Nikki Grimes tells poetic stories at the yard sales.

Welcome to Miss Vy’s Twice Blessed Secondhand Store, with both its in-store merchandise and its hosted yard sales. You will find clothes, Turkish rugs, clay pots, musical instruments, jars of old buttons, jewelry, baby furniture, coins, figurines, cups and saucers, and just about everything else you would expect.

You will also find stories, stories about the original owners and stories about people who purchased them from Miss Vy. And the stories are told in poetry.

Twice Blessed: Yard Sale Stories by writer and poet Nikki Grimes is one of the most fascinating, entertaining, and thoughtful uses of poetry I’ve read. We might wander through a secondhand store or yard sale, casting quick eyes various objects, and never give them a second look. But in Grimes’s hands, every object comes with its own and often unique story. And the objects have more than one story. There’s an origin story, or seller’s story, and a buyer’s story. It’s fascinating to see how Grimes crafts a story around each object.

That Turkish rug, for example. The seller gets rid of an occasional Turkish rug associated with a child’s accident. A seller gets rid of a peacoat no longer needed in a different climate. A buyer finds an unopened box of a doll that helps a family afford a birthday present. And so it goes, with old puzzles, Depression glass, coins, teacups, salt cellars, and more.

Magic Fingers

The first time Jerry saw Luz,
love cracked his heart
wide open.
But he was plain as mud
with ears that flapped
in the wind.
How could he compete
with all those pretty boys
on the high school
football team?
The only thing Jerry had going
was the magic
shooting from his fingertips
whenever he
strummed his guitar.
So, one evening,
ready to risk rejection,
he showed up beneath
what he hoped was
Luz’s bedroom window,
guitar in hand,
and serenaded her
in the key of love.
Luck was with him that night.
Forty years together
till the Lord took her.
Now it’s somebody else’s turn
to strum that guitar
and pluck the strings
of a young girl’s heart.

When the guitar finally lands in a yard sale, a music teacher’s wife finds it, and it becomes a gift for a student who can’t afford it.

Nikki Grimes

Twice Blessed is an easy collection to enjoy. And to love. Grimes tells stories of joy and heartbreak, of loss and love. The stories are familiar, because we all have our own stories of objects and special finds at yard sales and secondhand shops.

Photo by mrkittums, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Nikki Grimes and “Twice Blessed” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

So says T.S. Eliot to begin his much-lauded poem The Wasteland.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

So says Geoffery Chaucer in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

April is the not the cruelest month for me, it the blooming renewal month of Chaucer. April is not only an important month for major religions, but it is—drumroll—National Poetry Month!

The first poem that comes to mind in April, and then again in November, for Thanksgiving, is “Te Deum,” by Charles Reznikoff. He has taken the title from the Latin te deum laudamus, you God we praise, which figures heavily in Catholic ritual. Reznikoff was a Jew and his own religion was important to him.

I love this poem for its praise of quotidian blessings, the pursuit of one’s work, not as much an ars poetica as an ars vivendi.

Te Deum

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

—Charles Reznikoff

I love “Te Deum” for its reminder to be thankful for daily life, the changing seasons—the largess of the spring—and the work that gives our lives meaning, that we are part of a greater whole. Of course, this poem doesn’t need explicating, I just want to praise the sentiment, to praise sitting at the common table of this world, especially in springtime, the season of rebirth.Here is a spring poem from Enormous Blue Umbrella:

After the Birds Begin to Sing from the Trees

Before the sun makes its way over the bay
before the sky softens to gray
before the blaze of day begins

I rise, pull on my jeans, lace up my shoes
and enter the day, before the neighbors
are out, before the traffic begins,

before the phone rings,
while the day is blank as a page,
before I pick up my pen,

thank you, I say, let this day begin.

—Donna Hilbert

Here is a small gratitude poem from Threnody:

Lines Ending with Rumi

Heron feeding nestlings
In the Red Bud tree
Brings me to my knees
There are many ways to kneel
And kiss the ground.

—Donna Hilbert

Your Turn

April 30 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. What poem will you carry in your pocket? What poem might you memorize and carry in your heart. I will carry “Te Deum” in my pocket and my heart.

To celebrate National Poetry month all month long, check out this 30-day prompt book for subscribers.

The post Poet Laura: Not the Cruelest Month appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Alexander Voloshin wrote an epic poem about the Russian Revolution and Hollywood.

Alexander Voloshin (1884-1960) was born in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He had a career in theater, but World War I intervened and he became part of the Imperial Army. Then the Russian Revolution happened, and he found himself involved in the White-Red Civil War. When the Communists triumphed, Voloshin remained briefly in the Crimea. That was followed by a travel odyssey to Berlin, Brazil, and then Ellis Island. After a time in New York City, he made his way to Los Angeles and Hollywood, like thousands of other émigré Russians.

In Hollywood, he worked as a waiter and as an extra in movies. He was an actor in some 12 movies, the best known of which was “The World and the Flesh” (1932), starring Miriam Hopkins. The movie, set during the Russian Revolution, is about a rather nasty Communist revolutionary (Hollywood was big on Russian Revolution movies at the time). After his last role in 1937 (“Daughter of Shanghai,” starring Anna May Wong), Voloshin tried founding a theater magazine and writing for other publications.

Voloshin in the 1937 film “Daughter of Shanghai”

Dralyuk translated and published Voloshin’s poem under its original title, Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood. Not knowing Russian, I can’t speak to the quality of the translation. But it rings true. Voloshin is telling the story of thousands of emigres like himself, their lives torn apart by war, revolution, and social upheaval, who try to make a new life in other countries.

Sidetracked is full of exclamation points, asides, and comments by the poet, a surprise when you’re used to reading poems (even sagas and epics) in English. But what is suggested is the depth of feeling, the anger, the rage, and the sorrow caused by a social convulsion like a social revolution (and its murderous aftermath).

Each section, numbered chapters, is introduced by a quotation, proverb, or line from a song. A favorite source is poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin, whom Voloshin would have been familiar with because of his own theater background. This chapter in introduced with a line from Pushkin’s poem “Two Gypsies”: “A noisy band of gypsies roams / all through Bessarabian lands.” (Bessarabia corresponds approximately to present-day Moldova, tucked between Ukraine and Romania. In the time of the Russian Empire and its successor Soviet Russia, it would have something of a frontier area between Russia and Europe.)

Chapter 5

You can’t put blinders on a bird:
refugee actors soon were lured
by shining spotlights and marquees.
Hard work in shops and factories
was not for them…How they deplore
the clang of metal and the roar
of horns, how quickly they grow weary
of all they seem “mundane” and “dreary.”
A rose cannot bloom in a ditch…
And so, succumbing to the itch,
they all rushed off to Hollywood!

Having saved up as best they could,
they bought, in sets of twos or threes,
suits, pairs of shoes, and BVDs.
Since they were destined for great fame
and millions would be theirs to claim,
they happily ignored all rules
of economics—silly fools!
A cushy sleeper in first class…
The dining car is where they pass
their days…They loosen their new belts
and watch their dollars melt, melt, melt…

The lines have a theatrical quality about them, almost as if they were meant to be projected on stage instead of a printed page. Most of the entire poem is similar. It’s not like reading a play script, but more like watching a stage production in print.

When Voloshin died n 1960, his occupation was listed as cab driver. Dralyuk notes that it seems almost a Russian émigré cliché – so many former army officers and aristocrats becoming cabbies, waiters and other unthinkable occupations for people who held once-lofty positions. Voloshin also signals acceptance of this, seen in the final lines of Sidetrack’s last chapter: “If we must go, then let us go. / We know the drill—we’ll hit the road. / We’re Russians—we won’t come to harm!”

Related:

Boris Dralyuk and My Hollywood.

Photo by John K. Thorne, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Alexander Voloshin and “Sidetracked” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Euterpe was, by some accounts, the daughter of the goddess of Memory and the ever-fathering Zeus. Other accounts make Euterpe one of the water nymphs who was born because the winged horse Pegasus stamped its foot near the springs of Helicon. I rather like the latter explanation, because it lends a musical sense (the babbling brook) to her birth. Born of music, it would make sense she’d create the double flute and play it to bring delight. (That said, some mythographers credit Marsyas or Athena with the double flute’s invention.)

Euterpe Goddess of Lyric Poetry and Music

Since her name means “giver of delight,” it would be only natural for her to live into that, both by playing her flute and by inspiring poets and musicians to create delightful works.

Poetry Prompt

Explore inspiration via Euterpe. If you like, start by listening to some flute music or a babbling brook. Then write a poem that moves with the rhythm of the sound, or is simply inspired by the mood that the sound creates in you. You could also write a poem about your own name and what it would mean to live into that as a person moving in the context of your choice (family, friendship, work, travel, whatever!).

Photo by Rajesh Kavasseri, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

The post Poetry Prompt: Meet Your Muse Euterpe appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

If the information on the Family Search website is accurate, my paternal ancestors can be traced back to 1520s England. A few would eventually emigrate to America in the 1620s and late 1600s. On my mother’s side, the first group arrived in the 1720s; more followed in the 1760s. The final group arrived in the first great German migration to America in the 1830s. I’m not sure when one’s ancestry becomes important, but I can say I discovered it fairly young, put it on hold for a few decades, and then came back to it.

In 2001, poet Linda Nemec Foster published a poetry collection, Amber Necklace of Gdansk, that reads like a study of where she came from. In this case, it’s Poland. Ancestors had emigrated from Poland to America, settling in Cleveland. Growing up in the Cleveland area, Foster became aware of the stories of the old country and the family customs that carried over.

But when a family heritage is powerful, it’s not surprising that those stories will give way to desire to see the old country itself. After nearly a century, the country of Poland – once divided between the German, Russian, and Austrian empires, then made independent, then invaded by Nazi Germany, then occupied by communist Russia, and now once again independent – will be a very different place.

Foster begins by describing what she knows, what she herself has grown up in –her childhood, her neighborhood, the dreams immigrants brought with them, even an oak tree in her grandparents’ backyard that almost died but was saved by a mysterious salve concocted by her grandfather. Then she begins the transition, and she does it by writing of the two rivers in her story.

The Two Rivers in My Story

I. Cuyahoga
The river’s name sounds like a chant
and it probably is. A n ancient Indiar
chant born in northern Ohio when it
wasn’t called Ohio but Place of Green
water, Place of Tiny Gorges Where Trees
Come to Be Born. The chant floats
along the river’s steady current
a s the waters twist through gray rocks,
yellow earth, and leaning trees
like a snake wrapping around itself
until it slithers into Lake Erie
and becomes uncoiled and silent.

II. Vistula

Who could not fall in love
with the name of a river that sounds
like water? Caressing the air
that leaves your mouth with such moist
nonchalance, it takes your breath away.
River that is half-woman, half-fish:
mermaid that seduces all or nothing,
her song the last fragment you hear
before the current sweeps you away.
Imagine her as a young child, the object
Of desire as virgin, as the unexplored
heart. Nothing in her veins but melted snow.

Afte the poems of the transition, Foster arrives in Poland. She writes of Chopin, visiting her grandmother’s house, walking through a park, watching people going about their lives, observing how the land took over to regenerate everything after World War II. She watches the color and the clouds take over, not knowing the place “where death lived for so long.”

Linda Nemec Foster

The final section of the work continues Foster’s experiences and observations but ends with a kind of resolution – pride in a Pole winning the Nobel Prize for literature, conscious of her heritage, and dancing with her sister “in a smoky bar in Detroit / where two women dancing together can scandalize / any pimp within range.” The dance reminds her of those Polish weddings in Cleveland, where they both learned to dance.

Foster has published 14 poetry collections, including The Lake Huron Mermaid, her most recent. Her books and poems have received numerous awards and recognitions, including a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for The Blue Divide. Her poems have been published in such literary journals and magazines as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, North American Review, New American Writing, Witness, Quarterly West, and Paterson Literary Review. She served as the first poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College. She received her B.A. degree from Aquinas College and her M.F.A. degree from Goddard College in Vermont.

Amber Necklace of Gdansk will take you back to your own roots, your own ancestry. It reminds you that that land your ancestors came from still inhabits your DNA.

Related:

Linda Nemec Foster and the Extraordinary Ordinary.

Photo by Gabriel Caparo, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and “Amber Necklace of Gdansk” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Julian Peters draws comics to illustrate classic nature poems

It’s one of those “Aha!” moments. I was reading an illustrated poem, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”) when I realized I’ve been long fascinated with mixing artistic genres.

Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is a classic detective novel written as poetry. Sara Barkat has taken classic stories and novels and transformed them — The Yellow Wall-Paper, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, and even Dracula.

I didn’t think this was some great personal revelation, but I was struck by how I tend to gravitate toward graphic treatments of classic or contemporary texts.

The work that included Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 was Nature Poems to See By by Julian Peters. It’s a collection of 24 classic nature poems, arranged by season (six poems each), and illustrated with what is a literary comic strip.

Peters is a comics artists and illustrator. He has a master’s degree in art history, and he’s focused on using graphic art to adapt classic poems. While I never expected to see the poem “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins adapted into a comic book format, I can now say I have. (William Blake wouldn’t surprise me, since he was an artist as well as a poet. But Hopkins did.)

Along with Shakespeare, the volume includes poems by Langston Hughes, William Blake, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo (U.S. poet laureate from 2019-2022), Japanese haiku poets, Robert Frost, Christina Rossetti, and William Wordsworth, among several others. The work is like his previous book, Poems to See By; the difference is that this new one focuses on well-known nature poems, as the title indicates.

Mixing classic texts with drawing and illustrations allows a different kind of perspective. It’s a visual interpretation of the printed words. I’ve read “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas many times before, but I’ve never seen it illustrated. It’s a World War I poem, and the writer is remembering a train trip and what he sees at a particular stop. Peters’ comic drawings capture the sense of homesickness that pervades the poem. They also demonstrate the writer’s loneliness.

Julian Peters

It works surprisingly well. I say “surprisingly,” because it sounds counterintuitive; I initially was startled to see great poems embedded within comic art. Illustrating a poem with comic art? Yes. Exactly.

Peters’ work has been exhibited internationally and published in numerous poetry and graphic art publications. I’d first seen some of his work in Plough Magazine. In 2015, he served as “cartoonist in residence” at Victoria University in New Zealand. Nature Poems to See By uses full-color comic art; you can see an example of some of his black-and-white cartoons on his website (like the one he did for T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). He lives in Montreal.

Nature Poems to See By didn’t fundamentally alter my perception and understanding of poems I was familiar with. But it did enhance and deepen that understanding. Perhaps it was the seeming simplicity of how comic art frames them. Perhaps it was seeing words I knew through the artistic sense of someone else. Whatever it was, it added depth. And an occasional smile.

