Sitting down every morning to write

My poem, Cora's drawing: a great postcard!

I've noticed that in the past couple days I have been split between sadness that my tenure as a 30/30 September poet is almost over, and the fear that I will run out of things to say before September 30th arrives. And yet. Every morning I sit down fearing I have nothing to write, and discover that I do.

Recently I've been prompted to write by a construction site, a colossal squid, and a longing to spend more time sleeping.

When I look back over the poems I've written this month, I am delighted at the variety of subjects and ideas and even forms that I see. And when I look back over the poems my 30/30 colleagues have written I am even more delighted. What an amazing portrait of poetry right now we have created!

Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it wonderful that people like me and Heather Bourbeau, Harmony Button, Sam Cha, Lisa Ludden, David Rawson, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Emily Van Kley, and Jessica L. Walsh have a space like the Tupelo Press site, where we can share our (fresh!) poems with, well, everyone?

Yes. Yes it is wonderful. That Tupelo Press is able to do this, as a non-profit literary press, is thanks in part to the donations they receive, sponsorships for those of us sitting down every morning to write - excited, nervous, confident, fearful, bursting with words or squeezing them out bit by bit. And so, yes, I am here now to ask you to donate, to sponsor me, if you've enjoyed a poem or two (or twenty-four, or...wait, what's 9x24?). Here's how, and here's what's in it for you:

How to Donate:

There are three ways to donate - with each it is very important that you include my name as the poet you are sponsoring so that I know what kind of treats to send your way! Here’s how you can sponsor me:

1. Subscribe to Tupelo Press (9 books for $99). Visit http://www.tupelopress.org/books_subscribe.phpand fill out the form; be sure to put my name in the “comments” field!
2. Complete the Tupelo Press Donation Form at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php and be sure to put my name in the “honor” field. (You can also print out the form and send it in with a check.)
3. Donate using PayPal at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php - click on the orange “Quick Donation via PayPal” button - be sure to put my name in the “message” field!

If you choose option 2 or 3, be sure to provide your mailing address so that you can receive a tax receipt for your donation! 

What's in it for YOU:

 $5 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers (the stickers are business card-sized)

$10 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers PLUS a set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora (there's one of them up at the top of this post!)

$15 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora PLUS the first 10 people to donate this amount get to supply 5 words that I must use together in one poem

$20 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora PLUS one dozen homemade cookies (chocolate chip or gingersnap - your choice, delivered in October)

$30+ => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora, one dozen homemade cookies (chocolate chip or gingersnap - your choice, delivered in October), PLUS a handmade, signed chapbook of all the poems written by me for my 30/30 month (also delivered in October). 

Tupelo also offers a subscription (9 books published by them in 2014 for $99, or your choice of 9 of their titles - free postage!) for those who want to bulk up their poetry library. If you choose to order a subscription, I will also send you the rewards offered at the $30+ level.

Day 21 / Poem 21

It's hard to believe that here I am in the last 10 days of the 30/30 Project!

One of my favorite parts has been getting words from people - I love knowing they've supported me by donating to Tupelo, helping to keep poetry in the world, I love the challenge of working with five words I didn't choose and finding their way of fitting together, and I love being able to post and tell people that their words have made an appearance.

Today's poem has two points of genesis. One is that in browsing the Academy of American Poets' web site I found a link meant to help you find poetry events in your state. North Dakota is not even on the menu. Sigh.

And the other point was the words my mom sent me: tether, corduroy, plummet, ephemeral, illuminate.

Day 18 / Poem 18

Thursday being writing prompt day, we 30/30 poets spent some time this week talking about what our prompt would be. It is interesting to me where we all come from in our approach to writing prompts, from the very prescriptive to the very vague. I am in the very vague camp, as a rule. I will do prescriptive prompts if it's called for, but mostly I want to be pointed in a direction and then left alone.

This might be why I am so happy teaching college. Autonomy is high on my list of career priorities.

So we went with the idea of a response - to whatever we each felt moved to respond to. At home we are in the midst of dealing with a mouse (we've only seen one, but I know, I know), and so I felt called to respond to that. But earlier in the week I had asked my cohort, "But what about Scotland?" Mainly a joke, but it seems to have stuck in my head. Plus, NPR has covered the lead-up to the independence vote pretty heavily this week.

But, if you put together a mouse and poetry, there is a more than fair chance you are going to trigger a memory of Robbie Burns's wee beastie. And so today's poem began.

Day 17 / Poem 17

Common Duckweed

My self-imposed writing assignment this morning was to use the five words provided by my friend Casey, who sponsored me in this writing-intensive month.

