in sexuality -- it's appropriate for the age of the characters.

Here is Ann's poem, from which we took our "borrowed title" writing prompt.

What Is Possible at 6 A.M.

by Ann A. Philips

In the green slurry of six o'clock

before suburban curtains part,

that whirr could be the wind

over the headland, raising

the grass off its roots.

That grind could be a seal

on Prudy's Ledge. That vroom

the pound and suck of rollers

caught in the trough at Ocean Point.

Or Mace Carter motoring

out on the Henry G to pick

his traps. Those cries could be the osprey

cheating the eaglet of a prize

on the rocky beach of Christmas Cove.

The mackerel, airborne, gasps

and drowns into day.

Posted with permission of the author.

National Poetry Month Issue 27

National Poetry Month is almost over.

Before we write an elegy for NPM 2011, I have four more Maryland poets I'd like you to meet.

First is Eric Goodman. Eric says he's more of a  fiction writer than a poet. Tracks, Eric's novel in stories, comes out in June.

Eric keeps a writing and Baltimore literary events blog, Writeful and helps run a local readings series, Lit and Art at the Watermark.

A veteran of the slush pile, Eric sent me a group of poems with an acknowledgment that they might not make it past a first reading. All experience writers have been there.

In the poem I chose for today, Eric Goodman draws a contrast between how we feel when we're embarking on the writing life -- filled with exuberance and, hopeful confidence in our talent -- and how we feel when reality, or even just maturity, sets in. 

Finding an audience for our writing takes effort. Submitting work to journals, agents and publishers takes more faith than we have some days.

Do you feel lucky, poet?

Even if you don't, take a second, like the speaker in "Submission to a Student Journal" to remember that initial spark.

Submission to a Student Journal

(from a writer who’s burning out)

by Eric Goodman

You don’t know me

yet

but someday you will.

I know you

like the crow’s feet by my eyes—

You with your geyser talent

spewing young faithful words

that burn.

Inspired lines cool off,

dry up,

soak into the earth of age and detachment.

It gets harder.

Not the writing—holding on to the belief that your words matter in

a world with

one hundred thousand writers.

There used to be a show about old people

called Thirtysomething.

You’re too young to remember it

but I can’t get it out of my mind.

I attend the college reading

celebrating another literary journal that has

rejected me.

I try to mingle

but find apprehension in your eyes.

I’m out-of-place.

The young writer is suddenly not.

I shake your hand and want to cling to it, to

hold it until you understand,

until you can feel what I feel and know what it means to be one in

a hundred thousand writers.

On the way to my car

I see the man wearing his sign:

Will write for by-line.

The reflection fades.

I’m parked on the fifth floor.

I make twice as many circles as I descend,

words spinning in my head

as I search for

a poem

you’ll

take.

Published with permission of the author.

Writing Exercise (This one's for adults):

"Submission to a Student Journal" is a rant from an older, longtime writer who's feeling jaded. The student-editor he addresses in this poem seems like an earlier version of himself -- a geyser talent burning with words that have since cooled for our speaker.

In this exercise, let the twenty-something or teenage writer in you respond to the older author.

I am picturing myself in my NYU days. What if 40-something-poet me walked in to the student cabaret where we wrote, performed and directed short shows? What would 20-something me think of her and where she is in her writing life?

Funnily enough, I'm heading to the Blackbird Festival at Howard Community College today. HCC does have a student art/lit journal that takes outside submissions. If you're interested, check out The Muse.

National Poetry Month Issue 26

Do you haiku?

Haiku can be a half hour lesson in an elementary school classroom --

five beats in one line

second line has seven beats

last line -- five again

-- the kind of "technically, it follows the rules of haiku" spoofed in this great Get Fuzzy strip.

Or... you can spend a lifetime studying the intricacies of this short Japanese form poem.

Continuing with my National Poetry Month of Maryland poets, we are visiting with Tim Singleton today. Tim writes a poetry column, "Poet's Corner," for one of our local newspapers, Generations.

Here's Tim's take on the 5-7-5 vs. deceptively short/actually complex form debate:

Smugly, I once thought, haiku are short, I should be able to write those... if I have some success writing them, maybe, just maybe there is more to this writer side of me that I should pursue.

What a trap! I haven't been the same since.

Small and seemingly simple, they are so much more than the easy and mistaken math learned of the form in elementary school, the 5-7-5 march toward a seventeen syllable poem that has something to do with nature.