Related:

Great Poetry as Seen by Comic Artist Julian Peters.

Photo by Diego Torres Silvestre, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Artists and Poems: Julian Peters and “Nature Poems to See By” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

It seems, when it comes down to it, there are two ways to celebrate: the hard way and the easy way.

The hard way? Finding everything on your own: Poems to read. Prompts to write by.

The easy way?

Just delve into our highly-curated selection of poems at Every Day Poems. And access the new 30 Day Challenge Daily Prompts book over at The Write to Poetry.

Poems to Read

Many of the poems at Every Day Poems are open for everyone to read. (Paid subscribers get the whole collection.) It’s easy during National Poetry Month to simply check your inbox and read the day’s poem, or check out the archives.

Or maybe you’d like to read by theme. You can find all the themes on this page. For a special experience, you could concentrate on some of these popular themes:

Resilience
Gratitude
Awe
Change
Courage
Coffee
Healing
Creativity
Dreams
Kindness
Poems on Poetry
Poems about Poets

Prompts to Write By

Check out all the writing prompt series at The Write to Poetry, some of which are open for everyone. Paid subscribers get all the series, plus this brand-new prompt book we made especially for National Poetry Month…

Throughout National Poetry Month, we hope you’ll share your poems and creations here in the comment box or on Instagram, so we can celebrate with you!

Access the 30 Day Challenge Prompt Book at The Write to Poetry

Photo by Tasha k, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

The post Happy National Poetry Month! appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Sadbook Collections is a (mostly) daily comic that plays primarily at sadbook.substack.com. Drawn (and loved) by Sara Barkat, little Sadbook has a big heart—filled with musings, whimsy, sometimes puzzlement, occasional crises, and always art.

As you might guess, the origin story of The Sadbook Collections began with sorrow. Sadbook was born at a difficult moment, but very quickly took on a vibrant and often happy life. That’s the power of art. It sustains you when you face the abyss. It can transform sorrow and create a certain kind of magic that no one can take away from you.

The intrepid Sadbook has come to the page again in The Sadbook Collections—Book 3. Curious and philosophical as ever, Sadbook is ready to make your day.

Join the party.

Have some cake.

And maybe pick up a copy for yourself or for a friend who needs a smile.

Sara Barkat

About the Illustrator, Sara Barkat

Sara Barkat is the author of the indie excellence awards finalist collection The Shivering Ground & Other Stories and illustrator of The Colour out of Space: A Graphic Novel and The Yellow Wall-Paper: A Graphic Novel. Of course, she also draws Sadbook on a (mostly) daily basis at sadbook.substack.com. You can also visit the artist at sarabarkat.com

Before the Cover, the Comic!

Occasionally the illustrator colors her otherwise minimalist drawings.

But this year, she had not previously colored Rainy Sunny Day.

Somehow that sky and those mountains seemed to beg for the surreal colors of a Sadbook sunrise despite the rain.

Here’s the comic before the cover…

Table of Contents, for the Curious

from the artist: there i am
surprise party
and some good presents
three spools
new beginnings
the song takes you in
talking
the paper bag machine
it snowed!
reading a novel
the peanut butter
movie night
snow falls at night
music brings the world close
winter
hmph
snake!
will o’ the wisp
night fog
announcement
parchment
early in the morning
rubik’s cube
incredible
preparations
not too much trouble
last night
stick angel
forgot my password
small cucumbers
primary sources
into the well
ordeal by roses
the meaning of life
getting ahead
entry
society
redesign
the saga of the pen
mystic
ides
library
off-model
marathon
mrs
tic-tac-toe
kitchen floor
it’s called hope
crafts
copper wheel glass engraving
sun-shadows
out-of-order
bolt
a procession of garlic
true north
stick figures
piano time!
rich people
indian rice
very delicious pasta
recycling
phone stand
a climb
ikebana
festival
goodbye month
hello month!
oleum vitrioli dulce, pt 1
oleum vitrioli dulce, pt 2
the elusive tag sale
walking in the rain
azalea
knitting
the pen tip
900-page-book
inside the raindrop
paternoster elevator
almost sunset
hiding out
out the door
because i am a stick figure
cuneiform
hieroglyphs
printing press
festival
temp
movie theater
rainy sunny day
creek bridge trail
seeing snails
puzzle
on the pier
idea bucket
ride of the beholder
good soup
thorn bush
too much of a good thing
ferris wheel
to the fair
evening walk
party snacks
tangent
sailing is…
last one off the dock
sadbook coaching
hat in the ring
a nice cool drink
bow and arrow
troubles
a dream
another dream
new show
fire truck parade
the squirrel
crows
just hanging out
art store
how to video edit
cricket noises
finished writing
out of the pages
life
new notebook
phone calls
playground
lighthouse
riverside
the pier
leaf on its way
knock, knock
recursion
under the dresser
two bags of cookies
unexpected
candid
treasure
some years ago
to-do
apples
10 seasons
sadbook vs. the brick
the brick (an explanation)
lots of bricks (the conclusion)
pumpkin carving
night flight
leaf pile
the fridge
short nap
a couple more flowers
cleaning the fridge
daylight savings
bitcoin
under the lamp
plans go awry
good intentions
fallen leaves
yummy cereal
cucumber
the particular phone
caterpillar on a leaf
the turtle
suddenly got cold
hot chocolate weather
vacuum
red leaves
candles
three
evening
windy
inside
sadbook pageant
the tree
breaking news
endnotes
origin story

The Whole Series

The post Announcing a New Book! — Sadbook Collections 3 appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Alan Jacobs explains how our understanding of “Paradise Lost” has changed.

We were in London in 2024, and I signed up for a London Open House tour that was right by our hotel. London Open House was a two-weekend event in which buildings not normally available to the public (or tourists) were open. Most, like this walking tour, required pre-registration.

The tour was fascinating. I had walked around these streets scores of times and never knew what had happened here. That rather ornate building around the corner – where Winston Churchill recorded all of his wartime addresses. That townhouse on a side street – the original building for the British Museum. That large stone mansion that backed to St. James’s Park – built by John D. Rockefeller as his London home. The rather nondescript office building across from the tube station – where Ian Fleming worked for MI-6 before he wrote the James Bond stories.

The site where’s Milton’s house stood.

And right there, on a street named Petty France, was a Brutalist building housing the Ministry of Justice (it’s an ugly edifice; we call it the “Darth Vader Building”). At one corner is a small courtyard-like area. And right here, on this site, stood the house where then-blind poet John Milton (1608-1674) lived with his daughters and dictated the entirety of Paradise Lost. The only hint of this is the pub across the street, the one named the Adam and Eve.

Paradise Lost is one of the works that everyone wants to say they’ve read but hope no one asks for details. The fact is that it is one of the great works of English literature, cited by many as equal to or greater than Shakespeare and Chaucer. It’s also one of the greatest poems written in any language.

But as Alan Jacobs points out in Paradise Lost: A Biography, the work is also something else, a kind of cultural bellwether. People’s understanding of the poem has changed rather dramatically over the centuries.

When the poem was first published in 1667, it was not a commercial success, due somewhat to how the publisher managed it. But it did find sales, if not broad critical acclaim. The poem’s greatness was recognized by the poet John Dryden (who had worked for Milton for a time) and later Joseph Addison. Addison especially seems to have promoted the work.

Jacobs provides a brief biography of Milton and an introduction to the work itself, explain its themes and structure. He then examines how the poem has fared over the centuries. Samuel Johnson didn’t like it, seeing it as anti-Anglican. William Blake did like it but thought Milton had been “of the devil’s party” without realizing it. The Romantics embraced it; Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelly, and Percy Shelly all wrote about it. The Victorians recognized it as a great work but, Jacobs says, rather marginalized it.

But it was 20th century literary critics who began to deprecate the poem. Religious critics like Charles Williams (friend of C.S. Lewis and the Inklings) found its theology to be deficient. But it was also Williams and later Lewis who recognized that attacked on Paradise Lost were less about the poem and more about what critics didn’t like about Christianity.

Jacobs continues his discussion by tracing the influence of and references to the poem in operas, verse plays, fantasy literature, and even video games. It’s a comprehensive account of how the poem has fared since Milton recited it to his daughters in the early 1660s.

Alan Jacobs

Jacobs is the Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program at Baymor University. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Alabama and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia. He’s taught at Baylor since 2013; prior to that, he taught at Wheaton College in Illinois for 29 years. Jacobs has published numerous books, including two critical editions of W.D. Auden’s works, The Narnian: The Imagination of C.S. Lewis, A Theology of Reading, a biography of The Book of Common Prayer, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds.

That the biography suggests is that Paradise Lost has served as something of a cultural mirror. The response to and assessments of it over the centuries often tells us more about the people writing about it and the times they lived in. Like many great works of literature, Paradise Lost serves as a cultural mirror, often telling us more about ourselves than what it’s actually about.

Photo by James Bentley, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Alan Jacobs Writes a Biography of “Paradise Lost” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Marjorie Maddox brings a quiet poetic eye to the stuff of life

Watching kites in the sky. Bounding on a bed. A boy going fishing. Washing clothes. A housemaid making beds at a motel. Mowing a lawn. Adopting kittens. Veterans marching in a Memorial Day parade.

Common, familiar activities and events. These are the kinds of things we do in our lives and work that become part of the background of daily life. We take them for granted. We smile at the memory. But politics and foreign policy and newspaper headlines and online viral sensations soon crowd them out. We pay more attention to our smartphones than to the real life happening around us. If we happen to look up and notice, we immediately start to think about new content for Instagram or TikTok.

In a very quiet and gentle way, poet Marjorie Maddox says, look around. Her latest collection, Hover Here: Poems, should probably bear that as a subtitle. She doesn’t speak with loud or demanding images and words. That’s not her style, not to mention that loud and demanding soon crowds out understanding and reflection.

Turn the phone off. Watch. Observe. See what’s happening around you, like a friend struggling with grief.

Insomnia/Somnolence

Her husband dead, my friend can’t sleep;
another’s lost his wife and naps
around the clock. An old house weeps

with all it sees, what it can’t keep
from slipping through the floorboard cracks
to groan, “Your loved one’s dead. Don’t sleep

a second with a grief that keeps
repeating when you wake, the trap
of loss and clocks.” An old house weeps,

counts days and nights by sighs that leap
ahead and back, recurring map
to somnolence. My friends, we sleep

too much to stave off haunting grief
that’s always home. And when awake:
the house won’t rest, our dead won’t sleep,

regret or joy still can’t release
us from our weeping for the past:
the husband/wife, the friend. Asleep/
awake: time’s house, love’s clock, still creaks.

Maddox turns her gentle eye to more than daily life. One of the most moving poems in the collection is “The Rescue Mission of Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus.” It’s a three-part poem in which Maddox tells stories of children trying to flee the Holocaust. One boy is saved because a chosen one gets sick and can’t travel. A group of children are examined to select 25 to make the journey. And then the children board a ship that takes them to safety, leaving behind families and lives. The stories aren’t sensationalized; Maddox tells them simply and clearly. All I can say is bring tissues.

Marjorie Maddox

Maddox is the author of 18 poetry collections, including Nightrider to Edinburgh (1986); Body Parts (1999); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 and republished by Wipf and Stock Publishers); Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006); Local News from Someplace Else (2013); Perpendicular as I (1999 and 2013); True, False, None of the Above (2018); Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (2022), and Begin with a Question (2022). She is the co-author of the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and author of two children’s books, including Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009). She is also a professor emerita of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

Hover Here is a poetic gem. The poems sit there quietly, waiting to be read. They take their turn. They don’t demand; they simply ask you to sit with them and watch. And learn.

Related:

Marjorie Maddox and Seeing Things

Marjorie Maddox Hafer: Poetry, Art, and Spelling

Photo by Rhett Maxwell, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Tolkien wrote about a controversy over a road in Oxford

We’ve visited Oxford during most of our trips to England. We take the tube to Paddington Station and then a train to Oxford. The trip takes about an hour. We’d visit various colleges, the Sheldonian, Blackwell’s Bookstore, the covered market, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Bodleian Library. It’s an easy day trip from London.

Christ College (which, if you’ve seen the Harry Potter movies, includes the dining hall) faces a meadow. It’s almost a shock to see a large tract of undeveloped land right by the bustle of traffic and tour groups. It’s quiet, peaceful, and rather beautiful.

What I didn’t know until I read The Bovadium Fragments by J.R.R. Tolkien, was that for more than two decades, Oxford authorities almost ran a road through the middle of it.

The Bovadium Fragments is unlike anything you’ve seen written by Tolkien. It’s relatively short, pulled and edited from the Tolkien papers at the Bodleian Library by Tolkien’s son Christopher. It has never been published, although Tolkien had apparently considered a magazine to approach. It’s in (literally) three fragments.

The story that exists in these fragments is about an archaeological investigation of two ancient but related cultures and an attempted translation of the language of one of the cultures (the other was considered hopeless). The first fragment is a poem and some supporting text – all in Latin. The second fragment translates that into English, and then it continues a story. The third fragment is a short continuation of the story, using both Latin and English.

As you read through Tolkien’s fragments, you begin to understand what he’s doing. He’s satirizing the proposal then under discussion for a road through the Christ Church meadow, one he believed was turning the automobile into a religious cult. While he was at it, he was also lampooning archaeologists and how farfetched some speculations could be.

Christopher Tolkien

The text includes editorial notes, presumably by Christopher Tolkien, but what really ties the work together is a long essay by the general editor, Richard Ovenden, explaining “The Origin of Bovadium.” Ovenden, the Bodleian Librarian, puts the fragments into their historical context, how Oxford developed as a center for automobile production (who knew?), how the city struggled with traffic problems, and how a 1947 proposal for a road through the meadow was argued, debated, and fought over until it was finally killed in 1971.

The surprise is to see that Tolkien, the Oxford professor and creator of Middle Earth, felt passionate enough about the issue that he played with a possible article to respond. But it’s not a surprise to see how he framed that response – creating a story about another world (and partially using Latin to do it).

The Bovadium Fragments is a curiosity, something that Tolkien fans will love because it’s Tolkien. But it’s also about Oxford and its 20th century history, its role in automobile production, and the inevitable conflict that ensured with academia.

Ovenden is also the co-editor of The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien. A collection of 10 essays introduced by co-editor Catherine McIlwaine, the authors include academics, Tolkien scholars, and Priscilla Tolkien, Christopher’s sister. Each essay describes Christopher’s scholarly work as well as his contribution to his father’s literary estate. The work Chrstopher did for his father may be one of the most remarkable literary partnerships ever, and the essays describe it.

