Showing posts with label robert louis stevenson. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

NPM 2015: What Are You Wearing, Donna Smith?

What are you wearing for National Poetry Month 2015, readers? How about today's find, an upcycled denim skirt with ribbons of poetry embroidered on it?

Colors of the Snake River poem skirt
with poem hand-painted on silk ribbon
available at Etsy.

Throughout April, guest bloggers are dressing up in their poetry finery as Author Amok features poems about clothes. Why clothes? Read this post.

In addition to the guest bloggers, every Friday in April I'll post a round-up of original and recommended clothing poems. (Send those via email to laurashovan at gmail dot com or leave them in the comments). You'll find this week's writing prompt at the bottom of this post.

Time to stop skirting the issue and get to today's clothing poetry post. Guest blogging for us is Donna Smith of Mainely Write. So, Donna, what are you wearing?

“What are you wearing for NPM?” they asked.

“Once I had a tutu or two”, I trilled, skirting the question addressed to me...

Quote by Elle MacPherson: “I wanted so badly to study ballet, but it was really all about wearing the tutu.”

For me it was not just about the tutu (though a good tutu can take attention off many a misstep). I loved dance, especially ballet. I began lessons when I was in first grade, but even before that, I would dance to any music playing...even the music playing in my head.

Alas, as I got into my middle teen years, I realized that I did not have that long, lean dancer’s body that I thought I should have, and gave up that dream.

My first poem offering here is an original, paying homage to my younger self, and my older self, who gave up becoming a dancer:

Skirted

when I was but a little girl

I loved to twirl

and swirl

my spinning skirt would billow out

I had no doubt

about

my dream that I was born to dance

as in a trance

I’d prance

with leaps and bounds, my pointed toe

smooth rhythm flow

aglow

upon my stage of grassy glade

in verdant shade

a maid

in skirt with pleats of flower hue

one day time flew

and blew

into the now my skirt was swept

no promise kept

I wept.

©Donna JT Smith, 2015

In some ways I think writing poetry and dancing are very similar. You need a music and a rhythm, you need a flow, you need heart and soul, and you need to breathe it in and out. I gave up dance, but found a new dance in poetry.

My daughter also learned to dance, (and sew). I wrote this poem for her when she sent me a picture of herself twirling out on the sunny green lawn in her new dress she made from a bed sheet:

A Tyburn to a Twirl

Whirly

Twirly

Curly

Girlie

Spinning in her whirly, twirly dress

Is my little curly, girlie lass.

by Donna JT Smith, 2013

Just had to include this picture of my daughter’s skirt that she made from old neckties! It has been in storage, so it needs a little steaming perhaps, but you get the idea!

One of my favorite poets of all time, and probably greatest influence in my own writing is Robert Louis Stevenson. He was one of the first poets of whom I was made aware as a child. My mother gave me the book, A Child’s Garden of Verses (first published in 1900), and I read it over and over savoring the smooth and easy rhythms and rhymes in each poem.

There are two poems in this volume that have “skirts” mentioned in them. Women always wore long skirts back then, and even in my childhood, skirts were the norm for women. Even as a child in school, girls could not wear slacks, unless it was winter...and then only under your skirt outside at recess.

Check out (http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/ Lit2Go. It is a free collection of stories and poems in audio and pdf formats. There are also many that have a word count, the reading level and activities for your classroom.

Auntie's Skirts

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever Auntie moves around,

Her dresses make a curious sound,

They train behind her up the floor...

Read or hear the poem here.

The Wind

by Robert Louis Stevenson

I saw you toss the kites on high

And blow the birds about the sky;

And all around I heard you pass,

Like ladies' skirts across the grass--

wind, a-blowing all day long,

wind, that sings so loud a song!

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Poetry Friday: Lunar Eclipse

Wednesday morning, 5:15 am. My son groans when I turn on the light in the hall. My daughter begs for five more minutes of sleep. Hubby is already in the shower.