At the core of writing haiku is the practice of being aware and turning the connection of the senses and perception into the slightest of words so that another can share - from just those words - the same experience. Incorporate the tradition elements of the form, things like kireji and kigo, and the
practice deepens.

Not an easy task, but a task full of wonder and joy, one that influences not only other forms of writing, but the very way one participates in the world.

A Selection of Haiku
by Tim Singleton

cloudburst --
a peony blossom
bows and bows and bows

introductions --
the cocktail's cold
in her handshake

(The poem above is actually a senryu -- read the definition at the Haiku Society of  America.)

lunch hour --
brows glisten
at the pepper stand

Writing Exercise
Go beyond the 5-7-5! Haiku can operate like a photograph in words. They often contain two images that create a kind of conflict, motion or story when placed next to each other in the poem. The reader has to do a little bit of work.

Look at Tim's "lunch hour" haiku. What does the glistening brow tell you about what has just happened at the pepper stand?

Marylanders -- we have our own Haiku organization. The Haiku Poets of Central Maryland.

National Poetry Month Issue 25

I first met Maryland poet Vonnie Winslow Crist because we had not one, but two shared aspects of our writing life.

We are both members of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and we have both taught school poetry workshops for the Maryland State Arts Council's Artist-in-Education program.

Vonnie's writing is imbued with the magic of fairy tales and fantasy. Some of her poems are realistic, but even those have a sense of magical sense of awe about the natural world.

Vonnie's essay on the role of monsters and magic in modern culture will appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Little Patuxent Review.

If you can't wait until then, pick up a copy of her new book, The Greener Forest, which I blogged about here.

For a taste of the fantastic, click here to read Vonnie's poem "Dragons" in EMG-Zine, which specializes in fantasy and SF.

I'm sharing her ekphrastic poem, "At the Asian Art Center, February 21." The speaker in the poem is transported, not by fairies, but by a work of art.

At the Asian Art Center, February 21

by Vonnie Winslow Crist

Listen.
Hee-Young Kim has written
a poem
on four horizontal banners pressed
edge to edge like
river, grass, mountain, sky.

Look.
Strokes on these panels
translate odes chanted
by air into
the ear of Hee-Young.
And she, treasured interpreter, used
brush, paper, inkstone, ink stick
to paint mementoes of
the wind’s meeting
beneath the Coincident Moon
with shy bamboo –
beyond graceful
in her robe of silvered jade.

Read the rest of the poem at Vonnie's website.

Writing Exercise:
In this ekphrastic poem prompt, go beyond simply reacting to a work of art. Take some time to imagine the artist and his or her process in creating the painting, sculpture, graffiti.

Extension for upper elementary/middle school:
Linda Sue Park's Newbery Award winning novel A Single Shard is a work of historical fiction, but it could also be a response to today's prompt. Have students discuss how a work of art -- even a fragment -- could inspire an entire novel.

My month of Maryland poets continues tomorrow. National Poetry Month is almost over.

National Poetry Month Issue 24

Last night was the launch party/reading for my first book as editor -- Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems. We had a crowd of 50 people at the Towson Library, part of the Towson Arts Collective's Cruelest Month/National Poetry month reading series.

Life in Me is a non-traditional love poetry anthology (looking at 7 different aspects of love), published by Maryland Writers Association Books

I've met some amazing folks working on this book. One of them is Dr. Tapendu Basu, who also goes by the name Gandharva Raja.

His poem "The Bridge" is in the Madness of Love section of the anthology. It's a short poem exploring the magical thinking that can happen when we are swept away by love. Tapendu read the poem last night -- powerful stuff.

Tapendu is also the author of Epic Mahabharata: A Twenty-fist Century Retelling. I chose a love poem from his book to share with you. It combines an enthralling narrative and beautiful descriptive details.

A related writing prompt follows.

Savitri and Yama
[A love story]

by Tapendu Basu

One night in the forest dreary,
Draupadi, lonely as the moon at night,
asked Vyasa to make the season light

with a story of love.
Said Vyasa, "Listen:
There lived a princess with wavy tresses

lovely as a heron in flight.
The princess wed a woodman
knowing her love would never wane,

never want more than his hand's caress.
Upright as the trees he felled,
strong as his axe,

the woodcutter was unaware
of his noble birth and royal line
and how in the forest he was lost.