Related:

Editor of the Legendarium: Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020).

Photo by Sean McGrath, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Filling in the spaces about my family heritage took work.

When I was writing my historical novel Brookhaven, I initially relied upon two main sources – the records of births and deaths in the old family Bible, and the charts and genealogical lines in the Family Search web site.

My ancestors in Mississippi served as the approximate inspiration for the McClure family in the novel. I borrowed many of the first names outright from the family Bible. I borrowed one name wholesale, to remind me of what I almost missed.

The Bible records mentioned the death of a Jarvis Seale in 1862. It didn’t mention birth, marriage, or anything else about the man. Some research in Family Search told me who he was – the husband of a great-great aunt. He was the only in-law included in the Bible records. The Family Search information only had the relationship reference and date of death. I still didn’t know what my great-grandfather had included him when others had been left out. Another web site, Find-A-Grave, showed his monument stone in a small-town cemetery in north Texas, which really made no sense.

I found a partial answer when I was reading a history of Civil War battles. Jarvis Seale had died on April 6, 1862, the first day of the two-day Battle of Shiloh. But how did his grave end up in north Texas?

I knew I’d gone down a rabbit hole, but something suggested this might be important for the novel I was writing. So, I went digging on the web, in books, and articles. And I found the answer.

The Confederate dead at Shiloh were buried in nine mass graves, which nothing to indicate who was in what grave. Seale was the first (but not the last) of the extended family to die in battle. He left a widow with five children. His oldest daughter would eventually marry and move to north Texas, and she was the one who had erected a monument stone to her father decades after his death. This was not uncommon for families whose loved ones died in battle and were buried in mass graves.

This also partially explained his reference in the family Bible. My great-grandfather Samuel, who wrote all of the entries, most likely wanted to remember the brother-in-law lying almost forgotten in some unraked mass grave at Shiloh.

Going down that rabbit hole taught me what a genealogical chart or entry in the family Bible never could. It taught me about motivations, and feeling, and a few of the emotions swirling around that great cataclysm of American history.

Similar deep dives into tiny aspects of history taught me other things as well. I’ve organized them as seven tips.

A page of records in the family Bible

#1 Researching family heritage isn’t the same as researching genealogy. Genealogy gives dates and names and shows family linkage. Heritage provides the context and is far more difficult to understand. For a historical novel, heritage explains what people ate, what they used for amusement, how they thought about family and community, what their homes were like, and how they lived day-to-day.

#2 But genealogy can help a lot. When I look at my own personal genealogy chart on Family Search, I see my ancestors’ names spread out like a fan. I see how first names are often repeated down through generations. And I find puzzles, like why a young man of 19 would move from Savannah, Georgia in 1820 to Pike County, Mississippi. (I learned the answer: Alabama and Mississippi were the new frontiers, lands of opportunity for people looking to create a new life.)

#3 Be prepared to delve into obscurity. Some of the topics I researched for my novel included disease in Civil War prisons, when lumber manufacturing became big business in Mississippi, how spies operated in the Civil War, women’s fashions in 1915, and the physical layouts of one of Boston’s oldest churches and one of Brookhaven, Mississippi’s smallest.

#4 Amazon and other book sites can be your friend. Many times, I turned to Amazon, Alibris, and Google to find long-out-of-print books. One particular gem I found was an oversized collection of photographs of how Mississippians lived during the Civil War and after. Not only could I read the accompanying texts, but I could also see people and places.

#5 Be available and helpful to relatives working on genealogy. I know how I came to possess the Young family Bible – my father gave it to me, as his father had given it to him. But my grandfather wasn’t the oldest son; he was the youngest. And from various genealogy online discussion boards, I discovered there was still simmering resentment that the Bible had never been given to the oldest of my grandfather’s brothers.

I wasn’t about to surrender the Bible, but I did photograph all of the eight pages of family records and provide them to another family member doing research. That opened doors – and suddenly I learned about family stories about the Civil War I’d never heard before.

The burning the Brookhaven train station by Union troops (Harper’s Weekly)

#6 Don’t trust family stories. A story about my great-grandfather and what he did in the Civil War had been passed from my grandfather to my father and then to me. It was about a boy too young to serve in the war who enlisted anyway and had to walk home from Virginia when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. It turned out to be a complete fabrication. (Full disclosure: I held on to it to form the heart of Brookhaven.) My father also told me that we came from a family of shopkeepers and had never owned slaves. My grandfather had been a shopkeeper, but he was born on the family cotton plantation. I learned the truth from old U.S. Census records. We all tell family stories, but when it comes to writing a novel or history about them, always verify.

#7 Don’t forget two helpful aids – fiction and poetry. The post-Civil War era saw an explosion of literature about the war – memoirs, biographies, battle accounts, novels, short stories, and poetry. They can teach you what history books often leave out – individual stories of how people fought the war, survived it, and started new lives. Some of the best-known American poems and stories are about the Civil War – think of Walt Whitman writing the lines “O, captain,! My captain! or Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Louisa May Alcott wrote about the time she spent in a soldier’s hospital in Washington, D.C. E.L. Doctorow wrote a novel about Sherman’s march through Georgia. Historian Shelby Foote wrote one about the Battle of Shiloh. Fiction and poetry can give you insights that history texts can’t.

I didn’t expect one lesson of writing a historical novel: humility. The more I read and researched, the more I understood how people had experienced, survived, and sometimes even flourished the most extreme of conditions. The Civil War is but one example. I realized what so many of my ancestors had gone through, and just how much I had to be thankful for.

Photo by Diego Torres Silvestre, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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This month’s theme is Letters, so it feels apt to have a tea date with Erin Murphy’s What Did You Do Last Week?.

Near the end of the poem (number five in her list), this line appears:

“I wrote this poem.”

It’s not clear, nor does it need to be, who Murphy is writing this poem for. The poem is not addressed to anyone in particular. But that doesn’t stop you from writing your poem as if it’s to someone in particular. Grandma. Sister. Friend. Old boss. Whoever!

Your Pour

Get your favorite steep (or brew) and join us in writing a letter poem that utilizes the list technique Murphy uses in her poem. In your letter poem, communicate what you did last week, as Murphy does. Of course, you can take some liberties to tie things all together. Who will you write your letter poem to?

(Note: Not all list poems actually number their lists. Murphy’s does. Which is rather fun!)

Looking for more inspiring lines? Check out Every Day Poems!

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It is 6 a.m., and I have been trying to sleep since 4 a.m.

But that is not the kind of trying I am talking about.

I am talking about the kind of trying that might mean looking at things in a different light. Like the way I took these photos of a Japanese tea set at night.

I am also talking about the kind of trying that involves risk. The risk of being a beginner and putting something out there in any case, even if we feel vulnerable, or “not enough.”

Like this little poem* I wrote in French, for a prompt at a French site …

Dans la nuit
je rêve de thé noir,
doux et velouté
et plein de saveurs riches
comme ce soir.

It is trés (very) simple. Not what I might be capable of in English with the same amount of trying. Must everything we do be perfect? If so, we will not be free to try. To play (jouer). And our creative lives will suffer.

What could we otherwise create—what roses grant the world—if we let ourselves play (si nous nous laissons jouer)?

Yesterday, for the first time, I understood that Walt Whitman was playing in “Song of Myself.” Even being amusing! How unexpected from dear old Walt. Or is it that we ourselves forget to play as we read, as we receive? As if all poetry from the “greats” is (and was) serious business only.

In making my way in another language, I feel the risk of trying beyond myself. It is not easy. I often feel a sense of le dépaysement (being “out of my country” or outside my ease, off my familiar paths). It can feel like a leap into thin air.

What helps us navigate? What grants us freedom? To play, to be? Without fear? Or maybe just with courage, even if we are afraid? Bringing something along that grounds us can help. For me it’s tea.

There is also the comfort of memory, and of those who came before, lighting our way.

The lamp whose light played upon my Japanese tea set was my mother’s. It’s one of the many small things I brought into my home after she passed away in October, as a way to remember and honor the beautiful life she built in a humble place. Everything she did was beautiful, despite how little she had and the struggles (la luttes) she faced.

How better to honor her, really, than to try (essayer) to build the beautiful, despite mes propres luttes (my own struggles) and the vagaries of the larger world.

For you, maman, I play.

Photo by planetMitch aunger, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

See all Words to Travel By posts…

Poem translation

In the night
I dream of black tea,
sweet and velvety
and full of rich flavors
like this eve.

Poetry Prompt

Write a poem that begins “in the night,” Or, go French and try “dans la nuit.” What might you find in the velvet dark?

The post Learning by Poetry: Dans la Nuit appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Seth Weick lives, and relives, experience in the Texas Panhandle.

We lived in Texas for five years. My job had me traveling all over the United States, but our home was in Houston. Texas is a big state, so we became familiar with only parts of it – southeast Texas, East Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, the border area near McAllen, and South Padre Island. I had to travel several times to West Texas, flying into Midland and then traipsing all over the Permian Basin oil country to write stories. Later I would become familiar with the Hill Country southwest of San Antonio.

One area I never visited was the Panhandle. I’d read about it, intrigued by an eccentric millionaire named Stanley Marsh 3 (not the third) who’d had the Cadillac Ranch sculpture erected along Route 66 near Amarillo. It’s High Plains country. Wheat is grown there, as are corn, soybeans, and cotton. Historically, it’s been a major source of natural gas.

Its geography and people form the backdrop of Call Out Coyote: Poems, the new (and first) poetry collection by Seth Wieck. I don’t say this lightly, but this collection is a marvel of language and love for a geography and its people. I was enraptured.

A son strings barbed wire with his father in a poem that sound lie the opening of the Book of Genesis. Crops are named in another. A boy finding an arrowhead in the riverbed becomes a meditation on time. Childhood scars are remembered. A rattlesnake is discovered eating a rabbit. A local character who smokes Pall Malls, drives an El Camino, and chats with friends at the local garage meets his end at a train crossing. A prison inmate reads the Psalms in the King James Version of the Bible. Friday night high school football is almost a religion.

And then Wieck leaps to a painting by Jean-Francoise Millet, housed in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, and figuratively transports it to the Panhandle.

L’Angelus (after Millet)

The air distends, diffusing light and sound.
Our vespers announced ion bellsong. Crows rise
in timorous peal of wingflap, feather-
flushed messengers, evangels and vandals.

Our heads lean in, prayer prone, twin candle-
flames bent on breath—whence it comes—what breather
gutters our thoughts, then on throatwicks, gives words rise:
According to thy word. A shaped sound, round

as potatoes. Blind tubers die but don’t die
only sprout eyes and live their lives beneath the ground.
The same bent back which forks potatoes for the basket
will spade the hole for the casket of a child.

One of the most arresting poems in the collection is “Ulysses Arrives in Amarillo,” a 20-page mini-epic that tells the story of how Ulysses (yes, that Ulysses from The Odyssey) convinces the farmer Amos to sell his land to a real estate developer. How Wieck mixes Greek mythology and contemporary agriculture is a wonder. And “Mother’s Day Card at the Hundred-and-First Meridian” is one of the most beautiful contemporary loves poems that I’ve read.

Seth Wieck

Wieck grew up on a farm in Texas. He received a B.A. degree in English from West Texas A&M University and an MFA degree from the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He’s been a farmer, butcher, dishwasher, technical writer, copywriter, teacher, construction worker, and real estate appraiser. His poems have appeared in such publications as New Verse Review, Texas Poetry Assignment, Local Culture, Reformed Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, Fathom Magazine, among many others. She serves as a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic, and he’s also published short fiction and essays. He lives in Amarillo, Texas, with his family.

The cover and inside illustrations are by Jack Baumgartner, a pleasnt surprise because I’ve followed and admired his work for years. He’s a farmer, woodworker, artist, illustrator, musician, and puppeteer. His studio work can be found at The School for the Transfer of Energy, and he lives with his family on a farm near Wichita, Kansas.

Call Out Coyote is history, geography, culture, agriculture, people, and family. It is a love and respect for a place where one grew up and still lives. It’s an acknowledgement of hos geography and people shape each other. And it’s an outstanding poetry collection.

Photo by Amy Aletheia Cahill, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Susan Rooke explores the poetry of memory and memories.

Just recently, for some unknown and unprompted reason, a memory flashed from when I was eight or nine years old. I was visiting my grandmother in Shreveport for a summer week. I was sitting on the floor of her living room in the small frame house built by my grandfather and father. The front door opened, I looked up, and there stood what looked a younger version of my Aunt Rubye. I stared. She was equally taken aback; she was seeing the protective older brother she knew as a child.

The entrance of my grandmother from the kitchen broke the spell. She introduced us. It was my Aunt Ruth, barely if ever mentioned by my father. They hadn’t spoken in almost 25 years, and they wouldn’t for almost another 20, when she was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.

My memory had been shaped and created by something that had happened some 15 years before that surprise meeting, and it would open into an extended story of how a brother and sister had fallen out. I would come to understand that every memory was its own story, and it didn’t have to be a story I was personally part of until that front door opened.

What likely put me in mind of that memory was A Room Full of Ghosts: Poems of Remembering, the 2025 collection by Susan Rooke. I had just finished reading it the day before the memory surfaced. Rooke recalls and explores memories, and not only from childhood. One’s memory can often be imperfect, as Rooke understands in her poems. Memory can amplify and distort, emphasize the good or the bad (or both), return you to a life that may or may not existed, or existed the way you remember. We can use memory to defend or protect, too.

Where do Rooke’s memories go? Try gar fishing in the Aransas River, a visit to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a row of Chinese and Thai restaurants, father’s silk pajamas, a trip to Ecuador, and reading the newspaper’s obituary page. She includes a rather crazy trip (in a Cadillac) with her mother to visit cemeteries across Texas, and scenes from her own marriage, like a surprise vacation her husband somehow pulled off.

Another in a List of Things I Miss

Those early days of transformation, when
you and I could conjure any future together, spinning
dreamsilk from sunlight shining through a window.
Like that glorious vacation you contrived for us,
the penthouse suite larger than our home,
the vast rooms and antique furnishings,
the parquet floors, the Steuben vases
spilling fragrant lilies, the stately grand piano
with its ivory promenade of untouched keys.
Neither of us played. The best we could manage
was to admire it. And when we strolled out

to the balcony, we gazed through raindrops upon
the mud-colored Mississippi, the tugs and barges,
while the city’s jazzy heart thumped twenty-seven floors
below us. On that humid, cloudy day, we marveled
at the heights we’d reached, the views such
heights afforded, our fortunate youth. It made me
dizzy to look down, and I had to back away,
fearful of a fall, but you stayed, broad hands steady
on the railing, staring downriver to the water/sky
horizon, a distant greyish smear I knew we’d reach
someday, but couldn’t bear to see face-on.