Before I reveal the words Casey gave me, I wanted to say how grateful I am to those who have already sponsored me this month by donating to Tupelo Press, and to say that if you have liked the writing you've seen so far this month, if you think it is amazing that Tupelo offers up its web site to poets every month and gives us a way to reach more readers than we otherwise might, if you think it is crazy or brave or weird or wonderful that I am actually sitting down every morning of September with the intention of producing a poem and displaying it to the world, I hope you will consider sponsoring me by donating to Tupelo Press. Plus, you know, I have ways of thanking you! (See the end of this post for details.)

Casey's words are: surprising, unassuming, searching, kindness, and verdant

Now, even though I think thee are terrific words, and I love the way they play off each other, I really had no idea what to do with them. I spent a while trying out different combinations, ideas, but specific, cohesive images were eluding me. So, I backed up, turned to a fresh new page in the old writing journal, and thought about the three words I most wanted to bring together: surprising, unassuming, and verdant. The last two are probably the ones that made me start thinking about small flowers and wondering what the smallest flower is.

So, I looked it up and was (thank goodness) *surprised* to discover that the smallest flower is considered to be the flower of the duckweed plant. Duckweed! Who knew? And then I felt that rush of seeing how the poem would come together, where I needed to pull from to create it, and how the other words would fit in.

Over the past 17 mornings I have come to crave that feeling.

* * *

How to Donate:

          $5 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers (the stickers are business card-sized)

$10 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers PLUS a set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora

$15 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora PLUS the first 10 people to donate this amount get to supply 5 words that I must use together in one poem

$20 => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora PLUS one dozen homemade cookies (chocolate chip or gingersnap - your choice, delivered in October)

$30+ => set of 4 haiku-by-Merie stickers, set of 4 postcards with short poems by me and drawings by Cora, one dozen homemade cookies (chocolate chip or gingersnap - your choice, delivered in October), PLUS a handmade, signed chapbook of all the poems written by me for my 30/30 month (also delivered in October). 

Tupelo also offers a subscription (9 books published by them in 2014 for $99, or your choice of 9 of their titles - free postage!) for those who want to bulk up their poetry library. If you choose to order a subscription, I will also send you the rewards offered at the $30+ level.

There are three ways to donate - with each it is very important that you include my name as the poet you are sponsoring so that I know what kind of treats to send your way! Here’s how you can sponsor me:

1. Subscribe to Tupelo Press (9 books for $99). Visit http://www.tupelopress.org/books_subscribe.php and fill out the form; be sure to put my name in the “comments” field!
2. Complete the Tupelo Press Donation Form at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php and be sure to put my name in the “honor” field. (You can also print out the form and send it in with a check.)
3. Donate using PayPal at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php - click on the orange “Quick Donation via PayPal” button - be sure to put my name in the “message” field!

If you choose option 2 or 3, be sure to provide your mailing address so that you can receive a tax receipt for your donation! 

Let me know when you donate, and I can make sure your donation has been matched up with my name - and then I can start preheating the oven for your cookies, put Cora to work drawing, or pull out my dictionary to look up the wacky words you are sending me.

Just past the halfway mark!

Day 15's poem was a surprise and a delight - it felt like it just showed up waiting for me to write it down. I mean - I revised and edited and changed and shaped, but it wasn't a struggle.

Today's poem was trickier. Today I tackled another set of words from kind sponsors. I'd actually been holding on to these words for a couple days, waiting to see how they would fall together in my mind. I had to google one of them to find out what it was. Then later I googled another just to see what other information I could find in addition to what I already knew. When I did that, I did indeed discover something new about a familiar word, and that piece proved to be part of unlocking the relationships among the words.

The words my friends gave me? Arabidopsis, Schenectady, prosaic, buttery, indigo. And here is Arabidopsis thaliana, the title plant of today's poem:

link to credits

Days 12, 13, 14...

30 poems...30 days

Day 12's poem
This one was written using words from my friend Jill, herself an amazing writer (and friend and mother and rower and gardener and...let's just call her amazing all-around). Jill's words immediately set me writing that first stanza, and then the second one just seemed to follow so naturally. It was a nice morning for writing!

The words: longing, drop, spin, grace, glass

Day 13's poem
Friday night we had a lot of people here for dinner. It was wonderful! So much fun, so much good conversation. We really didn't want it to end - once everyone left we all just stayed up a little later, stretching out the goodness of the day.

