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
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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.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Thursday, September 11, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, September 8, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Day 6 & 7 of the Poetry Marathon
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| 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:
- 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!
- 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.)
- 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!
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| Writing journal page from the Sibelius poem |
Friday, September 5, 2014
Day 5 / Poem 5
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| 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!
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