Tooke also writes what it means to grow up a minority Catholic in a largely Protestant community; I easily get that one, having grown up a minority Protestant in a largely Catholic city. She describes a house in Korea heated by charcoal briquettes below the structure, and a train ride in the Andes. She remembers her grandfather listening to the farm report on the radio.

Susan Rooke

Rooke has previously published several works of fiction and one poetry collection, Of Stars & Smoke: poems for the dark wane of the year. Her poems have been published in such literary journals, magazines and newspapers as Bellowing Ark, The Christian Science Monitor, Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, Westward Quarterly, and more. She’s also a photographer. She lives with her family in central Texas.

William Faulkner once observed that “the past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” A Room Full of Ghosts bears witness to that truth. It will also prompt you to consider your own memories and the impact the past has had on your life.

Photo by M’s photography, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Susan Rooke and “A Room Full of Ghosts” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Terpsichore was, according to Apollonius of Rhodes, the mother of the sirens. Not these sirens, who sound suspiciously like the kind of siren no driver ever relishes hearing:

Rather, Terpischore had to raise these sirens (and one wonders what they did to get an endless timeout on that island! Maybe it was the hair-pulling that the bestiary caught in action?):

No matter. Terpischore had an otherwise delightful life being the goddess of dance and chorus. For this, she got to hold a lyre (and play it, of course).

Now, it’s not every goddess who gets an opera prologue in her name. (Summary from Wikipedia: “Erato, muse of lyric poetry, and her followers, call on Apollo, who descends from heaven with some of the Muses. They summon Terpsicore, who gives a demonstration of the power of dance, illustrating diverse emotions through use of movement. Solo singers and chorus join together to praise the virtuous deeds of wise men that are going to be celebrated in the ensuing opera.”)

Thank you, Handel.

Or, you could take Rita Hayworth’s musical viewpoint on Terpsichore, “I put the ants in the dancers’ pants.” (Hmm, maybe the sirens got their mischief from Mom?)

Poetry Prompt

Explore inspiration through movement, the physicality of writing. Begin by writing a letter to someone, however brief. Then craft a poem about the experience. Consider tucking something in about the sirens or their mother Terpsichore, if you can find a way.

Photo by Hoai Thanh, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

The post Poetry Prompt: Meet Your Muse Terpsichore appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

I can’t recall when it began, but some years back, I discovered myself thinking of things that hadn’t been even a small blip on my radar when I was younger. I know it started before I retired. One morning, I woke up, fixed my breakfast, and started reading the obituary page in the newspaper. Regularly. Like, every day. I wouldn’t read each entry, but I’d scan the names, looking for people I might now or had heard of.

Eventually I started finding names I knew. People I had worked with. Former executives I’d written speeches for. People I knew from church. It was unsettling. I remember my mother, who for as long as I could remember had faithfully attended her annual high school class reunion. She finally stopped, explaining quietly that only three people were left.

As you move into old age, you receive regular reminders of your own mortality, and not only from newspaper obituaries. As poet Dave Brown has discovered and written in I Don’t Usually, But, things that were never paid much attention to before take on meaning. For me, it’s art, family history, and a few other subjects. For Brown, it’s watching birds. And turtles being hatched on the beach. Memories of a grandmother and childhood. The things he would have liked to tell his mother. Watching the early morning light coming through the window. The importance of listening. Walking in a wildlife preserve.

Brown has also had the experience of opening the newspaper and discovering the passing of another friend.

Thanksgiving

It seems to happen a lot these days,
I wake up and read that another
fellow traveler has left this world.

It comes with being a certain age, I guess.
You would think I’d get used to it
but I never do, I never do.

Parting is not a sweet sorrow.
The sweetness of memory sustains
but never erases the pain.

The phone calls stop:
you miss his guitar, the B-3 is quiet,
her bass no longer finds a groove.

We say goodbye again and again, never to be the same.
Grateful, yes, thankful, to be sure,
Yet the weight of grief remains.

It happens more often these days
to those of us of a certain age.
We say goodbye, and tears fall.

We wipe our eyes,
remember in silence
and are thankful

that when the sun
rises in the morning
we get to see it.

Dave Brown

I Don’t Usually But is a collection of poems, but Brown also includes a few reflections and some startingly beautiful photographs (one of which appears on the cover). He writes in a straightforward, narrative style; these poems are easily accessible and easy to read. And connect with.

Brown is a writer, pastor, and musician, and he served as the pastor of Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington. He studied at both Whitworth University and Princeton Theological Seminary. He’s a founder of Blues Vespers, which has brought blues, poetry and reflection to Tacoma for almost three decades.

As the poems demonstrate, Brown’s focus on the thoughts of being “a certain age” are about gratitude and thankfulness. No one can stop the clock; resistance is futile, so we might as well enjoy it and experience the wonder..

Photo by Shaun Derry, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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What I knew about love at fourteen, I learned from Shakespeare. Love, especially young love, often ended badly. The only classes I cared about in school were Speech, Debate, and Drama. My first love, the handsomest boy I had ever seen in real life, sat behind me in Algebra. His mere presence electrified and distracted me so thoroughly that I had to repeat the class. His birthday was March 15, the Ides of March, which added to his allure. I was young for my class, fifteen months younger than he. When he turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, he dumped me for a cheerleader from a neighboring school who was allowed to ride around in cars with boys. One never knows when a line long buried will rise from memory at an opportune moment. Shakespeare did not let me down.

Morning on my Deck in the New Regime

I see a chap I know, walking with two friends
on the boardwalk dividing my tall house
from beach below, and hear invoked with flourish,
the Bard of Avon’s holy name. Another fellow
proffers forth a fragment of a speech:
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men
I look then down, wave, and bellow so:
cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,

after which three walkers in unison unleash
this citation of the fateful foul decree:
Julius Caesar, Scene 0ne, Act Three.
I treasure then this moment of delight
in bardic fellowship with passersby,
before my shroud of dread turns day to night.

—Donna Hilbert, first published in ONE ART: a Journal of Poetry

Where I live in Southern California, winters are generally mild, but spring still thrills us with bursts of light and new life. I like Dickinson’s notion that March’s shoes are purple. My favorite walking shoes are purple too.

Here is an excerpt from a March poem by Emily Dickinson:

We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,

—Emily Dickinson, excerpted from We like March, his shoes are purple

Here are the first few lines from William Wordsworth’s “Written in March”

The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the Strongest;

—William Wordsworth, excerpted from Written in March

Vernal Equinox

O to see the first day
of spring is a miracle.

My friend recounts
the story of new sight
in her blind eye: renewal

on a beam of light
on this day past the night
of equal light.

O to walk un-blinkered
into the shimmer
of Daffodil and Lily,

see the silverfish dart
from its winter crevice.

—Donna Hilbert, from an earlier version in the now out of print The Green Season, 2009

Your Turn

Albert Einstein said, “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.” How do you chose to live? What is going on in your March world? I find rebirth in spring to be a miracle. And love, at any age, is a kind of miracle too. What do you think? Have you a spring miracle?

Post and post images by Donna Hilbert. Featured image by Garry Knight, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Poems used with permission.

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Emily Patterson writes of the realities and blessings of motherhood

In her 2022 collection, So Much Tending Remains, poet Emily Patterson reflected on the first two years of her daughter’s life. In her new collection, The Birth of Undoing, she’s written something of a prequel, what came before those first two years.

Sitting in the waiting room at the fertility clinic, surprised “you knew the rules before you ever walked in” (don’t look at women leaving; keep accidental eye contact brief; don’t bring a toddler with you). The ultrasounds. Imagining what the child looks like at eleven weeks. The physical discomfort (Patterson draws a “self-portrait as not the giantess”), the beginnings of labor. Then she considers those first hours after birth.

In a room with white walls,

white floor speckled like an egg,
white sheets: you are hours old

and wrapped in a white blanket,
waking every hour to eat.

The door to our room, weighted
and thick, separates us from the rest

of the ward. Our only visitors:
nurses, midwives, and the kind

social worker, here to tell me
the signs of more than baby blues.

I nod, but my eyes stray to you.
I am all jubilance, distracted

by sleepless joy. Later, as the days
and nights blur, I’ll remember

her words––warm as the first sip
of tea, tasting of a courage

both bitter and honeyed.

Patterson’s reflections continue after the birth through the first early months. She describes childcare, attending a baby shower, dealing with postpartum depression, a visit to the playground, and taking a hike with her husband and watching the baby in the carrier on his back.

Emily Patterson

Then the prequel changes into something of a sequel, picking up where So Much Tending Remains leaves off. The family emerges from the pandemic lockdown. They go to the beach, experiencing the ocean. They explore a bog with its marsh marigolds. She remembers her grandmother and what she learned. She watches her daughter dance and watches Sesame Street with her. She sees her daughter developing her own personality. She comforts her child who has a nightmare while she’s still sleeping. Her daughter begins pre-school.

It all sounds very ordinary, very “much to be expected.” And yet, Patterson brings a tenderness and a discerning eye to the ordinary, and we begin to realize just how extraordinary all of this is.

Patterson has published three previous collections, So Much Tending Remains (2022), To Bend and to Braid (2023), and Haiku at 5:38 A.M. (2024). Her work has been published by numerous literary journals and magazines, including Rust & Moth, Whale Road Review, North American Review, CALYX, and many others. She received a B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

The Birth of Undoing takes what seems commonplace and explains that it’s anything but that. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish. Yet Patterson does exactly that in poem after poem. You realize that we’re all very much alike, and we are very much unique.

Related

Emily Paterson and So Much Tending Remains

Emily Patterson and Haiku at 5:38 A.M.

Thin Starlight: Interview with Emily Jean Patterson

Photo by naitokz, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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When I read Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in high school, I had no idea that I was not only reading one of his epic poems; I was also reading a fictionalized account of some of my own ancestry and history.

Yes, I knew I had some French ancestry on my mother’s side, sitting side by side with some German as well. I didn’t know that the German had arrived relatively late, in the mid-nineteenth century, while the French had been there more than a century earlier. And I didn’t know that most of that French had come from Canada, in the maritime provinces collectively called Acadia. A tiny handful of my mother’s French ancestors had come directly from France.

Evangeline, a monument to Acadians in St. Martinsville, La., via Wikipedia

I didn’t know that, at college football games, when I chanted “Hot boudin! Cold coosh coosh! Come on Tigers, poosh, poosh, poosh,” I was using words from my own ancestry. When I read A Cajun Night Before Christmas to my children, I never thought to ask why I could imitate the Cajun accent so well.

Then, a few years ago, after searching through the Family Search web site, I saw my extended my family tree. I saw names on my mother’s side that I’d never heard before. Zeringue. Charbonnet. Madere. Cuvillier. Clement. Picou. Borne. Bernody. St. Amant. I went to elementary and secondary school with classmates who had those names. I realized that I wasn’t one-fourth Creole French, descended from the French Creoles who settled Louisiana. I was one-fourth Cajun French. And those classmates could have been relatives.

Sacre! (An abbreviated form of “Sacrebleu,” or “Good heavens.)

The Acadians, corrupted to “Cajuns,” began arriving in Louisiana after 1755. War had been brewing between Britain and France, and the British, who had controlled Acadia for more 40 years, wanted absolute allegiance, defined as an oath of loyalty and abandonment of the Catholic faith. The Acadians said no. Expulsion followed. Some were able to return to France. Others were dispersed in other British territories. A sizeable group ended up in Louisiana, then a French colony but coming under Spanish control in 1763.

A map the German Coast, 1775, via Wikipedia

They settled in south central Louisiana, with its rivers, streams, and bayous. Most clustered in areas where towns like Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, Kaplan, Houma, and Thibodeaux sprung up. Some lived near what was called the German Coast – a stretch of land along the Mississippi River west of New Orleans settled by German colonists in the 1720s. (Part of it would give way to big sugar plantations and eventually petrochemical plants.) In towns like Des Allemands (“The Germans”), Edgard, and Reserve, Acadians met and mingled with descendants of the original Germans. That’s how Jean Adam Jacob met and married Marie Celetine Charbonnet and produced my grandfather, Joseph Edward Jacob. That’s how French-speaking Germans and Cajun French fused in my ancestry.

My mother was born and grew up in New Orleans, specifically the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. I can vaguely remember her still referring to sidewalks as “banquettes;” she adopted the Anglicized “sidewalk” after we moved to one of New Orleans’ Americanized suburbs. I use the term “Americanized” loosely; our neighborhood of standard three-bedroom ranch homes was a veritable melting pot, with names reflecting English, Irish, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Czech backgrounds. The O’Donnells lived next door. The Aucoins , the Viennes, and the Barousses lived across the street. The family from Guatemala lived four houses down. All of these names, like those in my schools, were “normal.” You learned to pronounce them early, and you didn’t think any of them were “strange” or “foreign.”

We also often ate what I now understand to be Cajun-influenced food. Shrimp and crawfish etouffee. Shrimp Jambalaya. Boiled seafood boiled with ear of corn. In college, we’d often drive from Baton Rouge twenty miles south to a restaurant in what I now realize was the German Coast. There was no menu. Long picnic tables were covered in newspaper, on which servers dumped boiled crab, shrimp, and crawfish. The beverage of choice was usually a 20-ounce beer, served in a frosted mug. You ate, and drank, your fill. Drivers were allowed one beer only and could not participate in chug-a-lug contests.

When I reread Longfellow’s Evangeline, half a century after the original reading, I now knew I was reading a romanticized version of where many of my ancestors had come from. This had happened to my ancestors – expelled from prosperous lands they knew, forced into exile, finding their way to what must have often seemed like a hostile physical environment (heat and humidity, not to mention alligators), and still being resilient enough to rebuild their lives.

Photo by Barbara W, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Rhina Espaillat looks in the mirror and sees all of us.

Poetry is often associated with the young. We think of the fire of the Romantics, or the young T.S. Eliot upending traditional poetry with modernism with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But even younger poets age, banking the fire and passion as they become tempered by experience and understanding.

Two of my favorite contemporary poets are Luci Shaw (1928-2025) and Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932). It’s something of a coincidence, or perhaps it isn’t, that both reached their 90s. Shaw died last December, just shy of her 95th birthday. Espaillat tuns 94 this year. Theirs is not the poetry of youth but instead the poetry of long lives lived – and lived well. It’s also the poetry of understanding and affection for people, in all our wild and crazy humanity.

For Instance, the new poetry collection by Espaillat, demonstrates this understanding and affection. She tells stories, often jarring and difficult to read. Not all love stories end well. Not all families are Instagram-perfect. People get sick. Accidents happen. Espaillat understands that we live in a broken world, that humanity has always lived in a broken world. But her poems suggest that, despite the brokenness, we can continue to live our lives in hope.