I have five minutes. Five minutes is not enough time to finish that chapter of my book (SKIN HUNGER, by Kathleen Duey) or go back to sleep. It is the perfect amount of time for checking Facebook.

Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
is too busy rounding up
Poetry Friday links to check Facebook.
When you have five minutes, stop by her blog.

Facebook is where how I found out about the lunar eclipse. Friends across the country were waking their children up early and heading outside to view the Earth's shadow pass across the moon. At our house, it was just another early school day.

But I put the kettle on, got out my star-gazing binoculars, and slipped outside while everyone else went about their morning. This is what I saw...

This week's eclipse was a Blood Moon,
named for its coppery color.
Photo: EarthSky.Org

Before everyone left for school and work, a thin line of moon -- wearing its coppery cloak -- was setting, just above the dark tree line.

Later that day, I was reading the "Poetic Asides" column in Writer's Digest. Poet Terrance Hayes -- a recent MacArthur genius award winner -- has invented a new poetic from. Using a line or lines from a favorite poem, use each word (in the correct order) as an end word in your poem. It's called a golden shovel, named for Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" -- the basis for a golden shovel poem written by Hayes.

Writing Prompt: Write a golden shovel of your own.
Post your poem in the comments (making note of the poet/title of the original) and I will round up all of our golden shovels next week.

I like what Writer's Digest columnist Robert Lee Brewer says about this form. He calls it "a fun mix of found poetry and pure invention."

To capture the slow eclipse in the midst of my family's busy morning, I used Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Moon," from A Child's Garden of Verses.

Here is my golden shovel, followed by Stevenson's poem. (The words of Stevenson's poem are in gray.)

Eclipse, 5 am

by Laura Shovan

After Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark October morning, the

Earth’s shadow sweeps the Moon,

dissolves its round cheeks until the Moon has

only an icy smile. Next, it is the sliver of a

snowy owl, mostly hidden, its white face

shrunk to one silver eyebrow. Cuplike,

it holds the Sun’s reflection in its feathers. The

owl swoops down when my kitchen clock

strikes six, finds its roost below the horizon. In

moments, sleepers will tumble down the

stairs, their school shoes clicking in the still-dark hall.

The Moon

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
She shines on thieves on the garden wall,
On streets and fields and harbour quays,
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.

The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse,
The howling dog by the door of the house,
The bat that lies in bed at noon,
All love to be out by the light of the moon.

But all of the things that belong to the day
Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way;
And flowers and children close their eyes
Till up in the morning the sun shall arise.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Source Poems: "Rain"

For National Poetry Month 2014, I have invited 17 authors and poets to guest post about source poems. In this series of essays, each writer will describe a single poem's significance in his or her life.

During last year's National Poetry Month series, poet Dennis Kirschbaum earned the distinction of writing the most-viewed guest-post. Read it here.

Dennis Kirschbaum

Rain

The rain is raining all around,  

It falls on field and tree,  

It rains on the umbrellas here,  

And on the ships at sea.

Robert Louis Stevenson

On a dreary, overcast morning earlier this month, I emerged from the D.C. Metro Station at Gallery Place and headed to my warm office a few blocks away. A steady rain was falling as I moved from the dry station entrance into the puddles that filled the sidewalk leading to the corner of 7^th and H Streets. As I navigated a sea of black, blue, and red umbrellas, four lines of verse, a complete poem, popped into my head as they have on every rainy day for the last 46 years. I don’t know the exact day, hour or even the month I first heard the short poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, but I remember the event itself and the way I felt at the time.

It was a rainy day that’s for sure. There’s a good chance it was April. I was sitting in Mrs. Cook’s first grade class at Beechfield Elementary School in the Irvington neighborhood of southwest Baltimore. My teacher had in her hands a gorgeous edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The page she was holding up showed a black and white photograph of a little brown haired girl looking out of a rain covered window. She peered through the window with resignation at whatever she saw or didn’t see on the other side. As I recall, the entire book was filled with beautiful black and white photographs illustrating the poems. However, as clearly as I remember the photo of the girl, I don’t remember a single other picture in the book.