Day 14's poem
Which brings us up today and the poem I wrote using words from some friends in California. This set gave me a bit more of a run for my money - I admit to never having considered Orlando as a place (or person - thank goodness for Virginia Woolf) that would be in a poem of mine. I ended up with a kind of silly conceit to get it going, but in the end I liked it. And it surprised me, which is always nice, too.

The words: sycophant, tintinnabulation, liver, Orlando, quash

*    *    *

How can you get in on this "give Merie 5 words for a poem" action? Sponsor me by donating $15 to Tupelo Press! Find all the details you need by clicking HERE.

Day 11

Earlier this month we September 30/30 poets agreed that Thursdays would be writing prompt days, days we would all endeavor to write from the same idea, image, news item, what have you, and tagged the second Thursday, today, for the (doomed) Russian sex geckos.

But today is also the 11th of September, and while I do not feel like writing a poem about 9/11 - perhaps I won't ever - I do wonder if people would expect that?

Well, as it happened, I started out wanting to write a light and funny poem about the sex geckos, but they made me sad. They reminded me of Laika. So that is what I wrote about.

But in this space I want to mention someone else's poem, the poem that comes to mind first when I think of 9/11 now. That morning a friend and I had met for breakfast before work, as we left and got into our cars, we both turned on our radios to NPR, pulled over after about a block, and then drove to my house, where we sat speechless on the couch watching TV. I was thankful to be with a good friend. I've come to associate 9/11 with this poem by Robert Hayden that begins with an evocation of the Civil Rights struggles and Vietnam, because for me, this is the ultimate word on grief, loss, beauty, and art's ability to transcend and comfort.

Monet's Waterlilies / Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

The 10th day's poem

One of my preoccupations as a parent - and I know that the way this preoccupies me marks me as lucky as well as privileged - is how and when to talk with Cora about the ugliness of the world. The harshness, the heartbreak, the horror.

Death is easier for me to talk about, and we've had more practice. Beloved friends have died, the parents of friends, pets, too.

Now that she's older, an independent reader, a constant reader-of-headlines-over-my-shoulder, a persistent questioner, and also someone who (seemingly) never forgets anything, well, now there is a lot more to explain in the world.

Recently I contributed a tanka (a Japanese form) to the 1000 Tanka for Michael Brown and Ferguson, MO project, where I tried to capture her inquisitiveness, my ambivalence, and what I believe is, in fact, required of me in these situations. All in 5 lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.

Today's poem over at the 30/30 Project is related to this preoccupation, to finding the ways our family history connects with the larger history of the world, to try to say what our lives have to do with events that impacted other families more forcefully than ours.

Day 9 / Poem 9

Today's poem was a surprise - it was not the poem I started this morning, nor was it the poem I thought about while I took a break to wash dishes. But after I washed the dishes, I washed my hair in the sink.

Whenever I wash my hair in the sink, and end up staring at the ends watching the shampoo bubbles run out, I think about hair, and when my hair was longer, and that one girl in jr high who swore she'd never had a haircut and that the wispy ends of her hair were actually baby hair. What is it about that idea that makes it sound like hair from outer space, or hair that is actually a visitor from the past? I don't know. But her baby hair made me feel both jealous and oddly uncomfortable.

Needless to say, I was never the girl with baby hair. That's how it all started - all the girls I was not, the ones I was jealous of, the ones I felt bad for, the ones whose families scared me, and the ones whose lives were exotic to me.

Here's to those girls, all of them.

Day 8 / Poem(s) 8

It's hard not to like haiku. They're small, they're imagistic, they're quick to read. It's one of the few poetic forms almost everyone knows, because you start writing them in second grade, right before you learn about acrostics and cinquains. 

Like many people, I fell in love with haiku with this one: 

On the one ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still. 
 - Buson (trans: X. J. Kennedy)

(the syllable count doesn't hold in a lot of translations)

Here's everything a stringently classical haiku should have: juxtaposition, image, hint of season, and a sense of something I think of as movement, but of an internal, emotional kind. The light as air moth, the so-heavy bell, stillness, but the implicit tone of the bell tolling if it were to be rung - how that moth would wake!

Fall, to me, is a haiku season if ever there was one. Everything seems overlaid with metaphor as the year begins its winding down. 

Today's string of haiku started with the one I ended up placing last in the sequence - I can still see that leaf, lonely yellow beside all the still-green ones.

Day 6 & 7 of the Poetry Marathon

The artist I collaborated with on a series of postcards -
one of the thank-you gifts for sponsoring me during my 30/30 month!