I’m a couple of decades or so younger than Espaillat, but even I can see myself in this poem.

Encounter

Do I know you? You’re wearing my nightgown,
brushing your horsey teeth in time with me.
We wash out faces, lay our towels down,
put on our glasses, all in synchrony.
No, I don’t know you, though I trust your face:
it has the look of truth, like whole grain bread.
But such a sober dish! No flair, no grace.
Why not champagne and petits-fours instead?
Why are you here? Who sent you here to spy
on my ablutions, this most private hour,
creases flanking your nose, each pouchy eye
riveting mine with some malefic power?
What does an aging monkey want with one
as young and lively as the rising sun?

We know what’s happening. She’s looking in a mirror as she prepared for the day. Who is this old, aging stranger staring back at us? What are they doing here? We’re a rising sun, not some picture of the world at dusk.

Rhina Espaillat

The collection includes love poems, poems of faith, stories of youth and old age, and a remarkable collection of tales grouped under the heading “The Storyteller’s Hour” that run the gamut of experiences. She includes poems about death, which is, after all, a part of life. She plumbs the questions asked by a child, as deep as any philosopher’s or theologians and considers those death leaves behind, the widows and widowers and parents who’ve lost children. A few of the poems are paired with their Spanish versions, reflecting Espaillat’s heritage (born in the Dominican Republic) and her translations of her own works and those by other poets.

Espaillat is the author of 12 books of poetry, short stories, and essays, and three poetry chapbooks. She’s received numerous awards for her poetry and translations, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost Award, and others. Her poetry translations have included works by Richard Wilbur and Robert Frost, translated into Spanish. She is also active with the Powow River Poets, a literary group she founded in 1992.

For Instance is a remarkable collection by a poet sharing what she knows of life. And she knows much. Reading it is looking into a mirror and realizing you’re looking at yourself. Or soon will be.

Related:

Rhina Espaillat and And After All.

Photo by Dziunka DBK, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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A Simile Is a Literary Device

When you write using a simile, you write to compare…

This is like that.

That is as this.

A simile can be used to comic effect. Think Shakespeare’s line, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Or, take the fun French idiom to describe someone’s handwriting: You “write like a cat”.

A simile can, conversely, be used in a lovely way. “Fair as a star…” says Wordsworth, in praise of his Lucy. And, on a day he discovered beauty that would stay with him: “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”

Poetry Prompt

Make a list of things that fit a category you want to consider in your poem: something lovely, or lonely, or surprising, or mysterious.

For example, if you choose the category of “mysterious,” you might list words such as:

• lantern
• unicorn
• ship
• ghost
• old house

Then you’d consider which of these might work in a mysterious poem.

For example, here’s a quick poem that compares the night to a lantern for mysterious effect.

The night like a lantern
came slowly to me,
speaking my name
in hushed tones
in soft flame.

So choose a category, make your list, and use “like” or “as” in your poem to compare one thing to another from your list.

Photo by Anna Tsukanova, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

Related…

More poetry terms
More Shakespeare
More Wordsworth

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I wasn’t quite prepared for Then Flew My Caw Away: Poems, the recently published collection by Mary Meriam. Many of the poems are about broken families or broken or lost relationships. They’re filled with a sharpness, a toughness, words wielded like a heavy blade. But every so often, something else breaks through, and it’s so tangible you can almost taste it.

That something is pain. In “Heron,” the collection’s first poem, she writes, “I need to live another way,/ somewhere, maybe Oakland, / leave my old broken oak tree / feels like my only friend.” Several of the poems suggest a mother figure who, intentionally or not, dominated the child. The words often ache. They don’t ask for pity; they simply seek to understand and explain.

Meriam tries to remember what was and what might have been real, but what seems clear is that mother-child roles were reversed. And there was tension. “Once I tore the lightning and sent it seething / past my o=mother. I was a witch forgiving / no one, barely present, in love with no one. / I was her daughter… / I was her victim.”

Meriam writes with rawness, lines carefully honed and shaped. The patterns from childhood cannot help but affect adult relationships, and many of the poem are about loss, loss despite a yearning. Even when she turns to nature for solace, the sense of loss is there.

Wild

The slightest sound I caught was in the weather.
The woodwork of the birds has been the weather.

Cat’s ears turn sideways capturing a chirp,
a rustle in dead leaves, the din of weather.

Wild sounds bounce skyward off the waveless lake,
a picture of a shook-up tin of weather.

I’m never going home again, I swear.
Who can I contemplate as kin? The weather.

You ask for thunder. Yes, I give you thunder.
This raindrop for a gift, a pin of weather.

Then dimmer and dimmer down the dusk descends,
the margins merit one quick fin of weather.

Mary Meriam

Meriam received her B.A. degree from Bennington College and an MFA degree from Columbia University. She’s published nine poetry collections and chapbooks, founded the online journal Lavender Review, which publishes lesbian poetry and art, and co-founded Headmistress Press. Her poems have been published in anthologies ad literary journals such as Literary Matters, Poetry, Post Road, Rattle, and The Poetry Review, among many others. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas – Monticello.

I wasn’t prepared for the pain, and the loneliness, of Then Flew My Caw Away. Meriam writes with a precision that’s often remarkable. There’s no great mystery here; what you see is what you get, and the poems can be unexpected, surprising, and unsettling. And yet, in a way, they are also universal:; they express a human hope for love and acceptance. “Why don’t you walk away / from me right now. I mean to say, please stay, / I couldn’t bear to live without your breeze. / The heat’s unbearable, so cool me, please.”

Photo by Amy Aletheia Cahill, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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When we were children, my brothers and I would sometimes be handed a snack that I thought had been invented by my mother. “Bread, butter, and sugar” was possibly our favorite treat. My mother was tickled that we saw it as a special dessert. It was only years later, when I visited her in a rehab center while she recovered from a broken hip bone, that she told me where it had come from.

She grew up in the Great Depression. Money was so tight that my aunt quit high school because she couldn’t pay the 25 cents for gym clothes. My mother, the fourth of six children, knew hunger. She said there were times when there was nothing to eat, so they’d go to bed hungry. The next day, my grandmother would prepare sandwiches for school, using the only ingredients she had – butter and sugar sandwiches. It was a poor child’s lunch in the 1930s, and her own children thought of it as a terrific treat.

Reading poet Erin Murphy’s new work, Mother as Conjunction, imagine my surprise to discover someone else who had the same experience as my mother, except it happened decades later. Mother as Conjunction is part-memoir and part-journal, with a heavy overlay of poetic sensibility. It’s not poetry per se; instead, it occupies a space between prose poetry and memoir. Some of the 19 accounts seem almost like diary entries. They cover growing up, her early adult life, and her life with her own family.

One account drew me in instantly with its title, “How to Make a Sugar Sandwich.” Yes, it is the same concoction my mother described, ate herself, and fed to us as a treat. Murphy’s experience approximates my mother’s as a child – it’s what you had when there was nothing else available. She frames it by describing a school friend who lived a very different life, as in, she drove her own Mercedes Benz convertible when she was 16. It’s doubtful that the friend had ever experienced a sugar sandwich. Murphy ends the account with the official recipe.

From “How to Make a Sugar Sandwich”

To make a sugar sandwich, you’ll need two pieces of white bread (not
wheat or whole grain); margarine (not butter); and white granulated
sugar. [Warning: be sure the margarine tub—which makes for a good
Tupperware substitute—is, indeed, filled with hydrogenated oil and not
mashed potatoes left over from last night’s dinner.] Slather the bread with
margarine, then sprinkle a layer of sugar on top. Take the sandwich
outside and perch on the front step while your younger brother rumbles
28
up and down the sidewalk on his Big Wheel. Soon your mother will call
from her night bartending job to make sure you’ve put the laundry in the
dryer. “Thanks, sweetie. Love you,” she’ll say, as always, before hanging
up. Now take a bite of your sandwich. Your fingertips glisten with the
sugar’s silver glitter. And it tastes rich, but not too rich. Just rich enough.

Murphy writes about a poignant story from childhood, and the cruelty of children. An overheard sales pitch and the memory of her mother it evokes. A story from her infancy about her parents in Florence. Her mother overcoming a park ranger’s rules. Her mother struggling to provide for her and her brother. The cocktail waitress who bought her book. And more.

Erin Murphy

The memories and stories seem fragmented, until you consider them as a unit. And it’s there that the real picture of her mother emerges.

Murphy is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College. She may also be one of the most prolific writers and poets working in academia. She’s written or edited some 15 books, five in the last three years alone, with another poetry collection and an anthology of essays in the publishing pipeline. Her first poetry collection, Science of Desire, was published in 2004; her most recent poetry collection, Human Resources, was published in 2025. She also serves as editor of The Summerset Review.

Mother as Conjunction is a moving, innovative way to remember and memorialize. The stories and the way they’re presented pull you into understanding and even appreciation.

Personal confession: I still occasionally treat myself to a sugar sandwich. And every time reminds me of my mother.

Related:

Four Collections by Erin Murphy, Part 1.

Four Collections by Erin Murphy, Part 2.

Photo by PetteriO, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Erin Murphy and “Mother as Conjunction” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Month of fevers, my friend Michele calls February, referring to its Latin origins. It can be a fraught month of foul weather and seasonal colds and flu. It’s a short month, but filled with special days beginning on February first with National Dark Chocolate Day, then Groundhog as Weatherman on the second. For me, February is the month of love and chocolate. Because of candy, my mother loved Valentine’s Day. She was partial to pecan roll, and milk chocolates, in the white box, with the kindly Mrs. See keeping watch from the lid. Mother hid the candy from my little brother so he wouldn’t get into it and share with the neighborhood kids. Or so she said. That was an excuse, because she hid her stash even after my brother grew up and left home, and long after I eschewed milk chocolate for more interesting dark chocolate squares. Though I didn’t like milk chocolate, I did love chocolate milk, and that helped me through one of the hardest times of my life, soon after my father died.

Chocolate Milk

That day I feared
I’d never stop crying,
my tears a torrent
taking me out to sea,
Dr. Helene asked, what soothed me
as a sad, and scared, small kid.
Chocolate milk, I said.
Drink that, she said.
Drink until you stop the crying.

I drove to the drive-in dairy,
bought a can of chocolate syrup
and a gallon of milk,
and drank, and drank, and drank,
until my life was sweet
enough to greet my children
skipping through the door from school.

—Donna Hilbert, from Enormous Blue Umbrella

Perhaps Jim Lewis has the right idea. Being too picky limits one’s options.

chocoholic

time was
i had to know
is the swirl with two stripes
a nut or a cream
now i dream
milks and darks and semi-sweets
pass the box and i’ll eat
anything
that isn’t wrapper

—Jim Lewis

What a lovely gift poet Betsy Mars’s mother gave her with the first breath of life, a valentine birthday, while avoiding an unlucky day.

Triskaidekaphobia

So many hearts and none
anatomical: small boxes
and pendants, ceramic
and amethyst, fused glass,
and silver, gold. Paper-
weights, jackets festooned
in pink and hotter pink.
Mugs. Mugs. Mugs.
And my mother’s heart

when on that night
I dropped, water bursting
before its time. Three weeks
early, she held me in one more day,
confined in her narrow hospital bed,
birthing a story as well as me,
my life framed in hearts and love,
or at the very least, the idea
of it, a messenger delivering me
arrows that graze me every birthday.

—Betsy Mars, first published in ONE ART: a Journal of Poetry

Then there is the great joy of new love when you least expect it! After 17 years, I still like the sight of him. We met while walking our dogs. Our dogs loved each other too.

New

That time in the park
at the end of the street

our dogs off leash
and we are off leash too

our love so new
we kiss and kiss

not caring for once
who sees us

what might be said
or be construed.

—Donna Hilbert, from Enormous Blue Umbrella

Your Turn

What is your favorite gift to give? What is you favorite gift to receive? There are many forms of love and devotion—what might you give?

Post and post images by Donna Hilbert. Featured image by rumpleteaser, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Poems used with permission.

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Dave Malone writes of the people and events shaping our lives.

I’m reading a poetry collection, and an image forms in my mind, a memory I hadn’t recalled in years. I’m 11, and my mother arranged for me to spend a week with my widowed aunt who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was the family historian, and I was the family reader, so I suppose my mother thought we’d be a match. We were.

She was a force to be reckoned with. In her lifetime, she crossed swords with reluctant neighbors, homeowner associations, historical commissions, the New Orleans City Council, and just about anyone whom she saw standing in the way of historical preservation and urban beautification. She also buried every deceased pet in her deep back yard, well behind her pre-Civil War house.

That week she had to do research at the Louisiana State Library, then located across from Jackson Square in the French Quarter. It anchored a corner of the Pontalba Apartments Building. The staff knew her well. She was a regular patron and a donor. We sat in the library that day, her reading through census records and me reading inhaling the smell of old books and documents.

That memory came back full force when I read this poem by Dave Malone in his collection Bypass.

Great Aunt

Autumn morning too cold
for its own good. The day
she buries her last sister.

Behind the country church,
with her back to the timber,
she sits straight in a crooked
funeral chair, its feet dug in
like leaning fence posts.

Unpinned, her white hair floats
in the wind, never falling back
in place, and her blue eyes
leave the entourage, hide deep
in the brown ridge past the steeple.

Half-shelled acorns crunch
like old cow bones beneath my boots
as I approach to give condolences
to this blazing lamp so unlike
the ghost in the ground.

I want to tell her everything,
tell her, she has to live forever.
Never leave the farm.
Never leave
me.

Malone does something interesting in these poems. He writes with a wry humor and a deep affection, but it’s an affection that doesn’t prevent him from seeing clearly. He writes with a deep love for his aunt, his mother, his grandfather, a debate teacher, friends, and a history professor. He also sees their flaws, their humanness. And he knows these people have shaped his own life.

Dave Malone

And it’s not just people, but events and experiences as well. Some seem like small things – a visit to an amusement park, a college road trip, a family reunion, children’s ball games, disappointing a friend, a float trip. Like his poems about people, Malone writes with a simplicity, almost a starkness; the stories he tells don’t need adornment or massive elaboration.

Malone is the author of seven other poetry collections: Under the Sycamore (2011); Poems to Love and the Body (2011); Seasons in Love (2013); View from the North 10: Poems After Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (2013); O: Love Poems from the Ozarks (2015); You Know the Ones (2017), and Tornado Drill (2022). He’s also published a two-act play, The Hearts of Blue Whales (2013) and a poetry chapbook, 23 Sonnets (2011). His poems have been published in Midwest Review, Fourteen Hills, Bellevue Literary Revue, and Red Rock Review, among many others. He lives in the Missouri Ozarks.