The Rain - Illustration by Bessie Collins Pease

Illustration by Bessie Collins Pease, 1905
Source: CTG Publishing

I told my mother that I needed a copy of that book. There was a series of futile visits to bookstores and the department stores of the era: Hutzler’s, Korvette’s, and Hochschild Kohn’s. Ah, the patience of mothers! However, the edition of the book with the beautiful photographs was nowhere to be found. Finally, I accepted another edition with the classic illustrations by Eulalie. Strange to think now that one of my most prized possessions, this little green edition from 1961, the year of my birth, was a runner up for my affection.

I don’t know if I was able to read the book when I first got it. Probably not. I remember camping in the Catskills the following summer with a stack of “I Can Read” books and by the end of that summer, I could! I read A Child’s Garden of Verses many times from cover to cover over the next few years.

Stevenson was born in Scotland in 1850. He wrote many of the classics of children’s literature including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and for a more adult audience, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There are no cars in A Child’s Garden of Verses. No telephones. No television. The street lamps are gas and have to be lit by a man named Leerie who carries a ladder to reach the nozzles. It was a different world from Baltimore in the 1960s, yet much of what he described was familiar to a child of that time: the entertainment afforded by one’s own shadow, the way a hole at the beach fills with water if you dig deep, the smell of leaves burning in autumn, and, of course, the rain that seems ubiquitous and eternal when its falling on your house and you can’t go out to play.

In Woody Allen’s hit movie, Midnight in Paris, the protagonist, Gil Pender played by Owen Wilson, is accused of “golden age thinking.” Golden age thinking is, according to the character who coins the phrase, “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in… a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

Gil is a writer and dreams of living in Paris where he is vacationing with his fiancee and her overbearing parents. Gil loves the romance of the 1920s and imagines himself alongside Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Soon he finds himself transported back in time every evening to hobnob and dance the night away with his idols and receive criticism and advice on his novel from Stein herself.

Perhaps those with an interest in writing are pre-disposed to golden age thinking, or maybe it is just a coincidence, but I find that I have a tendency to idealize what it might have been like to live in an earlier, and what appears from our vantage point, simpler time. I even have a modest collection of items from my personal golden age, roughly 1937-1957. My father’s slide rule, a Remington Quiet Riter typewriter, several mechanical watches, and a stapler that makes its own staples from spool of brass wire can be found among my dresser drawers and on my desktop. I write with a Parker fountain pen, which I fill from a bottle.

Of course, I understand that the idealized past is only a fantasy. Those of us given to idolizing the past tend to forget about the things that went along with the ‘simpler times.’ Polio, poor sanitation, surgery without anesthesia, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and bad coffee are all parts of a past we would just as soon forget. Perhaps such selective contemplation about a time one might not have experienced first-hand is indeed “a flaw in the romantic imagination.” Yet it is also true that the joys and sorrows, the celebrations and sufferings of our writing forbearers were strikingly similar to our own. This is why Stevenson’s poems, like all great art, still resonate with so many today. It’s why the book remains in print in many different editions (though none sadly, with black and white photographs) more than a century and a quarter after it was first published. In the poems, Stevenson captures the essence of what it means to be or to have been a child, the wonder, wisdom, wildness of that mind. It’s a color and quality of childhood that we still recognize in children today and in the children we once were.

No doubt there are other poems of Stevenson that capture the universal experience of childhood across space and time better than “Rain” but for me this short poem is a well from which I continue to draw. Perhaps it is the music of it, or the fact that it is the first poem I remember hearing read aloud, or maybe that I instantly memorized it, or just that I am reminded of it so often, especially in these kind, cruel months of early spring. The tune of it arrives as an earworm with the feeling of drops on my face. Or, maybe, it is the face of the brown haired girl at the window still haunting my flawed romantic imagination. The two of us peer through the streaked panes of glass and wonder when, or if, the sun will shine again, as it did in a far away country, a century before either of us was born.