One night Yama pounded on the gate
and let her know of his fate --
by the sword of time hung over his head

at year's end he was destined -- dead.
On the day death would claim
Savitri kept wakeful vigil, faithful that

the glow of death would certain thaw
death's unwelcome chill.
As darkness snail-paced covered

the chopped wood piled high,
the woodman fell in a faint
and would not stir his eye.

As shadowy silhouette cloaked in red --
his jet black hair bound in a net --
crouched over the lifeless form

and covered the death-paled face.
Saying, 'Prepare the funeral, O fair lady.
Satyaban's time is ended.

and Death has no time to spare,'
Yama plunged his hand
into the dead man's heart

and pulled out the thumbsized soul.
He spun a thread -- a web -- around it
and saved the soul in his net.

Savitri tugged on his flowing red robe
and begged that she be allowed
seven brief pace --

seven steps alongside her husband's departed soul
But she walked yet longer
keeping pace with the red robed Yama

till the evening light was spent.
Adamant, she refused to part.
'The thread you tied

when my husband died
has me in your snare,' she said.
Persuaded, with softness rare

Yama permitted one petition --
a single soulful plea and reason.
The moon burst through the cloud

and Savitri's face was aglow.
Pleaded Savitri, 'I wish for a son;
but, consider, a son ill becomes a widow.'

Savitri's wish was impossiblewise.
Yama was willing to compromise.
'If half your days you willingly sacrifice,

I will revive Satyaban for as many days --
death's count will not alter
and fate stays without fault.'

In each inflection of the story
Draupadi found comfort.
Easy it would be to spend

pensive placid days by the river's bend
where river Jamuna holds in holy embrace
the water that flows from Shiva's hair."

Posted with permission of the author.

Writing Exercise:
Sacred texts like the Mahabharata can be a wonderful source for fiction and poetry.

When I taught high school English, my students had an assignment to write a "side story" with its roots in a Biblical tale. One boy wrote a story that takes place after Lazarus is brought back to life. After Jesus commands Lazarus to awake, the man realizes he cannot sleep. I've never forgotten the story.

Choose a moment in a sacred text where you can tell a side story, a what-happened-next? or a point of view piece -- "how did this person feel about X."

National Poetry Month Issue 23

The spring holidays fall during National Poetry Month this year. They are a time for remembrance.

In my family, we celebrated Passover first with a brief Seder at my parents' home. The focus of the service is remembering the story of our ancestors' exodus from slavery.

Then, we celebrated Easter with my husband's parents. Remembrance again -- religious, yes, but also family traditions in the foods we make. Pizza rustica, spinach bread, a dish like a sweet kugel made with spaghetti, ricotta and raisins. And yes -- this guy:

Why stop and remember ancient stories and family traditions? It reminds us where we came from, who we are at our best and our worst.

Continuing my series of Maryland poets, Linda Joy Burke writes about loving our country enough to take a close look at where we are and where we hope to be.

OF THEE I SING III – AMERICA YOU DESERVE
by Linda Joy Burke

America
you deserve a love poem
not a sword,
you deserve to be elevated
by luminous utterances
rather than colored coded security alerts,

and even though I know
you don’t really trust
true declarations of love anymore

too many weak repetitions
of the greedy old words
have tainted your receptors

and too much making time
in the precincts of pretense
have stunted your growth,

.....I swear, I can see
what a good love poem
.....could do for you,
.....how it could make you over,
not artificially retouched,

I’m talking total transformation here,
transported into a pristine
wilderness for months or more,
with no mirror to check of your progress,

I want to help you open your big heart old again

Read the rest of the poem at Beltway: A Poetry Quarterly.

Writing Exercise:
"Of Thee I Sing III" reminds me of spring cleaning, getting deep in the drawers and cupboards, throwing out what you don't want or need, seeing the ideal through the dirt.

Let's do some spring cleaning in today's writing exercise. Except, don't clean your house. Make it something bigger or less concrete. How would you spring clean your relationship with your mother? What would spring cleaning a difficult childhood memory look like?

Linda Joy is an open-hearted person herself. She was my first poetry buddy when we moved to Maryland. She is a board member of Little Patuxent Review, the journal I edit, and was the first person who invited me to submit work to the publication, many years ago. I'm one of many who are grateful to Linda Joy for helping us make connections to the local literary scene.

You can read more at her blog, The Bird Talks, or follow Linda Joy's poetic observations on Twitter.