Like its predecessors, Bypass is grounded in landscapes and the people who inhabit them. And Malone is saying these are the people and the everyday experiences of life that shape us.

Related:

Dave Malone and Tornado Drill.

Dave Malone and You Know the Ones.

Dave Malone and O: Love Poems from the Ozarks.

Dave Malone and View from the North Ten.

Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore.

Photo by brando, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “Bypass” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Fire and Ice of Love, from French Poet Ronsard

It is moments like this when I wish I was an expert in French. But? I’m learning through the translation of poetry (and writing it).

With a Ronsard poem from the 1500s, which puts the verse around the early modern French period, I’m guessing that some of what I’m seeing is, well, older in character. No matter. The exercise is still worthy. And I am getting some fire and ice far before Robert Frost offered his.

If you want a full translation of the poem by a native French speaker, feel free to travel elsewhere. Mine is a personal exercise. I make no promises of perfection.

First, Ronsard’s French Fire & Ice

Qui voudra voir comme Amour me surmonte
Comme il m’assaut, comme il se fait vainquer,
Comme il r’enflamme et r’englace mon coeur,
Comme il reçoit un honneur de ma honte;

Qui voudra voir une jeunesse pronte
À suivre en vain l’objet de son malheur,
Me vienne lire: il verra la douleur
Dont ma Déesse et mon Dieu ne font conte.

Il connaîtra qu’Amour est sans raison,
Un doux abus, une belle prison,
Un vain espoir qui de vent nous vient paître;

Et connaîtra que l’homme se deçoit
Quand plein d’erreur un aveugle il reçoit
Pour sa conduite, un enfant pour son maître.

Second, Some Key Words I Learned

It is always a surprise to me when I already know some words I’m encountering in a foreign text. It’s a relief and an encouragement to realize that the years have given me some French I never lost. Like comme and voir and lire and pour and more.

The following words were new to me. Poetry, because it rhymes, and because it offers context, helped me learn these words quite quickly. I love learning through poetry!

surmonte-overcome, surmount
assaut-assault
vainquer-victor
honte-shame
jeunesse-youth
Déesse-goddess
conte-tale
doux-sweet, soft
abus-excess, overindulgence
espoir-hope
paître-graze
aveugle-blind
maître-master

I am still looking for the meaning of pronte, which I am going to hazard a guess for based on my Spanish: pronto, which can mean readily or swiftly. Neither my dictionary nor any online translators otherwise had a clue.

Third, My Ronsard Amour Attempt

Whoever wants to see how Love surmounts me
How it assaults me, how it is a victor over me
How it inflames and ices my heart
How it receives the honor of my shame;

Whoever wants to see a youth readily
Follow, in vain, the object of his misfortune
Come read me: he will see the pain
that neither my goddess nor my god will tell of

He will know that Love is without reason,
a sweet excess, a beautiful prison,
a vain hope of the wind we come to graze upon

And he will know that man deceives himself
When, full of blind error he receives
For his doings, a spoiled child for his master.

—l.l.b. translation of pierre de ronsard

See all Words to Travel By posts…

Photo by Gerald Berliner, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

The post Found in Translation: Love’s Fire & Ice appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

A few weeks ago, I looked at Bone Country, the recent poetry collection by Linda Nemec Foster. It was like a travel guide to Europe, but not what you would expect from a travel book. She explores Europe through both real and imagined stories, and I came away with a strong sense of what the people and places are really about.

Linda Nemec Foster

Since then, I’ve looked at two of Foster’s previous collections: Talking Diamonds, first published in 2009 and reissued in 2023, and Blue Divide, published in 2021 and republished in 2023. In both cases, the first publisher had closed its doors and the collections were reissued by Cornerstone Press of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It’s not difficult to see why. Both Talking Diamonds and Blue Divide are excellent, with sharp imagery, moving stories, and an original voice.

Talking Diamonds is composed of 48 poems on an array of subjects, many of them about family. Foster considers (or, as she writes, “enters”) her mother’s dementia. A field becomes a metaphor for a dying father. She sleeps in a room filled with the past. She parasails above the Pacific Ocean. She plumbs the philosophy of junk mail. She encases a Nativity scene in plastic wrap.

These poems are about their stated subject but also about something deeper. Foster is exploring what is below the surface, beyond what we see, and reaching to find meaning in the ordinary. In the process, she’s also asking what it is that makes us human.

Talking Diamonds

Late at night, when dreams still live
inside us, you can hear a soft
noise like the quiet sound of
diamonds talking
about their lives underground.
Never are they bitter or angry. Nor do they
even curse those dark
memories of suffocating black. They know
every facet of their brilliance began as mere
coal—a mere dark fist waiting
for a chance to be something
other than ordinary.
Something hovering just under
the surface where anything and
everything can happen: talking diamonds,
rain becoming white orchids, ourselves awakening.

The 42 poems of Blue Divide span the space between Talking Diamonds and the poems about Europe in Bone Country. You can see Foster beginning to address Europe in poems about Croatia, Sarajevo, buying a lipstick in Warsaw in 1950, and visiting a café in Geneva. What becomes clear is that these poems, and those set in early and mid-20th century America, are flowing from what she knows of her family — the stories, the tales, the jokes, and the lived experiences.

As she explains it, her ancestors swapped the Tatra Mountains of Poland for the orange skies of the Cleveland steelyards. She writes of the immigrants of Slavic Village in Cleveland, the family tree, the Catholic faith her ancestors brought with them (her poem on Mary Magdalene is rather stunning), and her father on the first anniversary of his death. Those emigrant and immigrant experiences shaped generations, physically separated by the ocean.

The Water

My mother hated it, my father loved it.
The ocean between them so vast
not even two daughters could bridge
the blue divide. For him, it was natural
to choose Navy (not Army) when everyone
went to war after Pearl Harbor exploded.
He hopped on a supply ship, learned how
to navigate using nothing but the night sky.
Made his way to Normandy, Anzio, north Africa—
and back again—all in one piece. Brought
home a thin blanket and his uniform
both filled with the smell of sweat. His wife
couldn’t wash it out; reminded of his ocean every day.

Foster has published 14 poetry collections, including The Lake Huron Mermaid, her most recent. Her books and poems have received numerous awards and recognitions, including a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for The Blue Divide. Her poems have been published in such literary journals and magazines as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, North American Review, New American Writing, Witness, Quarterly West, and Paterson Literary Review. She served as the first poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College. She received her B.A. degree from Aquinas College and her M.F.A. degree from Goddard College in Vermont.

It’s easy to see why Cornerstone Press would want to keep these collections in print. All poets have a unique voice, but Foster blends family, ancestors, geography, and her own life in a moving, often riveting way.

Related:

Linda Nemec Foster and Bone Country

Photo by Sam Bald, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and the Extraordinary Ordinary appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry, Charles Meynier, 1800

The name Erato means “desired” or “lovely,” and she is the muse of lyric poetry, especially love poetry! (Perfect for Valentine’s Day, too.)

In the Orphic hymn to the Muses, Erato is the Muse who charms our vision.

She’s been associated since the Renaissance with a wreath of roses and myrtle, and she holds a lyre and sometimes a golden arrow or a torch when accompanied by Eros.

If you see Simon Vouet’s interpretations, you’ll find two turtle doves by her feet eating seeds.

Poetry Prompt

Explore how all kinds of love fuels creative work. Consider romantic, platonic, familial, or self-love! Or, write a love poem to something unexpected, like your morning coffee ritual or the way light falls through your window. You might like to use the graphic from Little DIY about “romanticizing your ordinary life” as inspiration! You could also revisit the images that have classically been associated with Erato (see above), and put them in your poem.

Photo by Bundo Kim, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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What Is Lyric Poetry?

Lyric poetry is one of those terms we’ve probably heard tossed around quite a bit, though we may forget to ask “What is lyric poetry, anyway?”

If you want to take a moment to ask and try to figure the answer to that question, why not try. We’ll wait (with Apollo).

“Orestes suppliant to Apollo,” John Flaxman, 1879″

Back when the Greeks were staging poetry, lyric poetry was sung or chanted with a lyre in accompaniment, and it was done so through the first person.

This was in contrast to epic poetry where a narrator (who also speaks in the first person)… narrates something. Fine line? The lyric poem is much shorter and, according to Edward Hirsch, has been around for all time (“as ancient as recorded literature”). Used to convey deep feeling from a solitary standpoint, it plumbs our very experience of being and is therefore an offering of intimacy from writer to reader.

Knowing that the lyric was sung during Greek times lends the tiniest bit of humor to what otherwise might have seemed like ultra-serious poetry from Walt Whitman. After all, there’s something amusing about a lyric poem called Song of Myself. It’s just so… self-conscious…kind of meta.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…”

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” also strangely has a touch of non-intimacy to it. And, with 52 parts and over 1300 lines, it feels a bit epic in length. Oh, poet contradictions! To which Walt says…

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (Section 51)

Walt Whitman’s Lyric Poetry, Spoken and Sung (But Not to a Lyre)

Do you have a favorite lyric poet? Share in the comments!

Photo by Jason Leung, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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Poet Liz Ahl maps out her territory in three collections.

It wasn’t something I read in history class, but rather from actual “being there” experience. I first read about an ancient practice called “beating the bounds” from a blogger based in London that I follow. It’s a longstanding tradition in which people walk the boundaries of their church parish or community every seven years. The idea is to maintain boundary lines and resist encroachment.

The practice carried over when the English colonized America. The surprise is that some states still require “beating the bounds” as a statutory requirement. It’s officially called “perambulation,” and it still exists on the law books in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s applied to towns, and it’s often not enforced, but it still is something of a regular practice in New Hampshire.

Liz Ahl

A 2017 poetry collection by Liz Ahl is entitled Beating the Bounds. Ahl lives in New England. The wonderful title poem is about perambulation. Not only does it frame the rest of the poems to follow in the volume, it also stuck in my head as I read two other collections by Ahl, a chapbook entitled A Stanza is a Place to Stand (2023) and A Case for Solace (2022). “You must walk the path you think you know again, / to see how, again, you don’t fully know it,” she writes.

“Beating the bounds” may be the overall theme for Ahl’s collections. In fact, it’s what poets do. They take a subject, an idea, an object, a person, a place, or an event and mark it with their words – defining it, shaping it, displaying their understanding of it, helping others see what they’ve understood. I’d bever considered that image for poetry until I read Ahl’s poem. Using words, poets are leading the rest of us around what’s being described, marking the boundaries.

This poem is from that 2017 collection. The poet is talking a walk by moonlight, and you can watch how she marks what she’s writing about.

Full Moon Walk

The full moon spills a river of milk
that I follow through the laden evergreens;
crisp tree-shadows are thrown
across this dead-end road like storm-felled limbs,
but the storm isn’t due until morning.

The crunch and squeak of my boots through snow
and the occasional tick of a branch on a branch
are the only answers
to the cloudy breaths I push out.

The moon’s spotlight paints the side of a barn
and the barn glows like a drive-in movie
while my long shadow trudges across its screen.

Hours from now the town plow
will growl around these curves,
searching for new places to push new snow.
The neighborhood dogs
will make their early morning rounds.
Until then, they snore on their flannel beds.
Until then, the old snow,
no house light, no street light,
only this jagged illumination,
this midnight, this whitewash,
this call-you-out moon.

Beating the Bounds is divided into three parts, with the first part looking back to what the landscape was like before the area was colonized. The next two parts are more concerned with contemporary life in this place – bird houses, splitting firewood, a house that wasn’t purchased, and even swallowing and matting away blackflies (I know what that’s like; I’ve swallowed enough of them on bike rides).

A Stanza is a Place to Stand is a short chapbook of 13 poems. I like the word play of the title. The poet visits a maritime museum, builds a snow fort (comparing them to poems), describes an ossuary or bone room, experiences “knuckle-cracking record-breaking cold / whose fists pound hourly the wall,” and discovers this in Concord, Massachusetts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Highchair

The Old Manse, Concord, MA

Upstairs, the docent led us into the room
where the great man wrote “Nature,”
and we stood sweating between the four walls,
sniffing for whatever remnants of genius or insight
might lurk like ancient plaster dust
behind the carefully researched reproduction wallpaper.
I scowled through the windowpanes, trying
to inhabit his vision, to see if the way the glass
reconfigured the sunlight said something transcendent.

The tour’s final room is the kitchen—and we’re shown
the wood fired oven, the set kettle nestled in its socket,
the bathtub. And the wooden highchair,
from when the great man was just a baby visiting
his grandparents, before he had his big ideas,
before he could even climb the stairs to that room
with its yellow pattern of leaves on the wallpaper,
its grand writing desk, its windows full of light.

In 17 lines, Ahl maps the Emerson house, and she focuses our attention on the highchair that he sat in as a baby, symbolizing all of what was to come from his mind and pen.

A Case for Solace is comprised of 47 poems. The poems cover an array of subjects and themes, but I can’t help it. I’m still participating in the march around the borders, beating the bounds. Ahl writes of a friend’s death, suffering, her father’s tools, sitting with a friend whose wife has died, eating oatmeal and being jet-lagged, wearing her father’s hat, and more. She also takes her pruning shears to the dead parts of the lilac bush, and in the process provides a metaphor for life.

Tricking the Lilac

You must prune away
the dead clusters, the browned
petals that perfumed the air
in moist gusts for a while.

You must persuade the branches
that they don’t need to work
so hard on making seeds to spread
from those dead bouquets.

You must offer the lilac a future
of new leaves and blossoms to plan for.
Channel the energies of grieving,
as you must keep the bereaved busy

with the pantomime of living
until it becomes the living.

Ahly has published several poetry collections and chapbooks. Her poems have been published in such journals as Limp Wrist, Quartet Literary Journal, Able Muse, Rogue Agent, and West Trestle Review. Her poems have also been included in numerous anthologies. Formerly a teacher of writing at Plymouth State University, she lives in New Hampshire.

Reading these three collections evokes a sense of understanding and even thankfulness. Ahl provides a different way of understanding poetry, and you’re thankful for the opportunity to read poems like “Beating the Bounds.”

Photo by duncan_idaho_2007, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poet Liz Ahl Beats the Bounds appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Sarah Carey uses poetry to describe the family she knows and loves.

I’d read, a long time ago, that certain things become more important as you age. These included art, as in visiting museums, and family heritage, as in genealogy. I must have read it and dismissed it, so I can’t cite the source, but I later discovered it to be true.