Would you believe that weekends are a little crazier when it comes to finding time to write in the morning? I mean, there's eggs and bacon to be made, people! But, find time I did. Saturday morning Chris and Cora went to the Potato Bowl Parade and I wrote about dinner.

Saturday night I stayed up very late listening to music, writing, and finishing the sci-fi book I'm reading along with my brother and my dad, so that I would have something to post Sunday morning before the busiest day of the weekend got underway.

I have been thrilled to hear from people following my poems - knowing which poems have struck a chord with different readers is a rare treat! Please keep letting me know when you really like what you see!

I also hope that if you continue to enjoy the poems, or if you think it is pretty neat that I am sitting down every day and writing something that you get to read just a few hours later, or if you, like me, believe poetry is important and alive - if any of those things is true, I hope you will consider becoming a sponsor. Not least because I have some really exciting ways to thank you!

Let's say you decide that my poems are worth, say, 16 cents a day to you this month (or, maybe it's worth more, but hey, you also have to feed that family - I totally get that!). Donating $5 to Tupelo Press marked as a sponsorship for me would get you a set of stickers featuring haiku I've written to accompany photos. These are really nice stickers, even though my photo of them is blurry!

Maybe you have $10 you can put towards sponsoring me: I'll send you the stickers, sure, but also a set of 4 postcards that feature a poem by me that Cora has illustrated. She chose the poems, too. These came out so well, and Cora and I are both very proud of them!

A $15 sponsorship comes with a special perk: the first 10 people (8 spaces left, I believe) to sponsor me for $15 can choose five words for me to use together in one poem. (Frankly, these are so much fun I might go beyond ten, provided there is time in the month.) You also get stickers and postcards.

I have already heard from a couple people that the $20 sponsorship is the most attractive one to them because it comes with cookies! (Chocolate chip or gingersnap, your choice, to be mailed in October.) Plus stickers and postcards, of course.

And finally, sponsor me for $30 or more this month and you'll receive all the above, plus a handmade chapbook of all the poems I write for the 30/30 Project this month (which I will mail to you in October, along with some stickers, postcards, and cookies!).  (If you want to build your library, you can also subscribe to Tupelo Press and receive 9 books for $99 - you can even choose the Tupelo titles you want to receive!)

If you sponsor me, be sure to let me know so that your dollars can be matched up to my name and so that I know who to send these little thank-yous to. Here are the ways to donate:

1. Subscribe to Tupelo Press (9 books for $99). Visit http://www.tupelopress.org/books_subscribe.php and fill out the form; be sure to put my name in the “comments” field!
2. Complete the Tupelo Press Donation Form at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php and be sure to put my name in the “honor” field. (You can also print out the form and send it in with a check.)
3. Donate using PayPal at https://www.tupelopress.org/donate.php - click on the orange “Quick Donation via PayPal” button - be sure to put my name in the “message” field.

And, again, thank you most of all for reading along and for letting me know you're listening!

Writing journal page from the Sibelius poem

Day 5 / Poem 5

Mountain Mahogany.
Photo by Stan Shebs (cc)-by-SA3.0. from Wikipedia

Remember when I said there were treats for donating to Tupelo Press during my 30/30 Project month? I'm sure you do! The stickers have arrived and I LOVE them - they turned out great and I have MOO.com to thank for the wonderful printing job. The postcards are due to arrive early next week and I can't wait to see them - Cora and I had so much fun collaborating on them.

But, my friend Cindy emailed me yesterday to say that she had donated $15 and she had five words ready for me.

Now, I debated whether I should reveal her words, or let people guess.

I realize, though, that if I were reading this I would definitely want to know. So, if you don't want to know...stop reading now.


Still here? OK.


Cindy's five words for me were: Mustard. Marshmallow. Stripes. Vehicle. Mahogany.

She sent them last night at about 8:30, and I had the first couple lines in mind when I went to bed. I woke up this morning at 6, when Chris's alarm went off (he was already awake, working at the computer with headphones on).

Left the house at 6:20 to get donuts and coffee beans - on my drive out to Tim Horton's I figured out how the stripes would go in (marshmallow was never really a problem for some reason - possibly a sign I already knew too much about marsh mallows and marshmallows?).

Got home about 7, rousted Cora out of bed, had a nice breakfast, waved goodbye to Chris and Cora, and sat down to start wrestling with mahogany, the most difficult one, until I had the brainstorm of googling "mustard and mahogany" and learned the name of the shrub I had seen many times during my childhood. Whew.

I'm not sure I will have as much fun for the rest of the day - these five words were a terrific puzzle to figure out!