Here is a poem about boyhood.

Wolves

by Dennis Kirschbaum

While the other scouts slept with sighs

deepening beneath mildewed canvas

in the dark-at-last summer night,

we escaped to pine woods, took seats

among the needles. We made a blaze

from paper scraps and exploding

cones. Sky told stories of the lodge

his folks had in Colorado, how deep

was the snow and the wolves

they’d hear at night and can you hear

them now calling, calling at the edge

of this stand just beyond Baltimore?

Before sunrise, we drowned the embers

with our piss, boys who conquered everything.

Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent
from WikiMedia

Dennis M. Kirschbaum is Hillel International’s Associate Vice President for Campus Services. His chapbook of poetry, Clattering East, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. He has traveled extensively in India, Thailand, Morocco, Israel, and Egypt and is an Adirondack 46er having hiked to the summit of the 46 highest peaks in New York state. He has reconciled his checking account to the penny every month since 1979. He lives with his family in Washington Grove, Md.

Previous posts in this series:

Laura Shovan on "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams

Dylan Bargteil on "On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma" by June Jordan

J. C. Elkin on "Hannibal Clim" (author unknown)

Diane Mayr on a haiku by Basho

Jone MacCulloch on "We Are Waiting (a pantoum)" by Joyce Sidman

Mary Bargteil on Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Jacqueline Jules on "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes

Pamela Murray Winters on "The Land of Counterpane" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Source Poems: "The Land of Counterpane"

Our guest blogger for today's source poem is Maryland-based poet Pamela Murray Winters, an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Pamela Murray Winters

As with so many things in my life, I changed my “source poem” plans at the last minute.

I had intended to write about Deborah Digges’ incantatory “To a Milkweed,” a touchstone in my return to writing poetry in the past decade. Or maybe about “The Mower,” which shows the grim old Brit Philip Larkin as the softy we always suspected he’d be.

Then, after reading J. C. Elkin’s entry in this series on the mysterious dragon “Hannibal Clim,” I realized that I had to revisit Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane.”

I suspect that I first encountered what we call poetry in A Child’s Garden ofVerses, which my mother read to me. I am trying to hear her voice now, reading it, and I can’t. I should be sad, but at least it brings back the memory, and the concomitant gratitude, that she gave me the gift of reading. [AA: Stevenson's "The Swing," also from A Child's Garden of Verses, is the first poem I remember reading. Read more here.]

Looking closer, I realize that this poem is responsible for the best and the worst of who I am: it’s an integral part of my love of words, and it’s inextricably tied to my sloth. Regard the first stanza:

When I was sick and lay a-bed,

I had two pillows at my head,

And all my toys beside me lay

To keep me happy all the day.

Here I learned that one could lie a-bed, sick, and still be happy, a dangerous concept indeed if one is prone to fantasizing about being a Victorian lady of the thwarted intellectual persuasion, dropping posy-tied manuscripts and candied violets to the children at the window and courting suitors via sly essays in the local weekly.

What bliss (for the amateur invalid, not the truly suffering) to be bedridden! So many happy hours spent with a bowl of buttered white rice, a tankard of ginger ale, at least one cat, and a TiVo full of “Law & Order” reruns! To feel soft sheets against bare skin, to turn the pillow over to its cool side and bunch it up under that achy part of your neck…

I am sure that I tried playing with my toys in bed after first hearing this poem. I didn’t have soldiers, but there was that plastic barn with the farm animals smaller than a dime and the cunning little fences. I might have noticed for the first time how the gentle rolls of bedspread, arranged not by artifice but by the natural movement of my body, resembled hills.