An older cousin researching the family had led her to the old family Bible in my possession. The call became an extended conversation about old family stories, including one about the great-grandmother who allegedly killed a man and got away with it, and the great-grandfather who had reportedly walk home from Virginia at the end of the Civil War (I wrote a novel about that story).

Poet Sarah Carey has taken a related but different approach. She’s written an arresting poetry collection, entitled Bloodstream, about family, heritage, and stories about odd relatives (if you’re from the South, as Carey and I both are, every family has odd relatives. In fact, in the South, odd and relatives may be redundant. She even writes about family pets.

Bloodstream has an apt title. We are each part of that great steam of humanity, carrying the DNA of all those who came before us. And “blood” implies family, so you would expect a poetry collection with this title to tell stories. Carey does not disappoint.

She looks back to her Irish and German heritage, connecting to her father’s German background. She goes to funerals, like that of her grandmother, making sure to salvage the dying philodendron on her grandmother’s porch. She recalls trips and shopping at Montgomery Ward’s department store. She tells those yet unborn but who will come after her that her “endless strands / of DNA bespeak other passages: / maiden voyage of a train full of emigrants / to a promised land…”

Carey also tells her own origin story.

An Origin Story

In the cabin where I was conceived,
where my great-uncle let us stay,

Mother organized belongings
for our move, while Father, Straight
out of seminary, ministered,

as was his want, at a school
with mandatory chapel and vespers.

Where righteousness could be
compartmentalized, though I always believed
I came from some imagined justice.

In this tiny Southern town
where it was wise to not be too theological

or over-speak, Father spoke for the students
during the protests, sit-ins beginning
in bigger cities not far up the road.

In the era of Jim Crow.
Inside Mother’s belly, where her blood

pumped parallel to mine, feeding my veins,
my heart in intervillous chambers,
I drew a way of knowing

from her body about the world that was
and yet was yet to be.

She writes of art, like the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Vincent Van Gogh, connecting memories to family members. (For herself, she thinks of a longleaf pine and a royal palm as her self-portraits, likely a reference to the two states where she’s lived – North Carolina and Florida.) A chair becomes a focus for her mother’s room in assisted living. She imagines her father dreaming in his apartment in independent living. “We are all our dust, Father says.”

Sarah Carey

Carey has been a journalist and university communicator as well as a writer and poet. She previously published two poetry chapbooks, The Heart Contracts (2016) and Accommodations (2019), and the collection The Grief Committee Minutes (2025). Her poems have been published in such literary journals as Gulf Coast Review, Valparaiso Review, Sugar House Review, Florida Review, Atlanta Review, and many others. Her work has been recognized with several prizes and awards, including three separate recognitions for The Grief Committee Minutes. She is recently retired as the director of Communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and she lives in Gainesville with her family.

You can’t read a collection like Bloodstream without thinking of your own family, almost with every poem. And that’s the power of these poems, which take something as personal as one’s own family and suggest something so personal about our own families. And ourselves.

Related:

Sarah Carey and The Grief Committee Minutes.

Photo by Jason Parrish, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post Poets and Poems: Sarah Carey and “Bloodstream” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some readers share on Substack’s Notes and some comment at Every Day Poems. It all adds up to a lovely bouquet of favorites!

Here are ten of your faves we’ve seen recently:

1

“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

—shared by Rick Maxson, from The Snow Man

2

“‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘Look in they heart and write.’”

—shared by Megan Willome, from Astrophil and Stella

3

“The bitterness inflicted on them
takes their bitterness away.”

—shared by LL, from Outside Thermalito

4

“who live life without struggling
to write about it”

—shared by Megan Willome, from Exercising to Poetry Videos

5

“first light—fluid gold
through sheer drapes”

—shared by Bethany R., from Morning Gladness

6

“even when I am tided
into the fog, which swallows my sight,
and I am wrapped up in it.”

—shared by Sandra Fox Murphy, from Eclipse

7

“Making a decoy of blue overalls
And mystery of a scarlet shawl—”

—shared by Maureen Doallas, from The Fog

8

“junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter”

—shared by Bethany R., from The Snow Man

9

“Now, you wonder,
must catastrophe always be unpleasant?

Does sand struggle as it shrinks?
Do waves weep as they die on the shore

with laughter, with the wine-dark hymns?”

—shared by Maureen Doallas, from The Sea, The Tower

10

“The sea is not full
though she drinks every river”

—shared by Valentina, from The Sea, the Tower

Photo by Ivan Aleksic, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

The post Top 10 Dip Into Poetry appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

I’m not sure when I first ran across the reference to noir poetry. Several years ago, I read a novel in verse form, The Long Ride by Robin Robertson. I can’t say Robertson was a noir poet so much as he’d written a noir novel as poetry.

Recently, I read another reference, so I decided to find out what it was about. I knew about noir novelists – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, writers usually associated with crime stories from the 1920s to the 1950s. And noir movies, movies like Notorious, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Maltese Falcon, Strangers on a Train, Laura, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard. (My favorite noir movie, though, was released in 1974 – Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.

But noir poetry?

Yes, as it turns out.

Kenneth Fearing

And two poets often called noir poets were Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) and Weldon Kees (1914-1955).

In addition to being a poet, Fearing was also a journalist for a short time and a crime writer, writing both novels and stories for pulp fiction magazines. (He used a pseudonym for his crime writing; then, as now, poetry didn’t pay the bills.) He published several poetry collections and several novels, one of which, The Big Clock, was made into a successful movie of the “film noir” school.

Reading Fearing’s poems is like stepping into a time capsule. His poetry embraces popular culture of the years he was writing– marketing, advertising, slogans, and popular songs. This poem was included in Fearing’s Angel Arms collection, published in 1929.

Lithographing

These are the live,
Not silhouettes or dead men.
That dull murmur is their tread on the street.
Those brass quavers are their shouts.
Here is the wind blowing through the crowded square.
Here is the violence and secret change.
And these are figures of life beneath the sea.
These are the lovely women
And the exhilarations that die.
Here is a stone lying on the side-walk
In the shadow of the wall.
Hey? What saith the noble poet now.
Drawing his hand across his brow?
Claude, is the divine afflatus upon you?
Hey? Hey Claude?
Here are a million taxi drivers, social prophets,
The costume for an attitude,
A back-stage shriek,
The heat and speed of the earth.
Here is a statue of Burns,
There is the modern moon.
That song is the latest dance.
Hey? Of what doth the noble poet brood
In a tragic mood?

Lithography was a printing process invented in the 19th century; think Currier & Ives and all of those posters made by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In the 20th century, and particularly at the time Fearing was writing, it was being used by serious artists, like Edvard Munch, the German Expressionists, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Diego Rivera.

Fearing’s poems are full of cultural references, but they also have a strong sense of the dark side of humanity, likely sharing themes with his crime novels and thrillers. Like many writers of his day, he was oriented against “the system” and toward the proletariat. He was known as one of the “proletariat poets,” sharing a political philosophy common to such writers as Dashiell Hammett.

Weldon Kees

Weldon Kees was a poet, short story writer, and essayist and reviewer for publications like Time, The Nation, and The New Republic. He was also an artist (abstract expressionism), photographer, and pianist. He published three poetry collections during his lifetime; his Collected Poems was first published five years after his reported death.

Kees is likely considered a “noir poet” because of his overall themes. He wrote dark poems, and “dark” is the one that kept coming to mind as I read the Collected Poems. You think of empty, almost threatening landscapes, whether rural or urban. This poem, which almost reaches a hopeful state, changes completely with the last line.

The Forests

And the traveler
stumbles in darkness, hearing
beasts in the forest, fearing
the pitfalls, pitch-black ditches,
the brambles. Dread
in his heart: and the air
whispering death:
and his brain strangled.

But along the path:
a torch! The soaked pine
blazes, blinding the night.
The grateful seizing, and he feels
the fear half-gone, and sees
the pathway clear. And then at last,
the sun’s slow rise from the night:
cold fragile light that streaks
across the timber. And the way
uncertain still. All night
he’d known that they were there:
knew they were waiting there:
waiting for him. But then at dawn,
emerging from the forest,
he felt his heart at peace.
The day! Alive with brightness!
Wonderful to be alive!

Then he thought of the other forests beyond…

Kees’ life came to resemble almost a noir novel. He left New York City for San Francisco. Where he focused on photography and piano; his photographs were used in a collaborative book called Nonverbal Communication. But in July of 1955, his car was found abandoned near the Golden Gate Bridge, implying suicide or foul play. His body was never found. Had he killed himself? Kees had also talked of chucking everything and moving to Mexico.

Can I define noir poetry from these two poets? Not precisely. But I can say that the poetry of Fearing and Kees does have a strong affinity for film noir and fiction noir. It’s the poetry of shadowy urban streets, expectations rarely met, surprises around every corner. It is dark, with a dark view of human nature. It can be riveting to read, just like film noir can be riveting to watch. It doesn’t always have two men bursting through the door with guns (Raymond Chandler’s phrase). But it does have a sense of emptiness and of nothing being what it seems. I can see Dashiell Hammett reading it.

Fade to dark.

Photo by Bob Denaro, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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Paul Thiel ran with the Beats and the Warhol Factory

For many years, until they changed the closing time, my wife and I could be found most Sunday afternoons at the YMCA in our suburb of St. Louis. I had a routine — start with cardio like the treadmill or stationary bike and finish in the Cybex machine room. There was a fairly regular crowd there each Sunday, working out from about 5 to 6 p.m. One of those regulars was an older man, about six-foot-five. We knew him as Paul.

My wife started chatting with him first. And then he spoke to me one Sunday, saying he’d heard I was from New Orleans. He had relatives there, too, even though he was from St. Louis. We’d talk while on the Cybex machines, and he didn’t say much about his own life, other than he liked poetry as much as I did and he loved to visit New Orleans.

Paul Thiel

One Sunday, shortly before the COVID lockdown in 2020, he said something out of the blue. He didn’t look particularly well, and I asked him if he was feeling okay. “I have cancer,” he said. “They’ve found it all over my body.” There’s not much one can say to that, except expressing sorrow and concern. After the lockdown was over, I’d still see him at the Y, working out and still looking the same.

And then I didn’t see him. I asked the Y manager if he knew anything, and he said Paul had changed the days he came in. That was how I kept tabs on him. And then one Sunday afternoon, about a year ago, I was on a long walk. I could see him coming toward me from a distance; his height was an immediate identifier. He was using a cane and walking slowly, but walking nonetheless.

I asked him how he was, and he said it likely wouldn’t be long. I repeated what we had told him when the diagnosis first came in, that we would pray for him. He wasn’t religious, but he seemed touched that someone would pray for him.

I saw the obituary in early December. I was in for two shocks. First, he had just turned 88; I would have thought he was at least 10 years younger. Second, the obituary told the story of his life.

Paul Thiel had lived in San Francisco in the 1950s and run with the Beat poets. He knew them all — Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and the rest. He had lived in New York City in the 1960s and was part of the Factory crowd presided over by Andy Warhol. Thiel was a published poet. He had edited a collection of short stories.

I went to Amazon. Sure enough, two books were listed under Thiel’s name. Under the Arch: St. Louis Stories was published in 2005. Snapshots: Verbal Pictures – Poetry was published in 2024. (He had also published a book of sonnets in 2004, but I can’t find a reference.)

Snapshots comprises 88 poems, and a quick glance at the times explains what the collection is about. It’s part autobiography, part memoir, an effort to remember his life and perhaps to be remembered as well. In the introduction, itself a poem, Thiel explains how he encountered the Beat poets in his “vagabond” days; met underground and way-way-off Broadway playwrights; and encountered interesting people like Ann, who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. He writes that these are all random images in his life, “88 keys in my concerto.”

The titles are mostly names, some of relatives and some of writers and artists Thiel knew. People like poet Charles Bukowski, artist Robert Rauschenberg, writer William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, opera singer Joan Sutherland, Sharon Olds (he took a class in poetry taught by her), Dakin Williams (Tennessee’s brother), and Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol

Snapshots Thiel

White-haired ghost tripper around NYC
Silent as he watched. Surveying the terrain
With part of his entourage. Probably making
Snide remarks quietly as he observed
These trips were unannounced, spontaneous
Then in a whisk he was gone. You wondered
What did I see? Although his appearance
Was fairly frequent for a star, it nevertheless
Created an expectation of a happening
It is rumored that he lived in a cave with them
The Factory it was called and drug ridden
It was supposed. I don’t know. I wasn’t there
I heard that he actually resided in some secret
Hideaway all alone away from the Super Stars
He created magnifying their otherwise
Mundane egos. Anyone could have 15 minutes
Of fame, he attested and with his backing
They did, flocking to the doors of the Factory
Holly, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Eric Emerson
Super Stars to flourish during their moment
In his own way. Andy created a new world

Had I known, I could have told Paul about my only connection to Warhol. When I was a reporter for my college newspaper, I was assigned to review a Warhol movie called Trash. I saw it, reviewed it, and never forgave the editor who assigned it to me. For me, the title explained everything I needed to know.

All the poems in Snapshots are in the same style — truthful, keenly observed, and sometimes flattering and sometimes not (even to the point of self-deprecation).

Thiel didn’t intend to be a poet. In college, he studied geology and was, in fact, in a doctoral studies program at the University of Montana when he abandoned college and headed for San Francisco. After his time there and in countercultural New York City, he returned to St. Louis and worked in real estate.

But he never lost his love for poetry. He became involved in the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, taught creative writing, and attended and taught at writing workshops. He also organized a longstanding annual tribute to the Beat poets, following the death of Allen Ginsberg in 1997.

Thiel wasn’t one of the main players in the Beat generation or the Warhol era, but he knew who the players were, met most of them, and was close to a few. He also observed them, and wrote about them, with an unbiased eye.

And here he was, this tall, lanky man, working out on the Cybex machine next to me at the Y, chatting about the Y and workouts and new Orleans, and I never knew his connection to poetry.

Photo by Andrew E. Larsen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post The Friend Who Turned Out to Be a Poet appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

I have to admit that I was not only unfamiliar with the poetry of Gregory Corso (1930-2001) but I also had never heard of him. That is, until I walked into an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum and saw a monumental painting (roughly 30 feet tall), with its title written into the top of the painting: “For Gregory Corso.”

I pulled out my phone and Googled him. A Beat poet, an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Neil Cassady, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, among several others. That clicked; it placed him in the 1950s in counter-culture San Francisco, a decade before the hippies. Allen Ginsburg’s famous Howl. Beatniks. Cool, man.

Corso was a Beat poet, but only for a time. He was something of a nomad, roaming from New York to San Francisco, to unofficial student status at Harvard (he never enrolled) to Europe and back. He embraced and was embraced by the Beats, but he flew far beyond.

Gregory Corso

The child of teenaged immigrants, he was given up for adoption. He was sent to prison for theft, and that proved the turning point. For it was in prison that a fellow inmate introduced him to literature and poetry. With no formal education, or not much of one, he made friends with wealthy students at Harvard, and his poems so impressed poet and professor Archibald MacLeish that he created a special “non-student” status for him that allowed Corso to attend classes.

Over the course of his life, Corso published 12 poetry collections, novels, plays, and even albums. It was as if he couldn’t stop writing. As his friend Ginsberg said of him, “Corso is a great word-slinger, first naked sign of a poet, a scientific master of mad mouthfuls of language.” After reading some of his poetry, I think Ginsberg was making something of an understatement.

Inspired by the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, which were in turn inspired by Corso’s poems, I acquired two of his poetry collections. Gasoline was published in 1958, close to peak Beat time. In 1970, he published Elegiac Feelings American, a decidedly different kind of collection yet one still retaining features of Beat poetry.

Gasoline contains 31 poems. As Allen Ginsberg says in the introduction, reading these poems is like opening a box of crazy toys. They cover a wide array pf topics and themes – places in Europe, paintings, meals, driving a car, a puma in a Mexican zoo, cats, and visiting the building where Corso was born in New York City, among others. It seems almost like a feverish riot of themes and ideas, sharing one basic characteristic – a love affair with words and language, including some words he invents on his own. It’s as if the prison inmate who discovered literature in a cell stays simply can’t express himself enough. And it all comes pouring out of him, even when he thinks he’s at a loss for words.

No Word

It is better man a word elongate
And eat up what another spake
For no man is word enough
Who complains, to boot,
The word he ate was tasteless tough

It is better man give up his diction
become mouthless
it is better
that another man, myself,
heed his restriction

I know no word that is mine
and I am tired of his
It is better to sew his mouth
dynamite his ears hearless
drown his vocabulary
It is better
his eyes speak and listen as well as see.

Twelve years later, Corso published Elegiac Feelings American, a collection of 39 poems. What’s happened between the two collections is the 1960s – the protest movement, the Vietnam War, hippie culture, the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the widespread use of drugs, and all the various movements and counterculture events. The title poem is a six-and-a-half page elegy in memory of Jack Kerouac; it is also something of a lament for what Corso believed what America had become.

Many of the collection’s other poems mirror this theme of America. Corso was talking about the “end of history” two decades before it became fashionable if academic and foreign policy circles. Even the five “Poems from Berlin” are less about the German city and more about America. Even though the Beats moment had passed, this poem includes features of that era’s poetry – exclamation points (the Beats loved those punctuation marks), invented words, and a combination of ideas and images that can seem confusing.

One Day

One day while Peter-Panning the sky
I saw a man,
a man dying over the Eastern Gulf,
and I said to this man:
–The light that makes us a fiend of eagles
has made our poor wounds an interval of clouds,
slow and creeping, calm and sad,
in the skyful dungeon of things. –
And he replied:
–The sky is awful! The sky undarkens!
Hermes, his winged foot, rests old in China!
Rests uncontested while cloudbursts burst
and windleaves fall!
while my tired hands hold back
the violent skirt of night!
while my moss-covered feet crush
the seaports of the day!—
I left the dying man, and he must always die,
for Solitude refuses to lower a gentle hand
upon his long sad face.

Corso is said to have reached his peak in the 1960s and 1970s, but he remained influential until his death from prostate cancer in 2001. He was buried in Rome at the foot of the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of his poetic heroes, and close to grave of John Keats. One of his poems serves as his epitaph.

Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto via Wikimedia Commons

Related:

Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Exhibition.

Photo by H Mathew Howarth, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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One of my earliest memories involves my mother, sitting in the screened porch between our kitchen and the carport. I might have been 4 or 5, and she would have been in her early 30s. She had her legs drawn up under her, and she was holding a handkerchief, crying. I asked her why, and she said she was just feeling sad.

Decades later, when she was reaching the end of her life, I asked her if she remembered that. She did, and she was 89. She said she felt terrible that I had found her crying, but she had been deeply unhappy. I had unexpectedly walked in on it. She said that, at the time, she was realizing that her life was turning into something entirely different from what she had imagined when she was younger, and she felt like it was losing a dream.

Sadness is a word I associate with her. It’s a condition that can come from many sources — disappointment, loss, health setbacks, family upheavals, or sometimes no reason at all, to mention only a few. It’s a very human condition, something we’ve all experienced to varying degrees.

The poet and novelist writing under the pseudonym Noa Grey writes of lifelong experience with sadness. I can’t say for certain whether Grey is a man or a woman, but I have the impression it’s the latter, and the Amazon description says “her.” so I’ll use feminine pronouns. She’s in her forties, she writes in the introduction, and says she’s been good at sadness, even as a child. And perhaps good as masking it. She says she’s using a pen name as “an escape from my very vigorous engineering job.” And she writes that it took decades “to understand the depth of my sadness doesn’t make me the wrong kind of human.”

I would say that sadness makes Grey very human indeed.

With that as all the biographical information available, we turn to the poems in The Elegance of Sadness. It’s a relatively short collection of 45 pages, closer to a chapbook. Most of the poems are short, encapsulating a simple idea of observation, bur a few are longer.

The title poem is first, and it was the one that captured my attention, holding it for reading everything that followed. It was the one that seemed to capture my starstruck mother, who loved Hollywood movies and dressing up to go out.

The Elegance of Sadness

I wear my sadness
Like a Chanel No. 5,
Like a movie star
Wears her dress on the red carpet,
A queen her crown and the sky its sunset.

I did not know
It takes ten thousand tears
And ten thousand more to
Learn how to do it,
But I’ve shed them anyway
And each one gave me my sadness
A touch more class.

You know that smile?
Beautiful, yet distant,
Lips smiling, but eyes lot far away
Between clouds and bad memories
Longing for a never to come something?
When you see it in the mirror,
You know you’ve made it,
Your sadness is now Vogue worthy.

Grey goes on to write that you don’t need a guide or map to sadness. We find it, or it finds us. It can be a single tear, or a day when it cascades. We can’t really Google our way out of it, she says. She likens it to a violin crying (which makes me think of the theme to the movie Schindler’s List).

She explains loss as not the physical presences you lose, and describes how sadness changes as you age. And another aspect that reminded me of my mother: “The sinking feeling…/That you missed your moment?/ Of greatness.” And there is a kind of sadness that reminded me of myself, when she hears her father growling with his fist held high, raging not to take her ailing mother first.

The Elegance of Sadness describes a common human condition. Perhaps that’s why you can see so much of yourself and people you know in it. As Grey writes, “We see sadness / In so many faces / And so many mirrors”.

Photo by gnuckx, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Our hotel in Amsterdam had arranged our transportation to the train station. It wasn’t far, but traffic was congested. Once there, we boarded the Thalys, the high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris with a single stop in Brussels (it’s now called the Eurostar).

My wife had taken French in high school and college, but I think we were both slightly apprehensive about Paris. I’d been told that no one in Paris spoke English except English-speaking tourists, “and if even if a French person does, they’ll never admit it and just stare at you with a blank look.” I’d also been told, “They don’t like Americans.”

I would learn a French word, or, more precisely, a phrase. It would get branded on my brain the entire time we were in Paris.

The Louvre at night, via Unsplash

Our hotel clerk spoke English, as did the concierge and the bellman who helped us with our bags. We were pleasantly surprised. Perhaps this would go better than we’d expected.

The concierge recommended a restaurant for dinner, Au Petit Riche. It was less than a two-block walk away. He did say it was traditional French, and the staff would not likely speak English.

We arrived and were greeted by a smiling waiter. When I said reservation for Young, he scowled and motioned for us to follow. We passed areas where there were other diners and empty tables, and for a moment, I thought he was going to shove us out the back door. Instead, he pointed to a small dining room where two other couples were eating. Apparently, we could seat ourselves.

I was secretly pleased. The surly French waiter wasn’t a stereotype.

Paris Metro station, via Unsplash

I think the waiter was trying to segregate the non-French speaking customers. We were seated with a young Australian couple on their honeymoon, and an older English couple from Salisbury who seemed to be celebrating their 50th. And here we were, the Americans, celebrating our 25th. Our waiter had unintentionally created a chronological harmony of marriages.

We had a ball. We talked, traded tourist stories, shared food and drinks. We all enjoyed ourselves so much that I think we disappointed the waiter.

Since we were the latest arrivals in Paris, our new friends explained the overriding problem we’d been dealing with. The cultural workers in the museums were furious with government plans to change pensions, and they had been staging wildcat strikes. There was no way to plan for what would be open and what wouldn’t. We’d just have to take our chances.

Our friends taught us a new phrase, one that would we hear repeatedly during our stay in Paris: en strike, pronounced “on streek” Our hotel concierge would try to help, but no one had any control over when a wildcat strike would occur. You could also be in the middle of a museum tour, and the place would have to close. The workers had gone en strike.

The first time we tried to see the Louvre – en strike. Same thing for the Musee d’Orsay and the Victor Hugo House. We were fortunate with visiting Versailles, which required a train ride. The palace was open that day, we bought our tickets and discovered our tour guide hated Americans and tried to lose us. He failed. The next day, however – it was en strike at Versailles.

We did manage to see most of what we had hoped to see, with the sole exception of the Arc de Triomphe, which seemed permanently en strike. But en strike had some good side effects. When we found the Louvre closed, we walked across the Seine to the Left Bank and almost stumbled into the Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages. Inside was the famous “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestry. It was a totally unexpected and wonderful museum. That’s how we also found St. Julien-le-Pauvre Church, near Shakespeare & Co. books. (This wasn’t the original Shakespeare & Co., founded in 1919 and patronized by expats like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and F, Scott Fitzgerald; this one came along in 1951.)

Le Printemps, via Unsplash

Galeries Lafayette, via Unsplash

And, about three blocks from our hotel, we found a street so Parisian it seemed like a Hollywood set. The Rue des Martyrs was about two blocks of flower shops, bakeries, chocolate stores, and a wine shop (the owner was more fluent in English than we were). And we were within two blocks of the two big Parisian department stores – Galeries Lafayette and Le Printemps on the same street as our hotel, Boulevard Haussmann. While most of the salespeople at both stores spoke only French, we learned the universal rule of commerce – language is no barrier when you want to buy something.

We enjoyed the trip, but the constant threat and reality of en strike was exhausting. We were glad to head home.

Arriving at Charles De Gaulle Airport, we quickly discovered that en strike wasn’t finished with us. The baggage handlers had embraced the concept, requiring passengers to maneuver their luggage – all of it – through security and x-ray and to the departure gate, where the flight attendants and pilots would then load it on the plane. The moving sidewalk from security to the gate was rather whimsical, curvy and often up and down, as in hilly. It was great fun trying to manage both suitcases and checked bags.

“En strike,” I muttered, “en strike.” Years later, I still refer to the French capital as Paris en strike.

Related:

“Everybody in Amsterdam Speaks English.” Not.

Photo by Jaguar MENA, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

The post “No One Speaks English in Paris.” Well, Not Exactly. appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

So after accidentally checking my phone three times in 20 minutes and finding nothing there for me, I felt a twinge of embarrassment along with the thought, Why did I even do that? I didn’t even intend to check my phone.

Before I could get too deep into The Ravine of Self-Loathing, I decided to reach out for a little help from an unassuming pink sticky note. I wrote on it what I actually wanted to do, “Work on my writing project – 1 hr.” and slapped it onto my phone’s face.

Now, if I gravitated toward that rectangular black hole, I would hopefully have a visual interruption to break its pull and stop my automatic checking. I put the phone in the living room and set a timer on the microwave. I would still be able to hear any potential emergency breakthrough calls from family, but I needed to get that sucker out of my peripheral vision, and

away
from
my
body.

Time to attempt something I actually desired to do— write.

To my surprise, that worked that day. And the positive takeaway gave me an itsy boost to try again. Over the next few days and weeks, I found myself creating more little experiments of various types and time periods. I didn’t always make it to the set time, but overall, I was checking the phone less often and doing more of what I really wanted or needed.

I hoped to keep this ongoing experiment light and would include little notes for short playful appointments like, Cloud-Gazing – 5 minutes, or, Write a letter to my friend – 15 minutes, in between longer ones. I started wearing my old analog wrist watch more often so I could have a sense of the time without checking it on my phone.

At the November gathering of The Creativity Café, I decided I wanted to color a larger phone cover, or PhoneNap, as I later called it, that I could reuse and that made me smile. I experimented and came up with a design prototype which led me to make these guys. I used sturdier background paper and a rubber band to hold them in place.

I messed around with some colors and borders and left a blank space for the desired activity and timeframe. Then I wrote some little sticky notes to use as needed.

Do you also have a tiny bit of a tough time staying away from your phone, even when you don’t actively want it? Go easy on yourself with this. Make your PhoneNap as simple as you like. It doesn’t need to be a big project. That first sticky note I used was an effective crowbar in getting my phone out of my hand. Use whatever works for you. For me lately, it’s been more fun to cast my phone aside when there is a playful doodley aspect to the experiment.

After thinking on this idea for a while, I let myself go kinda go wild with the pencils. I was actually starting to burn through a bit of my daughter’s set of colors, which meant I really just needed to buy my own, right? Do it for the children, Bethany.

Have I mentioned, you don’t have to include any words on the paper? Sometimes just pulling the blanket over the phone is enough to remind you that there are other things you’d rather do. (Like play around in the paint box?)

Of course, some mediums are messy and might smear. I don’t advise using anything that might damage the phone or anything else. (And I’m wondering if there is a way to waterproof my watercolor ones.)

More Variations & Notes

• To help save some paper, one could reuse pieces found around the house. A cut-up cereal box or something in the junk mail could have a beautiful second life as your next PhoneNap.
• I made a simple envelope to store the little paper slips in. One could decorate the other side of it to create a 2-in-1 paper holder/PhoneNap.
• You could list a few favorite activities to leave on your paper permanently and just keep a sticky little arrow to point to the one you want to try at the moment. Or use the rubber band that is holding the paper onto your phone to underline the one thing you intend to do while your phone naps.
• Do what flows nicely for you which may be something altogether different. I’m looking forward to hearing whatever ideas you have about this!

Your Turn

What kind of PhoneNap do you wish for? What colors make you smile? What would you really love to do, even for 10-15 minutes today in place of some phone time? Raising a coffee mug to you and your break!

Post photo by Steve Hodgson, Creative Commons license via Flickr. PhoneNaps and post by Bethany Rohde. Photography by C. Rohde and Bethany Rohde.

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