Day 4 / Poem 4

Another thing I am really enjoying about the 30/30 Project is the camaraderie among the poets. When we moved from Minneapolis to Grand Forks in 2010 I left behind a lot of friends, including my poetry group - a group founded in 1995! Granted, at that point I was the only remaining original member of the 1995 group, but our membership had remained steady at the core for at least 10 years. I have really missed my poetry group, and the other writing group I was a part of from about 2001. So now it is fun to be back in daily conversation with poets, through the poems we post and through Facebook.

Recently, Sam Cha suggested we have a group writing prompt, which grew into the idea of Thursdays being writing prompt days - an idea that suits me well. Sometimes I like to write what I want to write, and sometimes I want a framework or a starting point. For today, Sam had two links up his sleeve. One regarding the 100 year anniversary of the death of the last Passenger Pigeon (Martha) and one about kite fighting in the favelas of Brazil. And, then, of course, the challenge of somehow linking these two news items which are about very different actual events, but have some common themes running underneath.

Knowing ahead of time the general territory I'd be mining this morning, I did some research last night, on kites, kite fighting, names in different languages for different parts of the kite, scribbling about survival and extinction and fight or flight.

I didn't use much of my research when it came time to sit down this morning - I'd already half written the poem while walking home from drop-off. And that's okay, with one exception. I really wish I'd found a place for "Lonesome George" - the last known Pinta Island Tortoise, who died in 2012, and had lived in captivity since 1971 (housed with females of a different subspecies - so not totally alone). It's his name, of course, that gets me. How lonesome he must have been, indeed.

Photo of Lonesome George by Mike Weston, (cc)2.0, from Wikipedia

Day 3 / Poem 3

Fig Girl / photo by Jan Kirby (c)2014

This morning as I walked back home after taking Cora to school, I felt a thrum of trepidation. What would I write about today? I'd been hoping (always, always) to wake up inspired, but I'd only really been inspired to drink coffee and make promises about going to bed earlier tonight.

So, I ran through some of my usual ways of poking the poem beast (who I envision living in my lungs, actually) and came home and read some random poems, browsed through Pliny, and then just sat back and listened to my brain.

There were two things running through my brain, and neither made it into today's poem.

One was the Spearhead song (is it too short to even be called a song?) "Home" - a little fragment track that I love. It's like a sleeping bag - small and cozy and warm.

The other was a quote from Charlie Parker: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

So I started scribbling around with those two things in mind, but for some reason what I started hearing in my head was Sibelius's Symphony No. 5, and what I was seeing was a garden sculpture my mom has had in the yard of every house we've lived in ever (photo above). Maybe it was that home/horn combination lurking under the surface of my primary inspirations, who knows, but I like where I ended up.

Click here to read the poem on Tupelo Press's site!
Click here to learn more about what happens when you donate to Tupelo this month and mention my name (the stickers came in the mail yesterday and they are so damn cool, if I do say so myself!).

Day 2 / Poem 2

I don't want to alarm you, but there are two photos at the end of this post. The first is of a Spiderman watch. The second is of a spider. Now you know.

Today's poem started a couple days ago, I suppose, when my friend Erika posted her amazing photo of a jumping spider. I fell in love with the photo (let's be clear about this: the *photo* - I love learning about spiders, I love pictures of spiders, but I have been known to shriek when encountering a real live specimen. Especially if over 1/8th inch in size). I knew I would end up writing about this mama spider, but I hadn't yet figured out how.

This morning was the first day of 3rd grade for my daughter, a morning she has been anxiously anticipating for weeks. She'd had her outfit picked out for a couple weeks, and back to school shopping had led to another round of discussions on "what stores think girls like" versus "what girls really like."

What this one girl, at least, really likes - is proud of liking - is Spiderman.

And so, walking back home, today's poem was born.

Spiderman watch.

Photo by Erika Sanders (c)2014 / Jumping Spider

Day 1 / Poem 1

Today's poem is up over at the 30/30 Project page, my poem and those of my compatriots. I'm happy to be able to start the month off with a poem I really like, as I feel quite certain that over the course of the month I may end up posting at least one that feel less ready. I am trying to stick very close to the idea of writing a new poem for each day. 

In today's poem I write about the painting A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, by Vincent van Gogh, and about the experience of seeing it in London this past May, standing in front of it, and underneath that the experience of having read his letters long ago in an undergrad class at CCS/UCSB. And I suppose something too about being in school so close to the ocean, sitting around tables talking, while all the while the ocean was out there, too.

There are actually three paintings by van Gogh of this same scene, nearly identical. The one below is slightly different than the one that hangs in the National Gallery, but only in a few small details.