Surely I relished the word “counterpane.” I never thought of it as the name of a country, but I valued its unfamiliar formality. Some words carry their oddnesses on their shoulders like the bindled vagabonds seen in stories (have you ever seen, in earthly life, a wanderer carrying a bundle on a stick?). The oddness matters more than the soul inhabiting the word. Words from my childhood I don’t hear anymore: davenport, Victrola, cursive, percolator. Each is a book in itself.

The poem bristles with action: soldiers (if I were workshopping this poem, I’d question the adjective “leaden”), sailors, even urban development. Amid it all, the sick child is the prime mover, a young god, a small person made giant by power and juxtaposition. Even when stilled by illness, the creator can rest and contemplate what he has made: “dale and plain / The pleasant land of counterpane.”

How many lessons on poetry are held in this one brief poem?

The Land of Counterpane

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson
Image from The Guardian

Pamela Murray Winters is a student in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Gargoyle, Fledgling Rag, Beltway Poetry, Delaware Poetry Review, and other publications. She co-hosts the Evil Grin Poetry Series in Annapolis, Maryland. A native of Takoma Park, Maryland, she lives in Churchton, Maryland, with her husband and menagerie.

Previous posts in this series:

Laura Shovan on "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams

Dylan Bargteil on "On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma" by June Jordan

J. C. Elkin on "Hannibal Clim" (author unknown)

Diane Mayr on a haiku by Basho

Jone MacCulloch on "We Are Waiting (a pantoum)" by Joyce Sidman

Mary Bargteil on Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Jacqueline Jules on "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes

Friday, August 31, 2012

Poetry Friday: When Did You Fall in Love?

When did you fall in love with poetry?

I once heard Jimmy Santiago Baca read. He discovered poetry in jail. He was learning to read, found poetry, and became a poet himself.

My friend, the poet Svea Barrett, says that poetry saved her during a difficult time in her life.

I fell in love on the floor of my brother's bedroom, on a sunny day in the late 1970s. My youngest brother was an infant and I was eight. Was he sleeping or playing quietly? Maybe he wasn't in the room at all. A copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses sat in my lap.

We had plenty of books. I was familiar with nursery rhymes and books like The Big Orange Splot and Fortunately were family favorites. We also loved the Mr. Men series, which we'd brought back from trips to my mother's native England (you couldn't get them in the U.S. back then).

I loved books, but this was different. On this day, I had an experience. Like an epiphany.

This illustration looks vaguely familiar.

The Swing

By Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

Rivers and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown—

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down!

The weird thing was, I knew that place. My grandparents had a big house on the outskirts of a small Nottinghamshire village. We visited once a year. I had "my own" bedroom in their house. And from that bedroom's high window, I could literally look "over the wall,/ Till I can see so wide,/ Rivers and trees and cattle and all/ Over the countryside."

I remember, I couldn't stop staring at the picture in my book. That someone could describe this place that was special to me. In that moment, I was in our house in New Jersey, but I could see the landscape of far away England. I read the words again and felt the swinging motion in the rhythm. I could picture myself on that swing, high up, looking at the farms and fields surrounding my grandparents' house. I could picture myself coming down -- the brown brick of the house, my grandmother's rock garden beyond the kitchen window.

I think that I have loved poetry ever since. My next big crush was Edgar Allan Poe. Then William Carlos Williams. All along, I kept writing.

A high school field trip to the first Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival sealed the deal. There, I was introduced to modern poets like Sonia Sanchez. The first poet I heard on that trip was Galway Kinnell, reading in a small church. The early light shone on him as he read -- I felt transported.

I love sharing poetry with children. I never know which poem is going to spark a light in which kid. (My daughter is partial to Calef Brown, particularly his poem "Olf," about a terrible -- as in not very good at his job -- pirate.)

What about you? Do you remember your first poetry epiphany, when the art form grabbed your heart and wouldn't let go?

Poetry makes me feel like this guy.

Today's Poetry Friday host is Sylvia at Poetry for Children. Stop by for more poetic epiphanies.

Author Amok

THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY