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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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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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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: Marjorie Maddox and “Hover Here” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

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 J.R.R. Tolkien, Motorcars, and “The Bovadium Fragments” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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

The post Seven Tips for Researching Family Heritage appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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!

The post Poetry Club Tea Date ✨ What Did You Do Last Week? appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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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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: Seth Wieck and “Call Out Coyote” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

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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: 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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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 Brown and “I Don’t Usually But” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

The post Poet Laura: Written in March appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

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: Emily Patterson and “The Birth of Undoing” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

Explore More “Words to Travel By” Posts

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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 Pass the Crawfish Etouffee and the Boiled Shrimp! appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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

The post What Is a Simile? appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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

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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.

The post Poet Laura: Month of Fevers appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

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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: 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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“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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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.

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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: 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.

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 Noir Poetry: Kenneth Fearing and Weldon Kees appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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.

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 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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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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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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“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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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.

See all Words to Travel By posts…

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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

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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One can visit Europe in lots of ways — cruise ship on the rivers, cruise ship on the ocean, bus, car, backpacking, bicycle, airplane, even on foot. I don’t know exactly how poet Linda Nemec Foster has visited Europe, but her 2024 collection Bone Country shows she has at least visited in prose poetry.

Bone Country is not a travelogue or tourist guide. Instead, it’s a deep dive into people, history, major upheavals, and small events. She watches a man with a spiked mohawk drink tea in Istanbul. An artist from Serbia insists he’s painted her face. She watches undercover policewomen and ghosts among the trees in Warsaw.

And she goes on, to Krakow and southern Poland, Bratislava, Lithuania, the Jewish ghetto in Prague in 1942, and Zurich and the Alps. She watches the indigo sky in Spain and the waterfalls in Silesia. A man scatters the ashes of his wife on Lake Geneva. She remembers the last place she saw her friend Lara in Vienna. She has a series of short postcards (Foster calls them “foreign subplots”) from the United Kingdom, Holland, Belarus, and Ukraine, and later follows them up with a poem entitled “Postcards” with short paragraphs about different locations.

Some of the poems seem like short fiction; “Lipstick in Geneva” describes a woman discovering the price of a cosmetic in a place that caters to the wealthy. One observes the hotel maid in Bialystok who takes all day to make a bed. Some of the poems seem only too real — being called out of the security check line at the Zurich airport; getting your rental car stuck in the lake district of Italy; finding fake Tex-Mex in the Polish mountains.

What all the poems have in common is a richness of language. Foster uses words extraordinarily well to place the reader right into the scene. Here she watches a young woman, possibly her daughter, seated in the Colosseum in Rome, drawing nearby pine trees, with the view framed by an arch.

The Daughter Draws the Pines of Rome

The daughter who rarely talks to her mother sits in the
Colosseum, surrounded by the silence of the past. She
likes the indifference of history, the cool reticence of the
ancient marble that has witnessed so much pageantry and
spectacle, so much pain and blood, but still maintains its
distance. A distance she doesn’t have to bridge. From her
vantage point, she can see a grove of Roman pines across
from the amphitheater. The archway perfectly frames one
particular tree. As if the monument’s anonymous architect
placed his building at this intersection of stone and air
just to capture the tree for this woman in the distant 21st
century. In turn, she tries to capture it on the empty page
of her notebook. The pale white comes alive with her pen
and ink sketch: the thin trunk, the symmetrical umbrella
of dense branches. She draws the tree as an answer to the
question she knows her mother will ask back home.

Linda Nemec Foster

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.

Bone Country is set entirely in Europe, but it’s less about the sites and more about the people, natives and tourists alike, inhabiting the landscapes. Foster has a fine eye for imaging stories and real events, and you may come away with a better understanding of a place than what you find in travel guides.

Photo by H Mathew Howarth, 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: Linda Nemec Foster and “Bone Country” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Says Dr. Alison Habens, in an article about the Greek muses,

‘Inspiration’ was the breathing-in by the poet of fumes from an intoxicating cauldron, the Awen of the cauldron of Ceridwen, containing probably a mash of barley, acorns, honey, bull’s blood and such sacred herbs as ivy, hellebore and laurel as at Delphi.”

That sounds a little dubious, except maybe the honey. We do have an interest in acorns, wanting to add them, in flour form, to our stroll through the flours.

Also, fumes might not be what you’re looking to breathe in. Maybe… steam, fragrance, dancing fog?

All of this can be the basis for your first poem of the year on Inspiration. Let’s try!

Your Turn: Inspiration Poetry Prompt

Inspiration can begin in many ways. In this post, we’re exploring the idea of breathing in as the start. Write a poem that focuses on that breathing in process. What will you breathe in? You can use the images that surround Ceridwen’s cauldron. Or you can explore ordinary items in your own home or region. Or something else. We look forward to reading your Inspiration poems!

Photo by Sergey N, Creative Commons, via Unsplash. Art by Mary Wallace. Used with permission. Post by L.L. Barkat.

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What do you do when you’re sick, as in bedridden sick? Poet Erin O’Luanaigh did what many of us do – read a lot of books and watch a lot of television. She also did what many of us might not do – she used her experience to write poetry.

O’Luanaigh had an illness in childhood that confined her to her bed for a considerable period. It was so serious that many of the adults thought she might not survive. But she did, and during the illness and recovery she read some of the great works of literature. She also had a grandfather who loved old movies, and together they watched a considerable number of classic films from the 1930s and 1940s.

The child survived the illness, and she remembered what she read and what she watched. And she put that experienced to good use when she wrote what would become her first poetry collection, Avail: Poems.

The term “ekphrastic” refers to a work or art (or a poem) based upon or inspired by another work of art. O’Luanaigh’s poems are not ekphrastic, although you might be tempted to think that when she writes a poem inspired by a poem or a work of literature. The experience of her illness meant that those works became part of her own experience, her own frame of reference, and her own being, and so they move far beyond description.

Take the 1940 movie His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It was the second movie version of the 1928 play The Front Page. The film itself is considered a classic romantic comedy and would eventually give way to more plays, more movies (The Front Page in 1974 starring Walter Matthau, for example), and the cited inspiration for Lois Lane in Superman. That 1940 film entered our cultural consciousness as much as it did O’Luanaigh’s. This is what she did with it.

His Girl Friday

She loves him in a loathsome sort of way
gives one last sigh for life in Albany,
and at the fade, decides that she will stay.

He fixed it so she couldn’t get away,
played his Svengali act for comedy.
She loves him in a loathsome sort of way.

He jammed the presses, framed her fiancé
with phony dough, a tawdry mashing spree—
but by the fade, she knows that she will stay.

He trotted out every newsroom cliché:
“For truth! For freedom of the press! For me!”
She love shim in a loathsome sort of way.

Their bickering is, after all, just play.
She shows her decoy lover to a taxi
before the fade. She knew that she would stay.

When lust settles down, hate saves the day;
divorce can cure a marriage’s ennui.
She loves him in a loathsome sort of way,
and at the fade, admits that she will stay.

She does something similar with the life Judy Garland in her poem “Frances Gumm” (Garland’s real name). That’s followed by poems for Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man) and Weekend in Connecticut (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne).

That’s only the introduction. She then moves to a series of poems bearing the heading “Avail,” the collection’s title. The prose poems play with the meaning of avail and how similar and dissimilar it is to the word “veil.” She then takes us back for a return to the movies with Barbara Stanwyck and Rita Hayworth. It’s almost dizzying to read how O’Luanaigh whirls us through images of saints, movie stars, skyscrapers, and road trips.

Avail is one of most unusual and arresting poetry collections I’ve read.

Erin O’Luanaigh

O’Luanaigh’s poems have been published in several literary journals and magazines, including The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, Subtropics, The Hopkins Review, the Los Angeles Review, and others. She received her MFA degree from the University of Florida, and she’s currently a Ph.D. student in English Literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. At the University of Utah, she’s a Steffensen Cannon Fellow and the senior poetry editor of Quarterly West. She is the co-host of the film and literature podcast (sub)Text, and she lives in Salt Lake City. (And she’s also a jazz singer.)

Avail will take you into the world of film and literature, translated into poetry. It’s a striking collection, one that resonates over and over. Or, as O’Luanaigh writes, “Resemblances are / just the shadows of differences…The end / of my world is the beginning of yours.”

Photo by Pai Shih, 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: Erin O’Luanaigh and “Avail” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

“To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

A walk in January can be lovely too, if climate and terrain allow for it. My personal and creative motto, thanks to Diogenes, is solvitur ambulando—it is solved by walking. Poems often arise on my morning walk from something I see, hear, remember, or from an interaction with someone along the way. Perhaps the repetitive motion of footsteps shakes something loose. Some morning-walkers look at their phones, others wear headphones as well. I can’t imagine foregoing birdsong and landscape to get a jump on a day that will surely be filled with interruptions and claims for my attention. The outdoor time with the rising sun belongs to me. I am lucky to live in a place where the weather is seldom too foul for walking, but sometimes there is threat in the air.

Field Notes: Peninsula in January

A foretaste of spring on waterfowl wings
*
Heron builds nest in the lone coral tree others in palm after palm.
*
Three days of sun a tsunami warning a bit of rain.
*
The sky returns to mottled gray just one day
*
Then angled light dry and bright.
*
—Donna Hilbert, from Enormous Blue Umbrella Moon Tide Press, 2025

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

—Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens, the esteemed modernist poet, was known to write on scraps of paper as he walked to his work as an insurance company executive. I struggled to pick a favorite Stevens poem to include here. There are so many that I love and so many separate lines are constant companions, as is the first line of “Of Mere Being.”

Of Mere Being 

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

—Wallace Stevens

On my Sunday Morning Walk, I am Reminded of Wallace Stevens

Palm tree frond and heron wing are one,
or so it seems to me from where I stand.
Palm tree temple, heron priest,
and I, a congregant, alone.

—Donna Hilbert, from Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022

There are palm trees on my walk around the bay, and birds aplenty, though their feathers are not fire-fangled. I do love to see them catch the morning sun, or rain or whatever gift the day offers.

Surprise Gift

Someone else’s hurricane
became our wind and rain.

It soaked the thirsty garden,
dumped leaves in heaps

from the roof. This morning,
tired clouds spread like scars

across the wounded sky.
The air is warm and close

but here, a ribbon of cool
glides across my ankles,

redolent of moist dirt,
damp leaves, sage.

I lace my shoes, join

dark streets wet with rain,

seek pleasure in the spoils
of someone else’s hurricane.

—Tamara Madison

Your Turn

If you are able, make a daily walk a part of your writing practice. Leave your headphones at home. Walk deliberately, inhabit your environment. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell?

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

The post Poet Laura: January Field Notes appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

It’s usually worthwhile to pay attention to the small things in life. Seeds. Ducks, Monarch butterflies. Tomatoes. The weather report (admittedly, that small thing can sometimes be a big thing.)

Amelia Friedline

Poet Amelia Friedline certainly pays attention to the small things. And she writes about them in a thoughtful and considered way. She’s assembled some 53 of them in her first collection, In Media Res. She explains her title in a footnote to the title poem. Translated from the Latin, it means “into the middle of things.” But it is also a narrative device to open a story in the middle instead of the chronological beginning.

And that’s what this collection does 0=– it opens in the middle of the story she’s telling, and Friedline is telling a story with the poems. Small things matter.

She makes soup. She waits for springtime. She keeps an eye on this year’s slow-blooming forsythia. She plants too many daffodils (and won’t apologize for it). She reads words that make her heart leap. She starts her day with a list of good intentions and finishes with the sole accomplishment of squashing a fruit fly. She hears someone singing and is startled to discover it’s herself. She finds a poem waiting for her in the day’s coffee grounds. And there’s a starlit night and the color of wheat fields.

This is where most of us find ourselves each day. In the small things. Although I can’t say I’ve ever dreamed about ducks or milking cows, but I do know a little about baking bread.

Dreaming of Brown Ducks

when my heart is restless
i find myself dreaming of brown ducks
and mild-eyed cows
and the cinnamon-colored stripe
between the shoulder blades
of the cotton-tailed rabbits munching clover,
as if the life bucolic did not come
with red-tailed hawks and foxes
and five-o’clock milkings in the frigid dark;
as though the cure for what ails me
could be found in the sheer tilling of the soil
or the kneading, resting, stretching, shaping,
baking of dough for bread.

Friedline in an editor, writer, poet, and photographer (In Media Res includes some wonderful photographs). She writes for Cultivating Oaks Press and her blog Dispatches to Jack at Substack. She lives with her family in the Kansas City area.

I wasn’t simply charmed by Friedline’s poems; I was enchanted. In Media Res is a slender volume; I wanted to read more from this poet self-described as “a woman with / the prairie in her heart / and roots as deep as switchgrass.” (In case you’re wondering, the roots of switchgrass can be five to 10 feet deep, and often deeper.) This collection is a small thing, yes, but it’s also a small wonder.

Photo by Missie, 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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Brett Foster (1973-2015) was a professor of English at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago. He was a Renaissance scholar, anthology editor, and a poet. He had been Wheaton’s Poet in Residence since 2005. He was known for his work on William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Renaissance Rome. He had been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

He received his B.A. degrees in English and journalism from the University of Missouri, where he met his wife. And the man was born in Kansas. You have to be a native of Missouri or Kansas to know just how contrary it is for a Kansan to attend a college in Missouri, and vice versa. The enmity is a legacy of the pre-Civil War “bleeding Kansas” battles over slavery. He did receive his masters in English from Boston University and his Ph.D. from Yale.

Brett Foster

At the time of his death, he had published one full poetry collection, The Garbage Eater (2011) and a chapbook, Fall Run Road (2011). He was working on a new collection, Extravagant Rescues, at the time of his death. It was eventually published in 2019. His poems had been included in numerous anthologies and published in such literary journals as Anglican Theological Review, Books & Culture, Bostonia, The Christian Century, Harvard Review, and Yale Review.

I started reading Extravagant Rescues without knowing any of this background or even that Foster had died in 2015. But as soon as I started reading the introduction by Jeffrey Galbraith, a colleague of Foster’s at Wheaton College, I knew I was reading a man’s final published work. I’m of an age when you don’t take understanding something like that lightly. He was working on these poems when he knew he would not see the publication of the collection. It’s safe to assume that he would be focused on the important rather than the secondary or the superfluous. As I read the collection, I could see that is exactly what he did.

While the poems are diverse, two related themes emerge – love and family. He recalls his own youth, like visiting Times Square with friends for the first time and his favorite Bollywood film, he abruptly shots to his wife’s delivery-room video and memories of pictures taken with a Polaroid camera. He remembers his first apartment as a newlywed and living almost hand to mouth from wedding gifts (that resonated; been there, done that). And he recalls a visit to the in-laws.

Recovery, Gulf Coast

Visiting in-laws outside Corpus Christi,
I feel whole again, healthy in swell weather.
silent in this deck chair near the mesquite.
Chicago and the snow seem far from here,
my hacking cough that fogged the windshield.
Calm prevails like sailboats off the balmy bay.
Not this place only, but because everyday
recedes against the yard’s edge. Then the children—!
They play behind me, where it laps the curb.
Buoyant in their running bodies, our two squeal
in sweaty chorus with the neighbor kids,
who all have lovely names: Celeste, Camille,
Chloe. Three graces: zealous, undisturbed.
Or heavenly virtues: trio fresh from hiding.

He continues to write of more recent memories, the children, and experiences he and his wife had, like teaching at Oxford. Slowly you come to realize that he is writing it all down, not for him to remember but for his family to read, remember, and know. His one foray with a “nature poem” is what he observes looking from a plane window west of San Diego, and it’s less about nature than it is about returning. And he wishes his wife, his great love, goodnight, in what seems more like a wistful goodbye (that one nearly broke me).

The final poem is addressed to the reader. Entitled “Horatian Valediction,” the poem says this isn’t the time for “deeper, troubled things,” nor for “lyrical greatness.” Instead, Foster writes this:

I sing simply of Love, of grace, and those graces
who are your friends, warm with life and giving
you grief, playfully—these late evenings in December.
And I sing of such beautiful people, even closer,
Safe and asleep nearby, here and there, her
and her and him, so pleasing
and peace be with them,
and you, too, Reader, you too.

It’s something any of us might want for our valedictory. Not fame, not great poetry, not spectacular teaching or accomplishment or awards or honors, but the love we had for those closest to us, and for our readers.

Related:

Letters from Brett: A Poet and Professor Remembered Ten Years Later – Aaron Brown at Relief Journal.

Brett Foster, 1973-2015 – Anthony Domestico at Commonweal Magazine.

Photo by Maja Dumat, 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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The world’s great poets not only wrote poetry still read and studied today; they also helped to shape the culture of their countries and, indeed, what we call Western civilization. Consider the greats of Greece and Rome — Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and others. The great poets of English include Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Germany has its Goethe. Russia has Pushkin. And Italy has Dante.

Many others belong to the category of “great poets,” of course, but as poet and author Paul Krause points out in his Dante’s Footsteps: Poems and Reflections of Poetry, it was poets and their works of poetry who led the way in language, culture, and ways of thinking and expression.

One brief example cited by Krause: The Greek word agape is well known in historic Christianity as the highest form of love. It is love that is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. The word comes from the Greek, and it was Homer who first used it and, Krause says, perhaps invented it.

Paul Krause

Krause is editor-in-chief of the VoegelinView, an online arts and humanities published by the Eric Voegelin Society. When I first saw the society’s name, it struck a note in my mind: I should know this, or at least I should know who Voegelin was.

A quick search immediately explained my why it was familiar. Voegelin was an Austrian professor who fled Europe when Hitler came to power; he was an ardent anti-Nazi and would have been imprisoned if not killed had he stayed. He landed at my alma mater, Louisiana State University, where he taught from 1942 to 1958, and he was LSU’s very first Boyd professor, which was (and remains) the university’s highest teaching designation. LSU even established its own Eric Voegelin Institute in 1987.

Krause’s poems and essays reflect Voegelin’s teachings, which were dedicated to the study of political violence and devastation from totalitarian regimes. But they move well beyond the world of politics and embrace the traditions of Western civilization. Yes, Voegelin believed in “great books.” So does Krause. So do many of us involved in the reading and enjoyment of poetry.

The poems of Dante’s Footsteps are as much in homage to the great poets as they are inspired by them. Krause is writing in the Western tradition. One is tempted to place them within New Formalism, but they really reach back to the great poems (and poets) of earlier centuries.

He writes about seasons and nature. He includes ballads that tell stories. He writes about culture, including a wonderful poem about the destruction of Troy (“The Song of Aeneas”). He becomes metaphysical with poems inspired by Milton. And there’s the title poem:

Dante’s Footsteps

I met a pilgrim as if by fate
While so far from Beauty’s grace.
Two shadows crossed on the sand
But I, face down, saw but land.

My heavy painful days never end
Trapped in darkness without friends,
Underneath rock and thunder,
Wailing screams without wonder.

Love ripped from my heart due to pride,
Heavenly steps crossed my side.
Theirs the walk of Love’s duty
Bringing forth light and beauty.

Echoes now of those footsteps weary
Climbing towards Mother Mary.
But I’m stuck in transgression
Eternally cut off from heaven.

The reflections or essays section of the work includes a discussion of Homer’s “epic of love,” “Virgil and the Christian Imagination,” and one with the intriguing title of “Dante in the Digital Inferno.” “In our digital age,” Krause writes, “Dante is once again journeying through hell. This time without Virgil as a guide of a literate audience knowing his references, allusions, and cultural inheritance.” A final essay discusses the politics of Romantic poetry.

Krause previously published Muses on a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature; The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books; and Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics. He is a frequent writer on the arts, classics, literature, music, religion, and other subjects for newspapers, magazines, and journals.

Dante’s Footsteps is both a worthy work on its own and a reminder that we disregard or toss aside our Western culture and civilization at our peril. The great poets provided the intellectual and spiritual framework for our Western culture, and they continue to be worthy of reading, studying, and appreciating.

Photo by Lenny K Photography, 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 psychosomatic illness is one in which an individual imagines a sickness; it may be as real to the person as a real illness. A somatic illness is a real one, with real symptoms, but it, too, can be associated with a disorder, when the response to the symptoms is out of proportion to the reality.

I’ve been fortunate with not having been directly affected by a relative or friend having been affected by either a psychosomatic or somatic disorder. But I’ve heard of or known people who have. And it’s all too true that just because “it’s only an illness in the mind” doesn’t mean it can be ignored or discounted; the impact on the individual and those around him or her can be devastating.

In her new collection, Somatic: Poems, Ann Keniston explores these illnesses. And she does so from what seems clear as first-hand experience with a close family member. It’s as if a curtain is opened on the life of a family, and you see an illness in all of its pain, disruption, and consequences, both the individual who suffers and close family members.

It’s a rather sobering, rather stunning collection. Keniston writes the reality, without any need to heighten the drama or emphasize the impact.

The collection is divided into four sections.

The first is a group entitled “Lament / Praise: Elegies,” in which she introduces the illness her mother experienced. Included is this poem:

Redundant

I must have loved her weakness
when she began to weaken
when everyone was harmed
the humiliations exposed themselves
some daily and mundane humiliations
too expensive to contain
inside I found a seed
like seeds embedded in a raspberry
like a bird with a broken wing
as if what were valuable had been broken
as if what is costly has been repaired
the cost is holding secrets in
as if the parts could be glued
the glued-together parts exist
so I can make an elegy
so I can write an ode
an ode entwined around unloveliness
an elegy untethered
detached from its object.

While poetry doesn’t provide an explanation of how or why, poetry can serve as a means of separation and understanding, “detached from its object.”

The next section is “Displacement: Odes,” followed by “Symptomatic: Anna’s Arias,” and “Assemblage: Odes.” Keniston connects the idea of an operatic aria to hysteria, because she explains in her introduction, “The aria…strikes me as an especially hysterical form.” Hysteria is how symptoms of these illnesses often manifest themselves.

Ann Keniston

Keniston, a professor of English ar the University of Nevada-Reno, previously published The Caution of Human Gestures: Poems and the chapbook November Wasps: Elegies. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, Water-Stone, and Literary Imagination, among others. She’s received numerous grants and fellowships and has held residencies at the CAMAS Arts Center in France, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Blue Mountain Center. She also served as coeditor of The New American Poetry of Engagement: a 21st Century Anthology.

Somatic is one of the most structured poetry collections I’ve read. It’s as if the science of illness and its symptoms have been poured into various poetic forms. Keniston has accomplished something intriguing and profound here, using poetry to explain and amplify conditions which are still difficult to grasp.

Photo by , 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

The post Poets and Poems: Ann Keniston and “Somatic” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

“All that we behold is full of blessings.” William Wordsworth

We are in the season of giving thanks and giving gifts, and I am considering the forms that each might take. I am grateful that I live in a place where the weather is generally benign and I can begin my day with a walk. If I am out early, I watch the brown pelicans fly over the peninsula where I live. A group of pelicans is variously known by one of the following: brief, pod, pouch, scoop, or squadron. I had favored squadron, because looking through the telescopic lens of my phone’s camera, from the path I normally walk, I assumed that the birds I saw forming a line at the jetty were pelicans, perhaps young ones, waiting for their turn to fly.

On the first Sunday of the return of Pacific Standard Time, I got up early to walk to the jetty itself for sunrise. What I had thought from a distance were pelicans turned out to be Double-crested Cormorants. Though pelicans do fly in formation as if in a squadron, scoop is also descriptive.

Were it not for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, raising the awareness of the effects of DDT, and saving the brown pelican from likely extinction, I would not be musing on a fine fall morning about the perfect collective noun for the pelicans in their brief, pod, pouch, scoop, or squadron, which bring with them the gift of joy every day of the year.

Gratitude

For the brown pelican
diving into morning ocean,
I thank you, Rachel Carson.

—Donna Hilbert, from Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022

An added pleasure of this morning walk is the casual chat of the fishermen who are also up with the sun. They offer live bait to one another, offer directions to other spots where the fishing is good. One fellow wishes me a blessed morning. I wish him the same. The day begins with kindness.

Kindnesses 

You hand me the cup of coffee,
fresh brewed, as I walk into the kitchen
just awake in my stockinged feet.

Each night when I brush my teeth
my toothbrush has been charged
because you switch out the plugs each day.

When you go to the store
how often do you come home
with something just for me—
this week, It’s It Mini Ice Cream Sandwiches.

The tile patio table I write on
passed along to us by an acquaintance
because she knew we liked it.

The hickory rake for the rock garden,
the sloped writing desk in the back bedroom,
both made by our friend, just for me, just for us.

I take the ingredients out—gnocchi, spinach,
grated parmesan and mozzarella cheese—
and make dinner. Yesterday,
the day after the election and the country fell,

I sent texts—I love you—to my brother, my mom.
I laughed with a friend last night on Facetime.
Put the trash bags in the can unasked.

Gathered the redwood needles
swept from the tree in yesterday’s wind.
The sun rises each morning,

some days breaking through the clouds,
some days not. But it’s there,
even during the most devastating storms
the sun is there, above the clouds, it rises and falls.

Just this morning I watched a monarch butterfly
drink from a Cosmos daisy.

—LeeAnn Pickrell, from Gathering the Pieces of Days

Some of my favorite gifts were given to me by loved ones. The rock painted red by my son when he was in elementary school, the witty and beautiful Valentine’s Day card from my late husband where he declared his love for me is even greater than his love for our beautiful Standard Poodle. And then, there is the costume jewelry that once belonged to my aunt and to my mother, and a few pieces from friends whom I hold dear, some still on terra firma, some not. Here is a favorite poem that beautifully expresses the potential longevity of a gift given with love.

Glimmers As They Go

One by one
my linchpins
are subtracted.
Pieces of jewelry,
pendants and earrings,
remind me of those
who gave them:
Janet, Jeanie, Lynn,
Roger, Mom.
When I flash
their bits of brightness
at my throat, in ears,
do they gleam again?
I cling to them,
my wire turtles, beads,
abalone sweater clasps,
yellow corncobs of fertility,
rosewood amulet
that broke apart,
I shine them,
bring them often
into light.

—Penelope Moffet

Kindness in Winter 

Young Scarlet stands in deepening snow—
where she knows the doe
knows she has stood
before—at the edge of the wood.
The doe turns her ears toward the soft, recognizable sound
in the snow on the ground.

She listens from far in the wood—
and from a place of long ago. Good
Scarlet feeds the gentle doe
red apples in the twinkling snow.

—Sally Nacker, from Kindness in Winter

Your Turn

What are your favorite gifts to give or receive? For what are you grateful?

Post and post photos by Donna Hilbert. Featured image by @ S@ndrine, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Poems used with permission.

The post Poet Laura: Pelican brief, pod, pouch, scoop, or squadron appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poet Luci Shaw died last week, age 96. She would have turned 97 on Dec. 29. The news prompted an outpouring of memories, comments, shared experiences, and posts about how important she’d been in the lives of so many poets and writers.

I never met Luci, and yet it seems like she was an old friend. I never thought of her as a mentor, and yet she influenced my own writing.

Luci Shaw

I knew Luci Shaw by reading her poetry. And I read her poetry because I visited a place that knew her and that she knew.

For some five or six years, I was one of the writers who contributed to The High Calling, an online publication of the Butt Foundation. Its retreat center was, and remains, Laity Lodge, in the Hill Country of Texas not far from Kerrville (or an hour or so from San Antonio). Laity Lodge had a small bookstore, and it was there I discovered Luci Shaw, her poetry and her non-fiction writing.

I came away with two of her books in hand, The Crime of Living Cautiously and a poetry collection, Harvesting Fog. Perhaps it was significant that I read the non-fiction book first; it served as an unintended introduction to her poetry.

Harvesting Fog became one of those seminal events. Tweetspeak Poetry editor L.L. Barkat selected it as the prompt source for one of our Twitter poetry jams. We’d had several by that time (2011), but this was one different. Barkat convinced Luci to participate, helped her create an account on Twitter, and showed her how the slams worked. And participate she did, a bit tentatively at first as I remember, then, getting the hang of it, with all the gusto of a Twitter jam pro.

The result was “The Cinnamon Beetle,” a series of six posts on Tweetspeak that presented all the tweets assembled as poems. I was the assembler; I participated in the jam itself, but my main role was editing the mass of tweets into poems. I took special care to make sure Luci’s lines were included. And she had some good ones; it was as if she was amplifying her own words from the prompts. I’ve included links to all six posts below.

That same year, Laura Boggess, another High Calling alum and writer here at Tweetspeak, hosted a book discussion of Luci’s Breath for the Bones. It’s wonderful work in which she describes how she sees the interaction between art, imagination, and the sacred.

We never met face-to-face, but that experience cemented by interest in her poetry. I featured one of her poems for National Poetry Month in 2011; I went on to review four of her collections: Scape, The Generosity, Reversing Entropy, and her final collection, An Incremental Life.

What did I find in her poems? A deep appreciation of the sacred in nature. A focused precision in how she used words; every word mattered. The connections between the temporal and the eternal. What you notice as you age that you pay little attention to when you’re younger.

This is one of Luci’s poems that we featured here, in which she explains how a poem enters her mind.

How It Happens

When the words begin to arrive in my mind,
like tourists with cameras primed for the views,
they show up to be introduced. Yesterday they
arrived late morning, bringing with them
bunches of exotic wildflowers and birds
with songs like bells ringing. For snacks, they
unpacked fragrant fruit to be nibbled
under the jacaranda trees. I inhaled their syllables’
soft breath, allowing them time to simmer into
some crisp internal identity, some fresh, surprising
sound or color. The words arrive visible,
like dandelion seeds that speak themselves into the air.
Then, surprise, a fresh phrase shows up,
tingling, excited to be invited, welcomed to
the party. I begin to sense the phrases thinking back
at me, thinking me in a sweet, internal colloquy—
interested in how our words sound
when spoken together into the bright air.
This is how my mind disputes amicably with
itself, one of the ways creation happens,
how freshness breaks in. How a new, crunchy
poem can begin, impatient, demanding to be
written down. And that is how a poem happens.

Luci didn’t only write poetry. For many years, she was an editor at Radix Magazine, helping discover and publish other writers. She also established the Luci Shaw Writer’s Fellowship at the Chrysostom Society. She saw encouraging young writers as part of her own art.

Many people knew Luci as a friend, a mentor, an inspiration, and an encourager. I knew her as a poet. She leaves her poetry and writing as a legacy, not only of herself but to all of us. We all have much to be grateful for.

Related:

The Cinnamon Beetle: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

In Conversation with Luci Shaw – Ben Palant at The Rabbit Room.

Photo by Missie, 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 The Poetry of Luci Shaw appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

50 States of Generosity: Indiana

We’re continuing a series at Tweetspeak—50 States of Generosity, in which we highlight the 50 states of America and give people beautiful ways to understand and be generous with one another by noticing the unique and poetic things each state brings to the country. A more generous people in the States can become a more generous people in the world. We continue with Indiana.

***

Nickname: Hoosier State State Capital: Indianapolis State Bird: Cardinal State Flower: Peony State Insect: Firefly State Fossil: Mastodon State Colors: Blue and Gold State Motto: The Crossroads of America Song: On the Banks of the Wabash State Poem: Indiana

Years ago, a notice appeared in the local paper that read, “The Amish Have Moved to Charlotte.” That would have been my husband’s early relatives who moved to southern Michigan from Indiana’s Amish country. Every year that side of the family gathered for a reunion in Topeka—until one by one their numbers dwindled. For a while, they met in a local park, but the last time we went, the few still living gathered in an old farmhouse—and brought their scrapbooks and stories. I especially enjoyed driving through the countryside, meeting horses and buggies and seeing so many parked in the yard of whoever was hosting church that Sunday. My husband’s parents would sometimes drive 80 miles south just to have supper in Middlebury. We assume they went to the Essenhaus. The current extensive menu lists nearly 30 kinds of pies. His folks would not have winced at a drive that far just for the pie. Also, I can’t count how many goodies I brought home from trips to the flea market in Shipshewana. Our niece once lived in Terra Haute—which she called “Terrible Hole, Uglyana.” I’m not sure what led to that, but I do know that we did not take advantage of exploring this wonderful state even when we lived so close.

Native American tribes inhabited Indiana for thousands of years until the first Europeans arrived in the 1670s and claimed the area for France. France occupied for about 80-plus years when Great Britain took control after the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). About twenty years later, after the American Revolutionary War, Britain ceded the entire trans-Allegheny region, including what is now Indiana, to the newly-formed United States. The whole area was divided into several territories, the largest of which was called the Northwest Territory—which was later divided into even smaller territories, the first becoming Indiana Territory in 1800. Then on December 11, 1816, Indiana became the nineteenth state. Indianapolis AKA “Indy” with the official slogan of the “Crossroads of America” as the capital. The city is located along the west fork of the White River that branches off from the Wabash, the state river of Indiana and subject of the state song, On the Banks of the Wabash. The song was written by Indiana composer Paul Dresser (brother of writer Theodore Dreiser) and has some interesting stories. The river also inspired songs like The Wabash Cannonball and Back Home Again in Indiana—sung traditionally at the Indianapolis 500.

Indiana borders Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west, and is the 38th largest state. Northern Indiana is flat and rolling, mostly farmland, with sand dunes along Lake Michigan. The northwest corner is actually part of the Chicago metropolitan area with nearly a million residents, but one can find “sand and solitude” at Indiana Dunes National Park and Indiana Dunes State Park (where you can see some of the largest beaver dams in the state and “learn all about nature’s engineers.”)

Central Indiana has hills and valleys and is the most populous of the three regions. It includes Indianapolis and our niece’s favorite—Terre Haute, where there is a small Holocaust museum—CANDLES (an acronym for Children of Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors), founded by Eva Mozes Kor, who survived twin experimentation at Auschwitz. There’s also the state “Bird” of Indiana’s museum. Central Indiana also includes several major universities including Ball State, Butler, Purdue, Indiana State, Indiana University (Indianapolis campus), and Indiana Wesleyan. Tippecanoe County is trisected by the Wabash River, Tippecanoe River and Wildcat Creek. What to do in Tippecanoe? Check it out!

Southern Indiana is a mixture of farms, forests, and hills. The “Knobs” is a series of 1000-foot hills that run parallel to the Ohio River and are worth a look-see. You might find me wandering around in the Hoosier National Forest, a 200,000-acre nature preserve, or checking out some caverns and caves.

Residents of the state are known as Hoosiers, but how that came to be is a little uncertain. Some think it may have been introduced by folks who migrated from the Southern states and used in their dialect to refer to someone from the hills or a woodsman, maybe derived from the word “hoozer.” Some have suggested that early Indiana settlers might have questioned “Who’s here?” when a visitor arrived and that those words just morphed into “hoosier.” The poet James Whitcomb Riley claimed the term originated from tavern brawls where ears were bitten off, prompting a finder to question “Whose ear?” the morning after. (I like that story best.) At any rate, the name was in common use by the 1830s and gained popularity with the publication of John Finley’s poem, “The Hoosier’s Nest” in 1833. Although it may have been seen as a derogatory term, Indianians embraced it as a source of pride that represented traits like friendliness, neighborliness, and contentment with the Indiana landscape and lifestyle. There’s even a “condition” termed “Hoosier Hysteria” that refers to the excitement surrounding basketball. Supposedly James Naismith (who invented the game in Massachusetts) said in 1925, “basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport.” Indiana is home to the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and the WNBA’s Indiana Fever (now starring Caitlin Clark.) In 1986, Gene Hackman played a coach in a movie called Hoosiers which was based (loosely) on a 1954 Indiana high school boys’ basketball tournament.

Speaking of Hoosiers—I have one. A cabinet that is. It once belonged to my husband’s great-grandparents, and his parents gave it to us many years back. We had it refinished, and it once stood in our Georgia and Michigan kitchens, but today it greets visitors in the front entry of our Boca Raton home. (I may even hear it whisper, “Who’s here?” when the doorbell rings.) I’ve been unable to locate the maker’s mark, but it could have been made by any one of several Indiana companies. The first kitchen workstation was created and sold by the Sellers Company in 1888, and eventually several Indiana companies also built them. By 1920, the Hoosier Manufacturing Company alone had sold about two million of them. Years ago I played with some words based on a prompt from L.L. Barkat’s book God in the Yard.

God, are you in the Hoosier cabinet,
porcelain white and cool
top rolled and history frosted
moved from house to house
to house to barn
to house to house to house
from south to north to south
How did you begin?
Where do you call home?
What stories do you store?

Indiana is a hotbed of creativity. The state not only churned out Hoosier cabinets, but also continues to churn out writers and poets and other creatives. In fact, from about 1880 to 1920 (the same time the cabinets were being built) the state experienced what’s been called The Golden Age of Indiana Literature. Indiana, and especially, Indianapolis, became a publishing and literary center. It produced Hoosier writers like Maurice Thompson, George Ade, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Eggleston, Frank McKinney Hubbard, George Barr McCutcheon, Meredith Nicholson, Gene Stratton Porter, Lew Wallace (Ben Hur: A Tale of Christ – which became the best-selling book of the 19^th century) and James Whitcomb Riley—the most prominent poet of the age. The period also corresponded to growth in other cultural areas including the creation of the Hoosier Group of five Indiana landscape painters.

Indiana continues to support a rich community of creatives. The Poetry Society of Indiana is the state’s official poetry organization, first established as the Indiana State Federation of Poetry Clubs in 1941. They adopted their motto, “Poetry, the crown of literature” and began selecting a Poet Laureate. When the Indiana Senate created the official position of Indiana State Poet Laureate and chose Joyce Brinkman, the group changed their title, selected Peggy Martin as the first official Premium Poet, and rehonored previous Poet Laureates with that title. Nancy Simmons is PSI’s current Premium Poet, and the state’s current Poet Laureate is Curtis L Crisler who created a form of poetry called sonastic—“where a persona poem marries an ekphrastic poem.”

However, there was another who also held the title of Indiana State Poet Laureate. On February 12, 1929, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, E. A. Richardson (“Big Rich”) read his poem “Lincoln, the Hoosier” to the Indiana General Assembly and was voted (though unofficially designated) state poet laureate. (Abraham Lincoln lived in southern Indiana from the time he was 7 until he was 21, and it was where he fell in love with books.)

The sky’s the limit when it comes to Indiana poetry and art. Even the airport is a hub for it, and if you are ever passing through, you should plan on a long layover so you can wander around Concourses A and B. There you can view the Indiana Windows created by British artist Martin Donlon. They are 14 floor-to-ceiling murals that take up 3292 square feet created from more than 2000 hand-blown panes of glass. They feature poems by Hoosier authors. I especially love this one by Norbert Krapf: “Back home on the ground we discover that the gift the great wings gave us is new eyes to see that this place where we live we love more than we know.” There’s also a video exhibit in Concourse A about the legacy of Mari Evans who many consider to be the founder of the Black Arts Movement.

Since it’s hard to choose a favorite poem from zillions of wonderful ones written by Indiana poets, I’ll close this this out with Indiana’s State Poem, written by Arthur Franklin Mapes from Kendallville, Indiana:

Indiana

God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it’s paradise to me,
There’s no haven quite as peaceful,
There’s no place I’d rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on…through paradise.

Seriously, I think our niece should revisit her old stomping grounds. She might gain a new perspective on the Hoosier state.

Photo by Owen Rupp, Creative Commons, via Unsplash. Post by Sandra Heska King.

Poetry Prompt: Indiana Generosities

See if you can create a poem using any of the things you learned about Indiana or maybe about one about a visit if you’ve traveled or even lived there.

More about Indiana: Poets, Writers, Artists, Sights, and Nostalgia

What is a Hoosier?
The Word Hoosier – Indiana Historical Society Publication
The Meanings of Hoosier
Visit Indiana
Indianapolis Cultural Trail – an 8-mile urban trail connecting six cultural districts
The Beautiful Indiana Silver Hills
Top 10 Most Beautiful Places to Visit in Indiana – video
Top 10 Places to Visit Indiana on a Budget – video
Santa Claus Museum and Village
Kurt Vonnegut Library
Indiana Connection: Traces of Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln National Memorial
Michael Jackson Childhood Home (video) in Gary, Indiana
Spirit of Jasper Train
Guide to Airport Art
Martin Donlin – Indiana Windows (Don’t miss the video at the bottom of the page)
National Poetry Month Comes Alive at Indy Airport

HOOSIER CABINETS AND CANNED GOODS

The History and Modern Revival of Hoosier Cabinets: A Timeless Kitchen Classic
Antique Hoosier Cabinet Identification: History and Value Guide
A Pictorial History of the Hoosier Cabinet
Hoosier Poet Canned Goods
Golden Age of Indiana Literature (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis)
The Hoosier’s Nest by John Finley (a reading)

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
James Whitcomb Riley Museum – “The Hoosier Poet”
The Funeral of Beloved Hoosier Poet, James Whitcomb Riley
James Whitcomb Riley: The Children’s Poet
The Raggedy Man – recited by James Whitcomb Riley
The Raggedy Man – Animated recitation

Notable Hoosiers – Artists, Authors, Musicians, Actors, and more
Marcus Mote – Artist
Marcus Mote – painting of a stanza from The Hoosier’s Nest
The Hoosier Group (and where you can see their paintings)
Hoosier Group (Art of Estates)
More on Paul Dresser
Kurt Vonnegut Biography
Our Land, Our Literature – List of Indiana authors
Indiana Writers Center
Indiana’s Current and Past Poets Laureate
Indiana Authors Awards (“Great books are written in Indiana and by Hoosiers”)
A Conversation with Curtis Crisler – (there’s a paragraph about sonastic poetry)
18 Famous Poets From Indiana
IndianaWriters.net – Contemporary Indiana Writers and Writing Exercises
Poetry Society of Indiana
Indiana’s Poets – Indiana Monthly (2015)
Indiana’s Nonfiction Writers – Indiana Monthly (2015)
Indiana’s Fiction Writers – Indiana Monthly (2015)

The post 50 States of Generosity: Indiana appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

It was our 25th anniversary trip – a week in Amsterdam and then a week in Paris. My wife had been to Amsterdam some years before on a business trip; I’d been to neither city.

We arrived early one May morning. It turned out to be Ascension Day, a public holiday in the Netherlands. We’d reserved seats for a shuttle bus, but as we neared the city center, everything looked like an early Sunday morning. Many shops were closed; little traffic was moving on the streets. Our shuttle driver dropped us off across the canal from the hotel; he decided the street wasn’t wide enough to accommodate his (very small) bus.

We had a lot of luggage. I mean, a lot of luggage. Even then, we didn’t really travel; we migrated.

The Hotel Pulitzer was rather famous; it occupied a whole series of canal-fronting houses on the Prinsengracht Canal. Our first trip to our room was easy – we followed the bellman with our luggage. Jet lag prevented us from paying too much attention to our route, except I was vaguely aware that we were walking through a labyrinth of hallways extending across several buildings.

I should have brought string or chalk or something to mark the way, but all we could think about was a nap.

The Prinsengracht Canal; photo via Unsplash.

Neither of us spoke Dutch, but my wife’s experience suggested that knowing the language wasn’t necessary. “Everybody in Amsterdam speaks English,” she said. Friends at work told me the same thing.

What I missed was the context. It was her business associates, and my friends at work, who said everyone spoke English. Everyone did – in the business community. We would quickly learn that, when you’re on a vacation trip, you don’t really come into contact with the business community.

The hotel concierge certainly spoke English, and he spoke it very well. He recommended a restaurant for dinner only a few blocks along the canal. It was called the Café Loreinen and specialized in French and Dutch food. He made reservations for us. Later, we walked through the cool evening, easily found the restaurant, and went in.

We might have been there 10 seconds when we learned that not everyone in Amsterdam speaks English. Certainly, no one in the café did, including the other diners. The menu was in Dutch. Somehow, we ordered, and the meal turned into something delightful, even if we weren’t quite sure what we were eating. But it worked out, and we enjoyed the food. The restaurant enjoyed our credit card.

We soon discovered that it wasn’t only the café where English wasn’t spoken. It was Dutch only at the Amsterdam Museum (but it had a guide printed in English). The Rijksmuseum, with its wonderful art collection, was only marginally better. We communicated in the café by pointing. We found ourselves doing a lot of pointing in the next several days. And taking the short train ride to the Keukenhof Gardens meant navigating the rail station and its chaos. Virtually no English anywhere in the station, so no one could explain why a band of armed Dutch army troops was running in what looked like a chase.

Amsterdam rail station

Late one night, we found a Greek restaurant in the Jordaan, not far from our hotel. The area, now very upscale and gentrified, was then still more of a working-class neighborhood. We walked in, and it was the proverbial movie scene. All conversation stopped, and everyone stared at us. (“Ick! Americans!”) Tourists, apparently, weren’t regular patrons. At least, I hoped that’s what it was. A friendly greeting (in Dutch) from the hostess seemed to dispel suspicions. No one spoke English, and we were soon scanning the Dutch-only menu. But the servers were friendly and gracious. At least, we think they were.

The day of our departure for Paris, the hotel arranged transportation to the rail station. No Dutch soldiers were spotted this time. We were taking the Thalys, the high-speed train to Paris, a three-and-a-half-hour trip with only a stop in Brussels. We did eventually find our car and reserved seats, struggling with our mass of luggage.

I was slightly worried about Paris. “No one speaks English in Paris,” we’d been told, “except Americans.” But I asked myself how bad could it be, after the language surprise of Amsterdam? (The nerve of those Dutch people, speaking Dutch!).

Paris was known, or stereotyped, for surly waiters and disdain for Americans. And our first day in the city, we ran into exactly that. But that’s another story.

Photo by Mark Gunn, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

See all Words to Travel By posts…

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 “Everybody in Amsterdam Speaks English.” Not. appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

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

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

1

“Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.”

—shared by Pauline Beck, from Fog

2

“Out in the garden . . . some old gardener . . . is secretly putting in order.”

—shared by Katie Brewster, from Out in the Garden

3

“sets lanterns
in dark corners”

—shared by LL, from [a letter]

4

“stricken air”

—shared by Megan Willome, from Autumn Music

5

“Whilst the rain is murm‘ring sweetly
As if angels echoing”

—shared by Bethany R., from Shooting Stars

6

“a cat at the foot of the bed, noncommittal….”

—shared by Sandra Fox Murphy, from Cat in the Night

7

“I roam the city
murmuring I am

young, my heart is strong,
and I can take it.”

—shared by Maureen Doallas, from Westward

8

“I tremble at the world—lavender,
crickets, alyssum, and suffering.”

—shared by Bethany R., from The Self, Unrivered

9

“The fog slips ghostlike into a thousand rooms,
Whirls over sleeping faces,
Spins in an atomy dance round misty street lamps;
And blows in cloudy waves over open spaces”

—shared by Maureen Doallas, from The House of Dust

10

“The leaves still fall
like the notes from the harp”

—shared by Bethany R., from Autumn Music

Photo by Yevhen Buzuk, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.

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

Sometimes I find myself backing into a poet’s work — starting with the most recent work and then working my way backwards to earlier works. Such is the case with Hedy Habra, whose Or Did You Ever See the Other Side? (2023) I considered here last year.

Then I read her first collection, Tea in Heliopolis (2013). I realized she has been writing about art — paintings, sculpture, music, architecture, and history — from the beginning. Her background suggests this is not by accident; she has always been exploring the cultural heritage of her family through poetry.

Under Brushstrokes was published in 2015. As the title suggests, many, even most, of the poems are about art. Habra is going to take us on something of a tour, with our informed tour guide showing us what is and isn’t obvious.

She begins with a series of prose poems that set the stage for the tour. Our itinerary includes travel by liner, and one stop is the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, closer to the United States than to Europe. We’re venturing far from home, and Habra invites us to “think of a houseboat over a sea of foaming moss so thick it seems anchored in green dunes.” We’re on our way, wondering how long it will take to sail through this massive sea of seaweed. Time is an element here, perhaps the most important.

Next, she’s leading us through ruins, much like she led her child so that he could see what his mother is seeing — their personal family history. But it’s not only ruins; their tour includes the desert, for how do you understand a desert land without understanding the desert itself? He looks for a desert rose, but finds only a fossil, again emphasizing age and history.

The poem “Brushstrokes” is the pivot point, a summary of the journey so far. It portrays a personal scene as a painting, a woman stepping out of a black evening dress as a man reads a newspaper and a man in a white wig plays a requiem on the piano. The scene includes remnants of the Sargasso Sea, with algae on the curtains and waves permeating the floor.

A later poem, “Hiding Under Brushstrokes,” will bring the subject of art into complete focus. We will see or be inspired by works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka. We will dine with Francisco Goya at “The House of the Deaf Man.” Then we arrive at the Borghese Gallery in Rome.

Walking Around Bernini’s Apollo & Daphne

Borghese Gallery

The statue of Apollo and Daphne by Bernini via Wikimedia

You can feel the wind in their faces,
lifting their clothes.
Frozen in flight, bodies strung,
unable to surrender,
his hand on her waist
is the closest to possession.

Stretched between earth and sky,
her raised arms reach
the highest leaves,
feet anchored, veins
merge in a web of darkness

as her skin hardens
under his touch,
she yearns to feel a while longer
the warmth invading
a body no longer hers,
enveloping

like breeze through long curls,
numbing her steps,
face leaning towards
her pursuer, eyes lowered,
looking back in vain,

unable to contemplate the cause
of her change,
sadness
fills her with its sap.

The poems continue with thoughts on family, water, storms, and times of day (like the “yellow hour” and “violet hour,” infusing artistic colors and scenes). She returns to art when she writes about a natural disaster — the Fukushima tsunami in Japan in 2011. Here she looks to “The Great Wave” by Hokusai and offers what she calls “cherry tree laments” for the death and destruction.

Hedy Habra

Habra has published three other poetry collections: Tea in Heliopolis, Or Did You Ever See the Other Side?, and The Taste of the Earth. She has also published a collection of short stories, Flying Carpets, and a book of literary criticism on the work of Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. In addition to a B.S. degree in Pharmacy, she has also earned M.A. and M.F.A. degrees in English and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Spanish literature. She’s received numerous awards and recognitions for her work, and she’s published multilingually in a wide array of literary journals and anthologies.

Under Brushstrokes is a strong, vivid collection. Habra poetically ranges across the art landscape, never remaining in one place for too long; this is a journey with an itinerary. It also helps illuminate both her first and most recent collections.

Now I have one more to go — The Taste of the Earth. I’m looking forward to the trip.

Related:

Reading Poets’ First Collections: Hedy Habra and Andrew Calis

Poets and Poems: Hedy Habra and Or Did You Ever See the Other Side?

Photo by chany crystal, 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: Hedy Habra and “Under Brushstrokes” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Longfellow never wrote a poem about Thanksgiving Day.

I went looking for a Thanksgiving Day poem, specifically one by Henry Wadswoth Longfellow (1807-1882). As much as I’ve read Longfellow over the past five years, I thought I remembered one. I found one that wasn’t about the day but about giving thanks in general. And I found one about the harvest, which we’ve featured here at Tweetspeak Poetry before for Thanksgiving Day.

As it turns out, Longfellow never wrote a poem for the day. He was alive at the time President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be a National Day of Observance in October of 1863, after the strategic Union victories in the Civil Wat at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Like so much else that happened during the Civil War, the holiday was federalized. Previously, it had been left largely to the individual states.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

But if there was a poet widely loved during that period and much of the 19th century, it was Longfellow. He helped create national myths like Paul Revere’s ride and the story of Miles Standish; he introduced America to the story of the expulsion of the Acadians from Canada; and he depicted a native American as something other than a “noble savage.” He was America’s poet, and that was the reason I wrote his poetry into my historical novel Brookhaven.

When I was researching Brookhaven, I discovered I didn’t know as much about the Civil War as I thought I did, and I found an indirect connection of Longfellow. As it turns out, my great-grandmother Octavia, who provided the name for the character Octavia Jane Montgomery in the novel, is a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of Miles Standish fame. I know there are probably at least two million other Americans who can say the same thing, but still. How cool is that? They were passengers on the Mayflower and likely participants at the first Thanksgiving to boot.

That first thanksgiving was to celebrate a difficult first year for the Pilgrims, and they celebrated with a meal, giving thanks for the harvest (and the generosity of the native Americans). It was the harvest that Longfellow celebrated in his poem.

A first edition of Keramos; photo via Abe Books

The Harvest Moon (1878)

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

“The Harvest Moon” was published in his 1878 collection Keramos and Other Poems. Longfellow was 71; he would publish two more collections before his death in 1882. By this time, the poet was a legend, something of a national eminence. Over the course of Longfellow’s lifetime, the nation had radically changed; America was now well on its way to becoming an industrial behemoth. Longfellow was the connection to national memory, to the time before the Civil War when life seemed much simpler. Life always seems simpler when you look back.

On this day, the team at Tweetspeak Poetry would like to wish each of you a Happy Thanksgiving. And we want you to know how much we are thankful for each of you and the poetry we feature.

I don’t think Longfellow would mind if I offered thanks on his behalf to you as well.

Related:

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes.

Our Best-Known Patriotic Poem: Longfellow Visits a Church.

What Happened to the Fireside Poets?

Photo by Lukas Schlagenhauf, 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 Happy Thanksgiving, from Tweetspeak Poetry (and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out and spending a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.

The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me.

Anselm Kiefer

Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called Fuel Rods. The other is a sculpture, entitled Breaking of the Vessels, comprising a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kristallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.

The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.” It included many of the paintings he’d done in the late 1970s and early 1980s — among the first cultural efforts to force Germany to confront its Nazi past. The paintings themselves were a somber revelation, including one of a railroad track that (presumably) leads to Auschwitz. You don’t simply walk through an exhibition like this one. You almost live it. The quiet in the crowded galleries was akin to the quiet I experienced at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

I was bowled over, by the exhibition and the artist.

One of the paintings in sculpture Hall

Last month, some 14 years later, my wife and I went to the St. Louis Art Museum to see art by Anselm Kiefer once again. “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” is almost overwhelming. Many of the paintings are huge, including five exhibited in the museum’s largest space, Sculpture Hall.

We started in the main exhibition galleries, surprised that there was no charge. In the second room, I walked into ekphrastic art — a large painting for the poet Paul Celan, one of two dedicated to him in the exhibition. (Kiefer has long been taken with Celan; over many years, he’s done a whole series of paintings connected to him and his poetry.)

This current exhibition is about the sea and the rivers leading to it. Some of the paintings feature the Rhine; for this exhibition, Kiefer created several about the Mississippi. I met one of the “river paintings” in a large room; it quotes the American Beat poet Gregory Corso. In fact, the title for the entire exhibition comes from a poem by Corso:

Spirit

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

“Becoming the ocean” by Anselm Kiefer

Corso (1930-2001) has one of the more unusual biographies for a poet. His parents were teenagers; his mother abandoned the family in New York and returned to Italy. He grew up in foster homes and orphanages, and spent several months in prison when he was 12, even a stretch for observation at Bellevue Hospital. He went back to prison for theft when he was 16, and he began to read classic literature. He worked as a laborer, then as a newspaper reporter, before he signed on as a sailor. Corso met Allen Ginsberg in New York, and that began his connection to the Beat poets.

If you read Corso’s poetry collections like Gasoline (1958) or Elegiac Feelings American (1970), you can see Ginsberg’s influence as well as Walt Whitman’s. Corso wrote in Whitman-esque lines reminiscent of “I Hear America Singing.”

The above poem, “Spirit,” is inscribed on Corso’s tombstone in Rome; he’s buried very near the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet he studied.

And here he was, showing up in two paintings in the Kiefer exhibition.

“For Gregory Corso” by Anselm Kiefer

“Becoming the ocean” was painted in 2024, one of the works created specifically for this exhibition. The second one, in Sculpture Hall, is simply “For Gregory Corso,” painted over the period 2021-2025. Lines from the “Spirit” poem are included, the words painted across the top. Like the other paintings in the hall, it’s huge (the guidebook says “monumental”). Most of the paintings in the entire show are large, but the five in Sculpture Hall are overwhelming.

Kiefer’s paintings are multilayered in meaning. I’ve seen the Sculpture Hall group twice, and each time I find myself being pulled in deeper. In that sense, they’re like poems you keep returning to, trying to understand what’s fully there, surprised that each time is like a new experience.

The exhibition continues until Jan. 25. And, yes, I will be going back.

Related:

Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea – Jeanette Cooperman at The Common Reader.

St. Louis Art Museum’s Kiefer connection goes back decades.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask.

The Beat Poets.

Photo by Anton Vakulenko, 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 Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Art Exhibition appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Its symptoms include extreme exhaustion, memory problems, dizziness, and muscle and joint pain. It can also cause sleep problems. The cause is unknown, but it’s believed to result from a combination of factors, including genetics, infections, trauma, and body metabolism.

Poet Autumn Williams has ME. She’s had it for 11 years. In 2021, her condition worsened to the point where she became almost completely bedbound. She turned to writing poetry. It is not so much poetry about ME as it is poetry inspired by the condition. To date, she’s published two collections, a chapbook entitled Wave and Clouds on the Ground.

She organizes the collection around the seasons. Some poems are short, with only a few lines. Others are longer, extended by short, almost fleeting thoughts and fragments. The overall effect is something akin to a dream state, which you might expect if you wander through clouds on the ground.

The title poem describes what she means by the title and perhaps offer a definition of the condition she’s grappled with.

Clouds on the Ground

Drifting moments,

unable to sleep

To try and fly into dreams
is impossible—

the gravity in my mind
is too heavy—

pulling me down

I need a place
away from here,

to
escape

the restless waiting

I create clouds
on the ground—

soft

and surrounding—
welcoming me into darkness
and relief

Williams evokes a dreamlike impression in this poem, a drifting in and out of consciousness. The poem is almost hypnotic. Try reading it in the early morning when all is quiet. You turn the page, and you find this sole fragment:

There is
escape
in dreaming

Autumn Williams

Season follows season, and then Williams begins again with “Fall.” No matter what the season, all of the poems suggest quiet and solitude. At times you feel like you’re experiencing a dream. The poems are deceptively simple. Like the ME that inspires them, you see these poems for what they say, and for the beauty of the natural world they describe. But what they are grounded in is complicated, just like ME.

Williams’ poems have been published in a number of literary publications and journals. Clouds on the Ground was a finalist in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. She lives in Texas with her husband and children.

ME is a condition such that it would be easy to give in to depression and despair. That’s not what this collection says, however. The circular nature of the seasons says that life goes on. There is great beauty in the world. You can move through those clouds on the ground, and you know there is hope.

Photo by Martin Fisch, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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A favorite place of mine to visit in London is Waterstone’s Bookstore in Piccadilly. reputedly the largest book shop in Europe. The store has eight stories but only five floors. Because the building includes a lower ground floor (we Americans would say basement), a ground floor (our first floor), a mezzanine level followed by four official floors and the official fifth floor being the restaurant.

The restaurant looks down to Jermyn Street and south toward Trafalgar Square. From a window table, you can see some of the famous St. James-area shops below, and a straight view from the window depicts rooftops and spires of some of the best-known buildings in Westminster. Piccadilly Circus is about a block east, and Hatchards Bookstore (oldest in London) and Fortnum & Mason a block west. The Royal Academy of Arts is across Piccadilly, and the Ritz Hotel is about a two-minute walk away. St. James Palace, which fronts the complex that includes the royal residence of Charles III at Clarence House, is “down the block and around the corner,” give or take a couple of blocks.

Piccadilly is always jammed with traffic and sidewalk throngs, and, despite its size, Waterstone’s is always an oasis of quiet. The upper floors have places to sit and read, and the restaurant is good for full meals as well as snacks. Adjacent to the restaurant is a bar, if you’re so inclined.

On our last visit, I was roaming the floors in an upward direction, intent on reaching the official first floor and the poetry section. Arriving at last, I looked through the stacks. I usually look for new poets or new works by established poets. But this time, one oversize book caught my attention.

It was The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). There must be hundreds of editions of The Waste Land, but this one was clearly different. First, there was no clean typescript of the poem to be found until the end. Second, single poem editions might run as long as 30 pages (if you add illustrations); this one was 160. My edition of Eliot’s collected poems has The Waste Land at 22 pages with no illustrations. (The poem as we know is reproduced at the end of this edition; it runs 11 pages.) Third, the cover highlighted the editor – Valerie Eliot (1926-2012), T.S.’s second wife. And fourth, this edition included the annotations made by Ezra Pound (1886-1972), who had read the manuscript before it was submitted to the publisher.

This was the centenary edition of the poem, first published in 1922. Yet I knew Valerie Eliot had died in 2012, and this edition was copyrighted 2022. The mystery was quickly solved. This facsimile edition was first published in 1971; Faber & Faber, the publisher, had republished with some additional content in 2022 as the centenary edition of the poem.

A page from the manuscript

The is a facsimile edition, so the original pages as Eliot wrote (or typed) them are positioned against a typeset version showing the actual corrections. The manuscript version includes Pound’s handwritten edits, questions, and comments.

It also includes Valerie’s introduction, which explains how Eliot wrote and published the poem; a short note by Pound, who outlived Eliot by several years; and

The first and most obvious thing you see is that Eliot struck his original introduction, some 54 lines, so that the poem began with the now famous line “April is the cruelest month.” Had the poem begun with the original line, “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,” one wonders if it might have had a lesser impact.

That’s the beginning; many more such changes exist in the manuscript. In some cases, Eliot handwrote new sections rather than type them. Because the facsimile was printed in color, you can see the different kinds of paper Eliot used, and which edits were made in pencil and which in red ink.

T. S. Eliot

And while all of this might be somewhat arcane to most readers, aside from fans like me, one cane almost watch Eliot’s creative process unfold as he wrote one of the great poems in the English language. He was also not a “first-draft” poet; he worked and revised his manuscripts.

As I stood there in Waterstone’s poetry section, I knew I would buy this book, and it would join quite a few others to be boxed up and shipped home by Waterstone’s. (The box also would include three poetry books, The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis, and Surviving Katyn by Jane Rogoyska, among many others.)

This centenary edition of The Waste Land is a poetry reader’s delight and an Eliot fan’s dream. I’ve been a fan since I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Four Quartets, and The Waste Land in high school and studied them in college.

Eliot ushered in the modern era poetry, writing some of the most remarkable poems of the 20th century. And here, with this manuscript facsimile edition, I had an in-depth glimpse into how he did it.

Related:

T.S. Eliot at the British Library, Part 1 and Part 2.

Finding Eliot in St. Louis.

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

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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One item on a page of new books caught my eye – a new work by Novel Prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro entitled The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain. The last work I’d read by him was The Buried Giant, something of a early medieval story set not long after the age of King Arthur’s reign. I loved the story, so I went looking to find out more about this new work.

Ishiguro was born in Japan but raised and educated in Britain. He’s likely best known for two works that out-British the British – Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day (which won the Booker Prize in 1989). But among many other books, he’s written stories set in Japan, delved into crime fiction (When We Were Orphans), and most recently written Klara and the Sun, which might be defined as literary science fiction.

Kazuo Ishiguro

And now he’s written song lyrics, many of which look suspiciously like poetry.

In the introduction, Ishiguro explains that while he’s known for stories, he started out by writing songs. In fact, he’d written more than 100 songs by the time his first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, was published when he was 27. He goes on to explain how songwriting influenced his fiction and how he wrote.

In 1999, he became a fan of American jazz singer Stacey Kent when she released her album “The Tender Trap.” In 2002, he mentioned one of her songs in a radio interview, and that led to her record company asking him to write liner notes for a new album. Not long after, Ishiguro and his wife Lorna met Stacey Kent and her husband Jim Tomlinson. One thing led to another, as they say, and Ishiguro and Tomlinson collaborated on a number of song lyrics over an extended period.

One of those 16 songs furnished the title for this new work: “The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain.” You can listen to the song on You Tube here, but here is an excerpt of the lyrics:

Well, I’ve packed our bags, I know I should have
consulted you,
But pretending to bargain would only have insulted you
So do just as I say
We’ll go away today
The fire still burns whatever you may claim
Let’s be young again
If only for the weekend
Let’s be fools again
Let’s fall into the deep end
Let’s do once more
All those things we did before
The summer we crossed Europe in the rain.

Like the title song, most of the songs are about romance and travel. In addition to Europe, Ishiguro also includes lyrics for songs about Casablanca, Macao, Scotland, and Indochina. As soon as I saw the title “Catherine in Indochine,” I knew what that song was about – French actress Catherine Deneuve starred in the movie Indochine (1992) about the beginnings of the Vietnamese uprising against French colonial occupation in the 1930s. I’m a long-time fan of Catherine Deneuve, ever since she starred with Jack Lemmon in April Fools in 1969.

I should note that the book is more than just a collection of lyrics. It’s an art object in itself – Ishiguro’s words and beautiful illustrations by Italian comics artist Bianca Bagnarelli. The lyrics and illustrations turn the work into something of a small-size art book. It includes a QR code at the end so that you can listen to the songs.

In The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, Ishiguro returns to his songwriting roots. The book is a delight. He has artfully combined words, illustrations, music, and movies into one satisfying experience.

Related:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Photo by J3SSL33, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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Just by the sound of the word, we can guess that the poetry form of haiku originated in Japan. Originally, it wasn’t a standalone form but rather the opening (hokku) of a larger poem. Over time, it began to be used as a poem in and of itself. The poetry form uses three lines, usually 17 syllables in all, in a 5-7-5 structure.

One of its best-known practitioners was the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). He often employed a kireji, a “cutting” word (we might say “centering”), and a seasonal reference, called a kigo.

Traditionalists will argue that haiku poems should be about nature, but once the form reached English and other languages, the range of themes expanded accordingly. Today, a poem on whatever subject is called a haiku if it follows the 5-7-5 syllable structure.

I’d been charmed by the fable The Sun and the Boy by poet Steven Flint, and I decided to take a look at his poetry. I discovered that he had more than 30 collections of haiku. I read three of them, and I find myself equally charmed.

Poems in Syllables (2018) are mostly poems about love in all its wonder and uncertainty — which, Flint writes, is the only thing he’s sure of. He cites love poems as a “flash of light” in his beloved’s eyes, a single heartbeat, an eclipsed heart, and an autumn leaf that fell from a smile. It’s often amazing how Flint can express so much intensity in so few words.

A consummate love,
where I dissolve in you and
you dissolve in me.

Afterglow (2019) includes some love poems, but it broadens to include nature and the human experience. Flint often entwines love and nature in the same poem, noting that the trees were the first “to warn me that she was the / wind that brings the storm.” He is much taken with the season of autumn, and he often includes images of colorful and falling leaves as metaphors. And “ember” is a favored word, whether he writes of a season or time in general.

Autumn paints the leaves
like sunset, watch the embers
of time burn away.

December invites
winter, the sun is just an
ember of summer

In Autumn Chronicles (2021), the fall season frames almost all of the poems. He still writes on themes of love and human experience, but in these poems, autumn is the operative framework.

A dozen white doves
fly in autumn light, grapevines
redden at sunset.

Summer has gone like a
dear love, autumn is left
with the memories

Steven Flint

Each of these collections have one haiku poem per page; the first two are 194 pages in length, and the third is 190. That said, haiku poems may be easy to read, but these three lines and 17 syllables can pack a powerful punch that leaves you studying poems over and over again.

In addition to The Sun and the Boy and his haiku collections, Flint has published the children’s book Lev Loveheart. He also posts haiku poems on Instagram at @steven_flint.

If you are interested in the traditional form of haiku poetry, get hold of one of the many collections of Basho’s poems. To see how the haiku form has been used in English and in more contemporary times, Flint’s poems offer a good example.

Related:

Poets and Fables: Steven Flint and The Sun and the Boy

Photo by Thangaraj Kumaravel, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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I enjoyed reading Flu Season: Poems by Katie Kalisz, so much so that I looked at her first poetry collection, Quiet Woman. I found the same keen eye upon family and relationships that I found in her later collection.

At the same time, her view is wider, including friends and relatives. The collection opens with the pregnant poet attending a funeral. A child, age unspecified, is in the casket, but a child who died before its mother. And she tries to imagine “the nearly grown child inside of me / dying before I did,” including the possible names of the child engraved on a gray gravestone and a memorial folder providing directions to the funeral luncheon. A later poem describes a wake for a 14-year-old girl, perhaps serving as the amplification of the funeral.

The poem is so understated that it becomes a surprising gut-punch. We can’t imagine something like this happening to a child of ours. And yet we know it happens.

Kalisz takes bits and pieces of scenes and images – a woman unwrapping a scarf from around her head, the name for those pregnancy stretch marks, parking next to a woman in a blue Oldsmobile, watching a man pour and smooth cement – and turns them into something larger. Scenes can shift quickly, like many memories and images. Her sister sitting in a stalled car on the shoulder of the interstate briefly touches a mother’s admonition and then moves into an amplification that perhaps no admonition was needed.

Cincinnati Sister

While your car stalls on I-75 and you sit on the shoulder
with our mother who is challenging you
to be more saintly than we know how to be yet
in our always young Catholic lives,
my husband holds my hand, makes me tea, carries
the laundry baskets up the steep basement stairs,
rubs my shoulder blades before I sleep.
His affection at the same time as your affliction—
of being new in a Midwestern city, being
the middle one, trying for once not to follow,
being frustrated at the small hotel room
and our mom in bed next to you—
muffles my good life, nontransferable
to you who needs it more right now.
If I could I would dry up your fresh tears
and find you a soft place to live,
or at least I would find you yourself, there
and give her back to you, like an original pebble
polished soft, placed inside your poem,
something you could keep forever.

Kalisz chronicles family trips, and watches “hiding in her room” as two teenaged boys mow the lawn. She sees the man’s groceries on the conveyor belt at the supermarket and realizes he must be a bachelor. She looks for mushrooms on Mother’s Day weekend. She recalls her grandmother who only read prayer cards she knew by heart and the death of a woman who cared for her as a young child. She starts small and moves to a larger idea.

Katie Kalisz

As an English professor at Grand Rapids Community College, Kalisz teaches composition and creative writing. Quiet Woman was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Award, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She received degrees from the University of Michigan, Loyola University of Chicago, and Queens University of Charlotte. Kalisz lives in Michigan.

I liked Quiet Woman as much as Flu Season. Kalisz is a fine poet, and I’ve rarely seen such a keen, insightful eye on family life like I’ve seen in these two collections. Some poetry doesn’t age well; these poems are timeless.

Related:

Katie Kalisz and Flu Season

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

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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I am honored and excited to begin a year as Poet Laura. My first Laura was Laura Ingalls Wilder. I thought life on the prairie was more exciting than life in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, but I had trees to climb and books to read, the library and the public pool were walking distance, and through one of the several nearby canyons, lay the pacific ocean.

I have always been in love with words: first the sound, and then the meaning. At eight, my favorite word was superfluous, which I thought meant super fabulous and should always be followed by many exclamation points with little hearts at the bottom. I was crestfallen when I learned the true meaning. By middle school I was in love with poetry and Edgar Allan Poe, particularly Annabel Lee. From the second stanza:

She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—

—Edgar Allan Poe, excerpted from “Annabel Lee”

When the English teacher, Miss D, required us to memorize a poem to recite before the class, I chose Poe’s The Bells, which, with its 113 lines, she said would be impossible to memorize. By then, tintinnabulation was my word, and I would not be deterred. What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!

In college, I picked up a cargo of words as a Political Science major, having been talked out of Journalism and into Poli Sci by my professor, Ms. Ganer, the most brilliant person I had ever encountered.

Lingo

In college, I learned new words—
reification, nascent, inchoate—
hard to pronounce, even harder
to slide into conversation.
Ambiguity I loved, word describing
the world to me on my sail out
from the certain harbor of youth.
But ambivalence I made my own—
moving simultaneously toward
and away from what I loved,
fortress of the known unknown.

—Donna Hilbert, from Gravity: New & Selected Poems, 2nd Edition Moon Tide Press

As I settled into adulthood and slowly grew into myself, quotidian became my word, sounding weightier and more interesting than mundane, ordinary, or daily. The poet William Stafford says, “Our best work derives merely from a continuity of our daily selves.” I have adopted Stafford’s notion as my credo. I am most attracted to the lyric poem with its affinity to music, and I am most grateful to live by the sea.

Everything I loved as a child, I still love: trees, the sea, birds, flowers, poems.

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 the 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, from Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press, 2025

The first two and a half lines of “A River” by Adam Zagajeski, tr. Renata Gorczynski:

Poems from poems, songs
from songs, paintings from paintings,
always this friendly impregnation

Here is a Tanka:

This is today’s song:
life is hard and exquisite
and the day begins.

Grace takes my hand and pulls me
from the bed into our dance.

—Ellen Rowland

My Mother Says

My mother says I sing like a bird
on a winter’s day,
my mother, whose grace catches
light on water,
on her changing face.

But if I am the bird and she the sea,
I sing because she flows through me.

—Amy Chan

Your Turn

What song might you sing about an ordinary day? Is any day ordinary? I find it an extraordinary gift to watch the sun rise and set each day, to witness the tidal highs and lows, and the migration of seabirds. Quotidian is my favorite word. What’s your favorite word?

Post and post photos by Donna Hilbert. Featured image by Maja Dumat, Creative Commons license via Flickr.

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It happens sometimes. You’re reading a poem, and the finely crafted words trigger a memory so powerful that you’re back in that moment of time. In this case, a poem about a young boy presenting a “stolen” begonia (or one snatched from a restaurant’s plantings) took me back more than 40 years. We were eating with our toddler at a Mexican restaurant when he decided to slip down from his booster seat, walk to a nearby table, and climb into an elderly man’s lap.

Mortified, we apologized, but the elderly man would have none of it. He was thrilled. He pointed to a younger couple seated at his table. “I keep telling them we’re waiting for our grandchildren.” He talked with our toddler for a few minutes, until our boy slid off his lap and came back to find a corn chip.

Many of the poems in Hard Listening by Alison Luterman prompt those kinds of memories. She has a poem about her husband in the emergency room; been there, done that. She swims a bit too far from the shore; yes, I did that, too, on a family vacation in Pensacola. Like most of us of a certain age, she considers how many times she’s been wrong in her life. She and I do part company, however, with a poem about hitchhiking. That’s one experience I never chose to have.

One experience we all shared was the craziness of 2020, when a sneeze at the grocery store could evoke a sense of panic, and we all seemed to be living in a fishbowl.

Fishbowl

My friend who was out dancing the Saturday night
before everything changed,
stepping and spinning and dipping the ladies,
said the lockdown caught him by surprise.
I felt like a fish that was swimming happily in the ocean
that someone scooped up in a net
and plopped into a little fishbowl,
and I’ve been swimming in circles ever since,
banging up against that cold hard glass.
We’re walking by the marina six feet apart, his hair
grayer than I remember, mine too I’m sure.
Boats on their moorings; sea-beaten pilings.
“I want a house by a lake,” I say. “Where I can just
roll out of bed in the morning and go down to the water.”
“Now you’re talking,” he says,
which means we both know this will never happen.
But to be human is to be a monkey
with her paw caught in a jar of gilded peanuts,
stubbornly refusing to let go of anything—
not the old life which is surely
gone forever, nor of hope,
that half-wrecked container ship, laden with history
and dreams and plague-ridden rats no one knows about,
still chug-chugging toward the open harbor.

Some of Luterman’s poems are overtly political. My eyes tend to glaze when politics enters poetry, although I understand. I read a lot of poetry, and I read a lot about poets, and I find it personally painful to see politics of any kind slip into poems. Politics crowds out the beauty, and so many of the poems of Hard Listening are beautiful. “There are times when the worst / thing you could imagine / doesn’t happen,” Luterman writes in her poem “Good News.”Exactly.

Alison Luterman

Luterman goes on to write about music. She writes about Amy Winehouse, “that voice, black cauldron of inky fire.” And Billie Holiday: “Elegant as satin, intimate as breath.” She says the voice of Karen Carpenter “was as thrillingly low / as the hush of a Redwood grove.” She describes Aretha Franklin’s voice as “a bright spear of faith / hurled from the ramparts of circumstance.” Music informs or inspires many of the poems in the collection, especially in the last half, and they are among the very best I’ve read on musicians and performers.

Luterman began writing poetry at age 6 or 7, she says, and “has never stopped.” She studied poetry at Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After a stint in VISTA, the Volunteers in Service to America, she moved to Oakland, California, where she worked in schools, directing musicals, teaching drama and poetry, and serving as an artist-in-residence for 20 years. She has written numerous plays and published several poetry collections, including The Largest Possible Life (2001), See How We Almost Fly (2009), Desire Zoo (2014), Feral City (2014), and In the Time of the Great Fires (2020). She lives in California.

Hard Listening is what its title says. Some of the poems are hard to listen to. All of them are well worth reading. I particularly loved the poems about music and musicians. And you will find yourself and your memories here.

Photo by seabamirum, 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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Literary critic William Pritchard collects his articles on the two poets.

William Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. His teaching has focused on 20th century poetry and fiction, but’s also taught on Shakespeare and major English writers from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

His books include Updike: America’s Man of Letters, English Papers: A Teaching Life, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. He writes reviews for such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Times Literary Supplement, and is both an advisory editor and essayist for the Hudson Review.

Pritchard is, in short, a literary critic. And he’s collected his reviews, articles and essays on the two most influential poets of the 20th century under the title of On Frost and Eliot. The material has been drawn from newspapers, literary magazines, and journals; the articles were published over several decades.

He acknowledges that what Robert Frost (1874-1963) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) have mostly in common is that both are considered great poets, likely the two greatest poets writing in the English language in the 20th century. Yet the two are strikingly different in form, subjects, themes, and style. Pritchard couples them together in essay collection for both their reputations and how their differences highlight what they accomplished and how it happened.

Robert Frost as a young man

What he doesn’t focus on is that both poets were Americans, but even there, they were different. Frost was born in San Francisco but moved to Massachusetts when he was 10. Eliot was born and reared in St. Louis. Both poets had Harvard in common – Frost attended for two years without graduating; Eliot graduated. Both also had England in common – Frost for two years and Eliot for most of his adult life.

Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature 31 times but never received the award; he did receive four Pulitzer Prizes. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in 1948; he also received three Tony Awards associated with plays, two of them posthumous (for Cats in 1983). Frost is mostly associated with poetry; Eliot was a poet, literary critic, editor, essayist, and dramatist.

T.S. Eliot as a young man

The entries in the collection include book Pritchard’s reviews of books by and about the two poets. His comments are straightforward and occasionally biting; he also seems to know when a writer knows what he’s writing about. (I suspect he’s also not one to suffer fools, gladly or at all.)

It’s always a surprise when something you’re reading connects in a personal way. One of his reviews about Frost is about the Library of America edition, published in 1995; that volume sits directly above my computer screen on a shelf. And he has very commendatory things to say about the 2015 edition of the poems of Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Pritchard calls Ricks one of the best scholars of Eliot alive. During a trip to London in 2015, I was able to attend a “book event” at the British Library, where Ricks and McCue were launching the two-volume edition.

William Pritchard

Another point of personal connection: Pritchard makes a statement about teachers and professors who were in college in the 1950s and what writers they carried forward to their classrooms. Many of my own English teachers were trained in that decade, and it’s one reason I was led toward Ernest Hemingway, Eliot and Frost, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and several others.

On Frost and Eliot is an insightful collection on not only the people who wrote and published on the two poets, but also the poets themselves.

Related:

Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken.

Robert Frost and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Homage to Robert Frost.

Committing Prufrock: The Path to Frost.

Jay Parini Has 16 Robert Frost Poems to Memorize.

T.S. Eliot at the British Library, Part 1.

T.S. Eliot at the British Library, Part 2.

Robert Crawford on the Young T.S. Eliot.

Eliot After The Waste Land by Robert Crawford.

The Art and Music of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

Photo by Hannes Flo, 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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Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, a poetry collection by Patricia Clark published in 2020, seems at first glance to be about nature. It includes poems about river birches, birds like hawks and mallards, gardens, moths, bees, spiders, the orca whale, and more. Even the poems not directly about nature touch upon the subject or theme in some way.

And yet, as you read and speak some of the poems aloud, you at first sense and then see that these are not nature poems. They may use nature as a subject, they may display nature in all its wonder and diversity, but they are definitely not nature poems. Nature may be the frame or the stage, but Clark is writing about life.

Even a poem like this one, which is about as close to a nature poem as you can get, is about something else again.

Ravine Idyll

The sun-dappled ravine floor has a crunch to it.
Last year’s leaves break apart and down.
There is this day, cooler, with more of summer to come.

The sun-dappled ravine floor still flows green.
Last week I saw a doe and fawn lie down.
Not yet the turn, not yet a painted leaf.

The ravine floor has a supple give, good moist earth.
Paths cross it where fox and white tails walk.
Change in the air, this moment cannot last.

The charge: note what is here, what departs,
and do not fall to mourning, for this, or
us. In the meadow, goldenrod, fragrant when crushed.

Note the images Clark is using here: the sun-dappled ravine floor, the leaves breaking down, the doe and fawn resting, the “good moist earth.” They key to the poem is the ninth line — “Change is in the air, this moment cannot last.” Nothing in life, including nature, stays the same.

This is what Clark is writing about. She avoids the trite, phrases and aphorisms like “You can’t step into the same river twice” or “You can’t go home again.” Instead, she brings a freshness, a different kind of insight to the idea of change.

Patricia Clark

She considers a painting of a seascape by Claude Monet, “Les Rochers de Belle Ile,” pointing out that the scene always looks the same but even here, along this rocky coastline, change is at work, “erosion / of all the softest parts.” Or she watches her brother’s last son driving off the college, “leaving behind / Douglas firs, rocky beaches of Puget / Sound for Half Moon Bay, Bodega / Bay, and California sun. Will he return?” There it is: nature framing the change of life.

Clark has published seven poetry collections and three chapbooks.A former professor and poet-in-residence at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, she has won several poetry awards and prizes and was the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and magazines, including The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate. Her poem “Astronomy in Perfect Silence” was chosen to go to the moon on the NASA / Space X Launch in 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.

Life changes. Often it changes daily. Nature remains, but nature itself is always changing. The poems of Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars (a contender for my favorite poetry title of the year) underscore the idea of change, quietly explaining that it happens no matter how hard we may try to avoid it or hold it back.

Related:

Patricia Clark and O Lucky Day

Photo by Paul Van de Velde, 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: Patricia Clark and “Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Paul Willis takes us on a tour of an Italian hillside town.

Travel writer Rick Steves says Orvieto in central Italy is precisely what an Italian hill town should be. Poet Paul Willis agrees.

A walled medieval city. A funicular that transports you from the train station to the old town. Churches. Monuments. Museums. Wine tours. Stone archways bridging across streets. Views of the plains And only 90 minutes from Rome by train.

Willis visited Orvieto, and he’s composed a chapbook of 26 poems about the city, where “the cobblestone alleys / barely keep the walls apart.” He notes other visitors to Orvieto or the region – Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain. He visits the area’s museums, writing about a relief of a Roman wedding and a sculpture of an Etruscan sarcophagus and an Etruscan tomb in a cemetery.

Willis also visits the churches, where he’s struck by paintings – “Simoen in the Temple” in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, for example, and a fresco behind a wooden statue of Saint Andrew in the church of Sant’Andrea. He includes poems about two paintings by Caravaggio. His poems about the churches serve as a good reminder than in Italy and the rest of Europe, not all great art is in the famous museums.

Leaving the churches, he sees a statue of Pope Boniface VIII that once presided over the city’s major gate. He’s moved by a memorial to World War I and a monument to seven partisans murdered by the Nazis in World War II. He also makes sure to visit the region’s vineyards.

This is one of several of his poems about Orvieto’s churches.

Angel

Well before dawn, awake in my bed,
shoulder throbbing, arm in a sling,
I thought of an angel at the entrance
to the Church of Santa Maria dei Servi
in Orvieto. The angel is part of a fresco
painting inside the main door and to the right,
in a little side chamber that is usually barred
and locked. Late one night, however,
I found the gate ajar, and entered.
And there on the wall was a sacred scene,
the exaltation of a saint or a day in the life
of the Virgin Mary, with attendant angels
looking on. Except one angel was looking right
out of the wall at me instead. At me, I swear,
with a gaze so direct and severe and knowing
and yet so welcoming as well, straight out
of the Renaissance. There was something pure
about those eyes, and eternally young, and full
of holy energy. And I felt seen, and I
felt known, and I felt transfixed and included,
with or without my will. That is what
I knew that night, and this night too,
though my aching shoulder still throbbed,
and I lay sleepless, and it seemed the pain
would never end.

Paul Willis

Willis is emeritus professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He previously published eight poetry collections, and his poems have been published in Poetry, Wilderness, Christian Century, The Best American Poetry, Amethyst, SALT, Southern Poetry Review, and Turtle Island Quarterly, among many others. He’s also written extensively on nature and wilderness subjects. He received a B.A. in Biblical Studies from Wheaton College in Illinois and his Ph.D. in English from Washington State University.

Orvieto is a kind of poetic travelogue, but it’s also something more. Willis fuses ancient history, religion, modern history, manmade and natural scenery, and even contemporary economics (this vineyards!) into an explanation of what this most medieval, walled city is about.

Photo by isado, 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

The post Poets and Poems: Paul Willis and “Orvieto” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

I love reading big poetry epics and sagas. My idea of a fun time might be reading Beowulf in the J.R.R. Tolkien or Seamus Heaney translations, or even the translation I read in my college textbook, the Norton Anthology of English Literature. (I still have it, more than 50 years later.) Then there’s reading and rereading the stories told in verse form by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish.

Epics and sagas are feasts, but a diet exclusively composed of feasts would quickly become boring and meaningless, losing any sense of “special-ness.” The vast majority of what we consume is everyday meals; the vast majority of the poetry I read is what I would call the poetry of the everyday. And few poets excel at the poetry of the everyday like Gabrielle Myers. Consider her new collection, Points in the Network.

A memory of a grandmother. A kiwi vine opening to the sun. A run with the dog. A hint of spring. The humidity of the South. Seasons. The fears of childhood. Clouds. None of these subjects are foreign to poetry; they’ve been written about thousands of times, perhaps more. But in Myers’ hands, and the words and phrases she uses, they take on a freshness, a newness, and almost make you think you’re reading about them for the first time.

She also uses the subjects as a launching point, starting with a simple observation that soon becomes something else again. Look at what she does with flies (one of my favorite pests).

Stop Time

To have time to watch flies circle above the chicken pen,
watch their dance, turn, shift in slight wind, count them
to 18, shift focus to ash’s thin new leaves
waving in a cool spring morning. Sit, be still,
think, but not too much, rest, let the mind pause,
sleep, breathe in clean air, dig dirt-stained nails
into soil, plant tomato, pepper, artichoke, basil,
again and again, run and be thankful
for each breath’s blooming jasmine and honeysuckle,
cooking tomato sauce, frying garlic’s sweet fragrances,
smell the earth awakening, feel lemon blossom’s pollen sticky on
hands, tomato vine resin holding fingers together, inhale cilantro’s
tang, push into rotting zucchini blossoms, lifted, gifted to arrive
at this stop time in between life’s rush.

Every poem in the collection is like this, taking an everyday subject and broadening it into an observation, an insight, or a meditation. Most of the poems are relatively short; one longer one that I particularly like is “Time Machine,” which begins with an observation about the wind in March and becomes a search for personal identity.

Gabrielle Myers

She does especially well with poems that include some aspect of nature, and most of the poems in the collection have some connection to nature. They hark back to the poems of her previous collection, Break Self: Feed, which are largely about nature and the place of humanity within it.

Myers is a writer, poet, teacher, editor, and chef who lives in California’s Sacramento Valley. She previously published a memoir, Hive-Mind, which describes her awakening and transformation on an organic farm. Her previous poetry collections include Too Many Seeds and Break Self: Feed. Her poems have been published in The Adirondack Review, San Francisco Public Press, Fourteen Hills, Evergreen Review, pacific-REVIEW, Connecticut River Review, Catamaran, and other literary journals. She worked as a cook and chef at several San Francisco-area restaurants and catering companies. She is currently a tenured professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College.

The poems of Points in the Network don’t compete against each other for the title of “my favorite poem.” Too many of them would qualify equally. I thoroughly enjoy how Myers uses words to sharpen and hone what she’s trying to say. There’s not a wasted or superfluous word in the lot.

Related:

Gabrielle Myers and Break Self: Feed.

Photo by Ajay Goel, 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: Gabrielle Myers and “Points in the Network” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

This month’s theme is Fog & Mystery, so it feels apt to have a tea date with Beth Copeland’s True North.

Near the end of the poem, these lines appear:

“…That memory is mapped

in my mind as the mountain is there even when it’s not
there, hidden behind seven veils of fog and forgetfulness…”

Your Pour

Get your favorite steep (or brew) and join us in writing a poem about something that exists even when it’s hidden behind “veils of fog and forgetfulness.” What makes it persist? What has mapped it?

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

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Christine Rhein and her sister were born in America and raised in the Detroit area. Christine herself made a home there, developing a career as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. Yet one of the formative influences of her life happened decades before and thousands of miles away.

Her father, Horst Misch, was born in Silesia in 1931. Originally part of Poland, the area had passed to the Hapsburg Empire in 1335 and then to Prussia in 1742. People of German heritage had lived there for seven centuries. To the south was the Sudeten Mountains, a region carved out of the Habsburg empire after World War I and incorporated into the new country of Czechoslovakia.

In 1938, the troops of Nazi Germany occupied the Sudetenland, incorporating the German-speaking area into Germany and establishing a puppet regime in Prague. The next year, with the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, Germany annexed Silesia as well. Silesian Poles were deported, and German settlers moved in alongside the already substantial German population living there. At the end of the war, the region was overrun by Russian troops.

Christine’s father was now 14. His own father, enrolled in the army, disappeared in the destruction of German armies. The young teen and his mother were expelled from their home, fleeing first to Czechoslovakia and then to Poland. Eventually, the young man made his way to America, as did the woman he married, an East German with a similar story.

Rhein tells their story in part I of Wild Flight: Poems. It’s the story of Horst and his wife, Eleonore, a story of displacement and dispossession, a tearing away of the familiar and being pushed and shoved into the unfamiliar. For all of the upheaval they experienced, they were among the fortunate ones; some two million Germans died in the postwar chaos, forced evictions, and resettlement elsewhere.

That experience of war, destruction, flight, displacement and resettlement shaped the rest of her father’s life, and thus Christine Rhein’s own as well. As in any family, there would be stories, stories that would explain how a Silesian German born in Poland would come to live in Detroit, Michigan. And the stories might fade over time, but they would never go away entirely.

from My Father’s Geschichte (story or history)

He says the nightmares stopped sometime
in his forties, the ones I witnessed in childhood
when he napped on the couch, shouting

himself awake—January 1945 all over again,
the run from Russian troops moving west,
burning homes, raping women—and always

the same dream: his mother hidden while he
stood lookout, his body pressed against the door,
soldiers laughing, pushing from the other side.

At seventy, he nearly chuckles at the long-lived fear,
the way he does when his accent prompts
someone to ask where in Germany he’s from

and he begins, I’m not sure how much you know
about history. Have you heard of the Oder River?
Well, I was born on the wrong side of it…

The poem continues with the family’s wintertime escape, people fleeing with a few possessions in suitcases or wooden carts, “just a day ahead oof the Russians.”

Christine Rhein

The collection has five parts; the story of her father is largely in the first part. But those poems are the formative ones for those that follow – Christine’s own life, her experiences with her sons, her meditations on art, family life, washing windows (and remembering the German poems her father taught her), and even a story about chimney swifts, which at least possess the good fortune of having claws to cling to the sides of walls and cliffs.

Rhein’s poems have been published in several literary journals and magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, and Southern Review, among many others, and they’ve been included in anthologies like Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wild Flight won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. She lives in Michigan.

Wild Flight is poetry, history, contemporary life, and family, all told in a narrative and understated style. Rarely have I felt so moved by a collection’s substance, but this one did that and more.

Related:

When You Don’t Speak Czech or German.

Photo by Martin Fisch, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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You Too Were Once on Fire: Poems, the new collection by Peter Murphy, begins almost biblically with the introductory poem “The Diaspora of Light.” It echoes the “Let there be light” line from the book of Genesis, although the poem begins by citing Plato. It then moves to the stars, followed a leap to “The God Nobody Wanted,” with the convicting line of “What will it say on your tombstone / other than consumer?”

These first few poems of the collection show how important introductory poems are. You read and digest them, and you come to expect (or read into) questions of faith and contemporary society no matter what the poem’s subject is.

And the subjects do change. Murphy describes how the fact that 24-hour bars in Atlantic City have three happy hours allows him to pursue happiness (a la the Declaration of Independence) whenever his shift lets out. He wanders like Frank O’Hara through New York, ignoring the news on Fox and CNN, “listening / instead to Rachmaninoff / and the Milky Way.” He considers a beauty pageant to select “Miss Besieged Sarajevo” in 1993, the winner being “blond and shrapnel scarred.”

He continues to explore the disconnect between what is and what is supposed to be. A prisoner is questioned with torture; bombings transform a definition of terror; a house burns as the people inside go on about their regular activities. The ideal is stuck in our heads while we live the real.

And it’s not only the ideal. Even an ordinary day at work becomes something else entirely.

Spontaneous Combustion

It was an ordinary day at work, he thought,
when he felt the first thump in his chest.
He paused, as if hit with the tip of a pointer or a cane.
Excuse me, it said, and he gave it his attention.
What now? What do you want?
Don’t worry, it replied. I’ll make it quick.
And it did, exploding throughout his chest,
making it a chest of fire, a whole house of fire,
burning the oxygen out of his lungs.
No, he shouted. Not now! Not now!
but it said nothing. It didn’t need to speak.
It had no need for words of any kind.
No, No, he thought he said, but he hadn’t.
He just lay there ablaze, giving in.
He wanted to say, All right, you said
you’d make it quick.
But he didn’t say that either.

Peter Murphy

Murphy has previously published 12 poetry collections, chapbooks, and works of nonfiction. His poems have been published in several literary and general magazines, including the Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New Welsh Reader, The Sun, Guernica, The Literary Review, and others. He served as an educational advisor to three PBS programs on poetry produced by Bill Moyers and has received several fellowships and writing residencies. He’s led hundreds of workshops for writers and teachers, and he is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.

It’s something of an understatement to say You Too Were Once on Fire is unsettling. People of faith would say we live in a fallen world; others might say the real is growing ever more distant from what should be. But as Murphy’s poems show, all of us share the sense of things coming undone.

Photo by greg westfall, 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: Peter Murphy and “You Too Were Once on Fire” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on.

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within (or riding atop) American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash.

The accent, in fact, was my yardstick for authenticity in fiction about New Orleans. Writers would pen novels set in New Orleans and invariably use the Southern accent. Big thumbs down. The only people who have Southern accents in New Orleans are those who move there from other parts of the South. Natives don’t talk like other Southerners. In fact, the only novel I know of that caught the New Orleans accent perfectly was John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and he was a native New Orleanian. In my opinion, it deserved the Pulitzer Prize it won for fiction in 1981 on the basis of getting the accent exactly right.

My mother, her four sisters, and her brother had the accent. My older brother and younger brother had the accent. Both of my sisters-in-law had it. All my cousins, including the ones my age I grew up with, had the accent. Every kid in my block, except for one Chicago transplant, had it. Most of my classmates in school had the accent; my two closest friends in high school had it. Most of my teachers had it.

In short, I grew up in an environment saturated by the New Orleans accent. What was weird was to find someone who didn’t have it.

Like me.

I never had it. Ever.

No native New Orleanian could believe I was one of them. I talked like a Yankee. Well, not a New England Yankee or Bostonian, of course, but like someone from the Midwest (Ohio was the usual guess). Salespersons in department stores would ask if I was a tourist or from some of part of the country. My teachers would ask the same thing. Nope. I was a native.

Nobody could believe it. I was an anomaly. Or a mutant. I had to move to the Midwest to sound normal.

St. Louis Cathedral – the heart of New Orleans -by Jimmy Woo via Unsplash

I don’t have a good explanation for why I never had the New Orleans accent. My father had a slight Southern accent; he was from Shreveport, and service in World War II honed a heavy accent down to a slight one. My mother, who had dreamed of being a teacher, developed a cultured New Orleans accent, at least in public. At home and when she was with her family, she reverted to the familiar New Orleans accent.

But that’s not an explanation. After thinking about it (a lot) over the years, I finally concluded there was no answer. It simply happened. Or I was an extraterrestrial. I wasn’t scarred for life, but it did contribute to the sense that I wasn’t like the rest of my immediate and extended family. (It worked with same way with my father’s relatives in Shreveport. I sounded like a Yankee to them, too.)

One thing the awareness of difference did accomplish: it made me sensitive to accents and language. I’d hear a different accent, and I’d look up and listen. I paid attention to how people said things, the expressions they used, and how they pronounced (or mispronounced) words. Gradually I came to see language as a way culture manifests itself.

And it attracted me to poetry. Poetry was different. It wasn’t like reading a novel or short story or a history book. The words in poetry were / are recognizable, but they occupy a different place. Poems often seem a little weird, when everyone else is reading and speaking prose.

I understand. I get it. It’s the story of my early life.

Related:

Dat Talk: New Orleans Accents

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

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—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

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I’ve reached the age when you realize most of your life is behind you. Your priorities and interests have changed. For example, ou care more about art than you used to. Judged by how much you spend reading it, the most interesting thing in the newspaper is the obituary section.

You realize that you’re a link in a chain; that’s why you are considerably more interested in family history and genealogy and FamilySearch.org is one of your most visited websites. You also learn why your mother spent so much of her later years in doctors’ offices, and why your mother-in-law stays fascinated with watching the antics of birds.

In short, you think about things that weren’t even on your radar scope 20 and 30 years ago.

Poet Donna Vorreyer is thinking about those things, too — things like grief, aging, longing, the beauty of nature, why your bones are aching more, the importance of holding on, and why those small daily delights become more important and vital than your career. “I have nothing left to prove,” she writes. And she’s assembled her thoughts, meditations, and observations to form her latest collection, Unrivered: Poems.

Donna Vorreyer

Vorreyer writes poems with those themes, and she does so with a wry sense of humor, self-understanding, and the knowledge that you can’t stop the clock. In fact, time seems to flow faster. (Maybe that’s why Silicon Valley billionaires are investing considerable money to extend the length of their lives; they might save themselves some money and read Unrivered instead.)

In her poem “Transubstantiation,” one of the most moving poems in the collection, Vorreyer sees the birth/life/aging process as something akin to a religious rite, or at least something sacred: “How the child can cradle the mother now, rock her in arms she bore. How the child can cradle the father now, soothe him with hands he kissed and held. How the priest blesses their foreheads while they can still speak.” I’m reminded of sitting with my mother, in her final year, listening to her telling stories about her life I never knew, just as she used to read fairy tales and tell me stories when I was a child.

Vorreyer describes an annual eye exam, followed in the same poem by a mammography exam and a biopsy, never once mentioning the names of these tests. She writes of finding her place in the line of family, how she wants to be a river, “gathering stones, signals to shape my current.” That idea of “rivering” frames the final poem in the collection, “The Self, Unrivered.”

One poem again reminded me of my mother. She often said she hated her 40s, loved her 50s and 60s, and then faced the physical issues of her 70s and 80s (she died at 90). “There’s nothing golden about the golden years,” she’d often say. Vorreyer might agree, but she phrases it a bit more poetically.

To Be Honest, Not at All Like Fine Wine

Vapor rises from the bath, a shoal
of ghost fish surrounding me, a mantle
of mist to conceal the damage.
I’ve been told some do this gracefully,
but who has the energy for grace?

Instead, I cling to small miracles,
admire the intricate lace edges of kale
mapping an unknown coast. I search
a box of languages for one that buzzes
at the pitch of preservation.

But the odometer rolls forward
no matter how many times I stop
at yellow lights, horns behind me blaring.
I beg your pardon. I am trying
to make something last.

Vorreyer previously published three poetry collections — A House of Many Windows (2013), Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and To Everything There Is (2020), and seven chapbooks. Her poems have been published in numerous literary and poetry publications. She is the co-editor and co-founder of the online journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters, and she directs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She lives in suburban Chicago.

The poet knows well of what she speaks and writes. Unrivered is about the quiet later years, when the passions fall away and you come to understand what is important about a life. If you’re of a certain age, you’re going to find yourself in most if not all these poems. I did.

Photo by Anton Vakulenko, 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

The post Poets and Poems: Donna Vorreyer and “Unrivered” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Sidney Lanier became identified with the Old South and the Lost Cause

As I began to write the manuscript that became my historical novel Brookhaven, I knew I would use a 19th century poet as a kind of infusion into the story. Three poets in particularl were closely associated with the Civil War—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Sidney Lanier. A fourth—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—was a possibility.

Whitman is the poet today we connect to the war, but he wasn’t by the people who lived the war. Herman Melville was considered by the North to be THE poet of war during the time it raged, but he would be problematic for my novel, because it was largely set in the South. In the South, Sidney Lanier only became “the Civil War poet” years after the war, and particularly after his death in 1881, and his poems were less about the war and more about the postwar period. But to use Lanier’s poems was tempting.

In the end, I chose Longfellow, and for several reasons. He was hugely popular before the war. His oldest son enlisted and was seriously wounded. His wife died from a tragic accident during the war. And while he had been an ardent abolitionist, Longfellow was among the few who were horrified at the human devastation wrought by the war, so much so that he regretted the role he had played in advancing radical abolition.

His horror is well taken; it’s estimated that up to 750,000 soldiers died on both sides, out of a total population of 31.4 million (1860 census). Everyone knew or were related to someone who had died, was seriously wounded, or suffered amputation. The war left deep and personal scars on both sides. A century after the war ended, my grandmother still referred to the Civil War as “the war of northern aggression” and would not travel to “Yankee states.”

Sidney Lanier’s birthplace in Macon, Georgia

Except for Edgar Allen Poe, Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) was the best-known Southern poet of the 19th century. Born in Georgia, he enlisted in the Confederate Army in late 1860. He was 18. Four years later, he was a pilot for a blockade runner named the Lucy. He was captured and sent to prison in Maryland, where he contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually take his life.

After the war, he became a musician, a hotel clerk, a church organist, author of a novel, Tiger Lilies (1867), a teacher, a lawyer, a poet, and eventually a professor at Johns Hopkins University. His poems were published by several magazines, and his poetry was admired by Longfellow. Poetry was strictly a money-making opportunity for Lanier; this was a period when newspapers and magazine alike published (and paid for) poetry.

I have, or might have, a personal connection to one of his poems. Before moving to Mississippi, the Youngs lived in Georgia in the countryside near Savannah. South of Savannah is Glynn County, rumored within the family to be the inspiration for the name my grandparents gave to my father, which eventually became mine. One of Lanier’s most popular poems was “The Marshes of Glynn,” the fourth section of his Hymn of the Marshes. It’s an engaging story, but I learned during my Brookhaven research never to trust family legends.

What has to be sheer coincidence is that Lanier died on Sept. 7, 1881, and on that day 70 years later, I was born.

I like “The Marshes of Glynn,” and I like Lanier’s poetry in general. But a poem I particularly like is this one, which (without being cited) became the inspiration for the sections of Brookhaven set during the Reconstruction period.

The Raven Days (1871)

Sidney Lanier in 1870, about the time he wrote “The Raven Days”

Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks.

Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking.
Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade.
Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,
We lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.

O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Will ever any warm light come again?
Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow
Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?

Many consider this poem to be a kind of anthem for what has come to be known as the Lost Cause, or how the defeated South found solace in believing what it had done in seceding and fighting a war was something noble and good. Many Southerners truly believed they were fighting for the freedoms described by the Declaration of Independence and spelled out in the Constitution.

The Sidney Lanier monument in Piedmont Park, Atlanta. Courtesy Wikipedia.

That cause had been lost, but it endured in memory. It came to frame how many in the South understood the Civil War, Reconstruction, their own history, and even themselves. Lanier, perhaps unintentionally, captured that belief in one of his most lauded poems about the Civil War, The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson. Generally forgotten, or perhaps conveniently forgotten, was the brutality of the slave economy that Old South had depended upon.

After his death, admirers made sure he was lionized and remembered. A college and several high schools were named after him. Johns Hopkins and Duke University erected statues. Music was written using his poems as lyrics. Streets and two lakes were named after him, as was a ship built during World War II. UCLA in California even has a memorial scholarship named for him.

I’m not sure what Lanier himself would think of his identification with the Lost Cause. He probably would have been too busy trying to provide for family to care. But I think he would have been gratified to know that neither he nor his poems are forgotten.

Photo by Hiroyuki Takeda, 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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Over this past year, I’ve written of places I yearn to be, my querencias. I was blessed in my youth to live in Portugal, specifically Terceira in the Azores, an archipelago of nine islands with the highest point of Portugal being a volcano on Pico. Centuries ago, the archipelago was a respite in the world’s trading triangle, and the islands had been formed by the merging of tectonic plates and volcanoes.

At age eleven, I moved to Portugal, and it was quite the transition for me—a new stepfather, a new country where we traveled back in time. Our plumbing and electricity were intermittent, my sister and I often doing our chores and homework in candlelight, but I came to love this country and its people. Too many wonderful experiences to share here; some were a bit scary. I wrote an essay about one eye-opening day, a day in Praia da Vitoria where small whales beached themselves, an essay titled “A Spectacle in Black and White.” You can read the whole essay here, but following is a short excerpt:

I took a picture that morning with my small Brownie camera. I have few photos of all my memories of those years, and there are so many. Moments lived but not recorded, but they are pictured in my mind — the island a place drenched in a time before the world turned fast and raucous. Days in a land where I discovered the feel of a place so near God’s hand, flush with sea life and volcanoes and caves and winding paths where I learned to walk in the rain and come to accept a man of no familial relation as my father. On an island once spewed from the ocean depths where concepts like Life and Death inched nearer to my understanding. Where a single black and white photograph held in my hand sixty years later etches a swift memory of time, of sorrow, and of man’s fading primal nature to love the wild earth as tenaciously as the tides love the moon.

In those early years, our only family trip to Europe’s mainland was to Madrid, a beautiful city in 1962. Portugal is rich in its history and arts, but I’ve pulled local poetry from the islands. A few years ago, I came across an American poet and translator, Scott Edward Anderson, with roots from Sao Miguel, Portugal. From his poetic book, Azorean Suite, written in English and Portuguese, here is an excerpt:

The sea surrounds, is ever-present
      endless, the sea surrounds
            and sea sounds swirl and sway
humid torpor of temperament
      fog enshrouds
            clouds caught on peaks
wrapping the mountain
      a helmet of white, gray, ash
            the ever-present volcanoes
threat of fire and destruction
      threat of sea-wind and wave
            thread of saudade woven
into the fabric of life
      on the islands ….

—Scott Edward Anderson, excerpted from Azorean Suite

Photo from Unsplash, Luca Severin

In my poem, “Chasm,” I recall exploring a cave in 1961, an enchanting place formed inside a lava tube:

Chasm

There’s a dark hole
in a gray hill on Terceira.
An unsteady step there
plummets to bat-filled black.
Only the brave go on
to Poseidon’s palace—
a room so tranquil
only he could have
molded the basalt walls
dripping gods’ tears
to clear streams.
A glow replenishes
the bright green carpet.
Above, barefoot fishermen
still struggle, each dawn,
with handmade nets to survive
while Neptune lives in splendor
            beneath them.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

The beauty of nature and the sea is abundant in Azorean poetry. From Poems in Absentia & Poems from the Island and the World, Pedro da Silveira, born on the island of Flores, writes of his roots in the Portugal isles. His poems in this collection were translated by George Monteiro. Here is an excerpt from Silveira’s “Absent Poem”:

Absent Poem
to Álamo Oliveira

Sometimes I still dream that I return.
The first island rising in the horizon:
Terns and the sea, rocks, fajás, brooks
Trees cut off in the blue air …
And then, awakening, I sing.

—excerpted from “Absent Poem” by Pedro da Silveira

Fajás refer to landscapes flattened by lava flows. As I dug further in Azorean arts, I found other poets from the small island of Flores, such as Roberto Mesquita, born in 1871, who lived an unfortunate life, had little education, but authored many poems published in local publications. Here, translated to English, is Mesquita’s sonnet.

“Melancholy” (1922)

I entered the cloister: the fountain, as before,
Sand in the marble basin,
But a vast silence shrouded
The sad uninhabited mansion.

From the ground sprouted, flourishing
Wildflowers, mosses, weeds
And the dead monastery carried
My soul to distant times.

“Arise, good monks” with a roar
I then shouted in the sleeping cloister
The centuries have anointed with sorrow.

Alas, my urgent appeal
Is answered only in a painstaking psalm,
By the ailing voice of the wind which there prays.

—Roberto Mesquita

One more poem about all the walks I took in Portugal, rain or shine:

Walking in the Rain

The walks I took in Portugal,
as a girl allowed to roam
paths alone, now haunt me,
for on those walks, an ease
strolled with me as I passed
the gang of street dogs near
the butcher, barking, startled,
yet they knew me, granted passage.

I walked on, turned to the next path.
Most days the rain would drizzle,
fall off and on for I walked
on an isle in the sea, roads of dirt
grounded me, paths skirted in rock
heaped to hold cows or grapevines
green. Mountains loomed past rocked
fields configured like a game board.

Prayerful hush and repose cradled me
’neath sea clouds, constant veils
of mountaintops, volcanoes, shadowed sun.
My solitary respite, cherished walks
on a muddy road, daily, wrapped in a jacket,
endowed as if I walked with God Himself.
A deep sense of place clothed my soul,
whispered who I was, where I belonged,
and I still, 57 years later, ache to return,
though the roads are now paved.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

It’s hard to believe how quickly my year as Tweetspeak’s Poet Laura has passed. This is my last post before the new Poet Laura’s words start ringing true in this column. Last year, when I was recovering from a knee replacement before a second hip replacement (yes, now I’m one knee short of robotic!), L.L. Barkat invited me to be Poet Laura. But she had to track me down as I traipsed around on my walker. I am so grateful that she found me and thankful for this past year discovering new poets and sharing a bit of whimsical verse as well as my history and adventures. I’ll miss it.

Donna Hilbert is the Poet Laura for 2025-2026, and I look forward to reading her columns. In learning who she is, I discovered that one of her books, Threnody, had been sitting in my Amazon cart for too long, and it’s now sitting in a stack beside my chair. I’ve discovered we share a love for the work of Kari Gunter-Seymour, and I’m drawn to the words in her poem “dent de lion.” Glynn Young wrote a Tweetspeak column about Hilbert’s collection of lamentations, and I have two things to say about what he wrote: (1) Why did you include her poem “Buried” that made me weep? Kittens on the Dichondra! Ah, devastating! (2) I loved Young’s description of Hilbert’s work: “Threnody is a circular work, showing that love leads to grief leads to love.” I look forward to the coming year and how Hilbert will surely take us on a whole new journey of wordplay, adventures, and digging into our curious and creative bones.

To close out my last Poet Laura column, here is my poem that’s a favorite with all the poets where I read at open mikes.

Driving Home from Kerrville

“Mom.”
Awed by the sight of a tree full of blackbirds,
I turned toward my daughter.
“Mom, you don’t have to write a poem about everything!”

Well, well, well.
Yes, I do.
On some days
everything speaks.
Observations—
especially the small things,
keen interactions,
a flight in winged breeze—
each one opens portals
where I travel
into new rooms
full of lilted light
and wily words
where visions beget
            visions.

Everything is poetry.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Featured photo by Nathalie, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Poems by Sandra Fox Murphy used with permission. Post and post photos by Sandra Fox Murphy. “Melancholy” is in the Public Domain.

The post Poet Laura: The Verdant Respite of Portugal + New Poet Laura Introduction appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

I wrote my first book when I was 10. (Note I said wrote, not published.) It was a mystery involving a group of kids who find a secret door behind a grandfather clock. The door leads to a cave — and that’s all I remember. A few years ago, I was cleaning out old files in the basement and found several poems I’d written in high school. Two were illustrated by the poet, who was not an artist. All of them were uniformly bad. I donated the batch to the recycling center.

I may be one of the few people who didn’t write poems in college. I did read a considerable amount of poetry, but a semester devoted to the English Romantic poets taught by a rather draconian professor (“You WILL learn this!’) convinced me I was not and never would be a poet. I opted for journalism, which resembles bad poetry.

A.J. Thibault

A.J. Thibault is best known for writing screenplays, short stories, and novels. His work has received numerous awards and recognitions — an American Fiction Award, A Gold Star Movie Award, Royal Society of Television & Motion Pictures Award, and many others. His writing generally falls in the science fiction, horror, and suspense genres, although he’s also been recognized with several comedy awards.

In college, some 50 years ago, Thibault wrote poetry. It was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests. He set the work aside; 10 years later, he also wrote 10 poems when he lived in Los Angeles. With a few minor modifications, he published the poems in 2007 under the title of We Lack a Word: A Collection of Rhythmic Prose and Poetry. A new (and slightly revised?) edition was published in 2015. I discovered it earlier this year when a Kindle version popped up in a promotional email.

What intrigued me: what would a poet’s words sound like, to himself and others, in poems written half a century earlier, in a different time and different context? Would they be dated? Would I have had the courage to publish my high school poems? (I can answer that question: No.)

Some of Thibault’s poems are short, and some longer. The poems are in a recognizable form, although about two thirds of the collection are what he calls “rhythmic prose,” which is not the same as prose poetry. We might call them short creative nonfiction, brief remembrances, and even a very short story or two.

The collection, though, has an overall style — simple language, evocative images, with a bent toward telling a story. This is one example, an almost impressionistic scene that you could easily imagine as a painting.

Kids

Three small children raced
Across the narrow ice
And down the soft hill of the park.
Red, yellow and a dab of blue
With white stripes.

Three small children merged
From a voidless shadow
And cried out in ecstasy.

Three small, yet emergent sounds
Filled the warm air of their breath
And remained floating
Between two glittering
Expanses of snow and sky.

Remained floating.
A small patch of grass in our memory,
A soft tune in a glowing field
Broken only by the upright
And dark foreboding trees of age.

His subjects vary widely. In addition to children, he considers sunrises, pterodactyls, education, the “money” of autumn, books, self-awareness, and more. The prose selections include being in civic hospital at age four, the consequences of your ice cream choices, hockey, trench warfare, fast music and cars, missing a family pet, and others. Most of both the poetry and the prose lean strongly in the direction of storytelling; it’s not a surprise that his career took him in the direction of screenwriting and fiction.

Thibault’s novels include Deadly Serious, Sway, Keeping Score, and How to Change a Law. He is also the founder of iLobby, which focuses on children’s health education and financial literacy. He attended Ryerson University in Canada and received his MFA degree from UCLA’s film school. He lives with his family in northern California.

We Lack a Word proves you can revisit your youth and publish what you wrote then — and still be proud that you did, because it is eminently worth publishing today. I do have to say, though, that I’m still glad I didn’t publish my own poems (with illustrations) from high school.

Photo by Gerry Knight, 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: A.J. Thibault and “We Lack a Word” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

So, get your favorite steep (or brew) and join us in writing a poem based on Maggie Smith’s I Think of You, Eréndira—which ran recently at Every Day Poems. The poem begins…

I was in love. Everything glass I touched turned blue.
Every orange I opened revealed a diamond.…

(read the whole poem)

Your Pour

When we are feeling an emotion, it can “color” or “texturize” the world. If you like, open your poem using the format of Smith’s poem, as such, to express how an emotion can “turn” everything around us to something else…

“I was [emotion]. Everything [your chosen object or material] I touched turned [your chosen color or element]…

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

The post Poetry Club Tea Date ✨ The Turning appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Catherine Strisik explores famous history in poetry

It’s coincidental, but my poetry reading this week has taken me to Greece. Tuesday, it was The Presence of One Word by Andrea Potos. Today, it’s a journey through family history and tradition.

In Goat, Goddess, Moon: Poems, Catherine Strisik poetically tells story after story of family history and experiences. And the family is a Greek one. We travel with her to the villages and landscapes of her forebears in northern Greece. (Part 1 of the collection lists the villages of Amygdalies and Trapezitsa, and I Googled them to find them on a map.)

Not surprisingly, perhaps, she associates the family with food and herbs, like her great-grandmother who came to America in 1916 carrying the smell of chamomile. Strisik adds Kalimera cake (of which there are several kinds), basil and dill for her grandfather, psomi bread from the bakery, soup, and friend eggplant sandwiches. The food comes the villages of her ancestors, and it is often prepared communally.

The two villages she cites are both in the area of Grevena, a town and municipality in northern Greece or western Macedonia. And the people there know their food.

Grevená People

We take our places at the stove casually
flaunting our flaws, our fractured English
and our wooden-handled spoons and give
the appearance of the attentive, square and
straight-backed. We gather to stir lamb shank
stew. Within the stir, a hand gesture’s resemblance,
our language prepared with the moisture and baa
of the mother lamb. When I ask for a taste, speak
quickly about the ingredients, you each hold
a spoon to my mouth. The ingredients taste
of wool and shepherds. I taste our
resemblance, our sacrifice. We have fallen
in love because it is June, and raining
hard. For a moment, we gaze
toward the flock on the hillside.

Strisik goes beyond the villages to what she calls her own labyrinth, the city of Heraklion on the island of Crete. She gets lost following its winding street, but (luckily) she doesn’t encounter her own minotaur.

She does find a few white-haired men seated and talking in a circle, all with the cigarettes and polished shoes. She finds lady beetles, a cat begging for food, and the fish seller who tells Strisik that “you look like one of us.” The title poem is centered here in Heraklion; she discovers that what she is seeing is blending with myth.

Catherine Strisik

In the final section of the collection, Strisik considers her own name, “Katerina.” She is still in Crete, “the island of remnants.” She says she uses her name “only in church when receiving communion,” but she explores its sounds, its textures, and its meaning. She’s becoming a kind of Greek woman, finding her roots and finding her place in both her family and her poetry.

Strisik previously published two full collections, The Mistress and Thousand-Cricket Song, and the chapbook Insectum Gravitis. She serves as editor of the Taos, New Mexico, Journal of Poetry and is a former poet laureate of Taos. She’s received numerous poetry awards and recognitions, and her poems have been translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. She lives in New Mexico and Massachusetts.

If your own heritage is Greek, or if you have visited or long to visit Greece, Goat, Goddess, Moon might make a good companion. The poems speak to the villages, the food, and the landscapes, and even more to the people, people like Strisik herself.

Photo by Marco Nurnbrger, 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: Catherine Strisik and “Goat, Goddess, Moon” appeared first on Tweetspeak Poetry.

Andrea Potos writes on the remembrance of things past

When I was a child, my favorite annual activity was to spend a week, sometimes two, being spoiled by my paternal grandmother. She lived in Shreveport, some 325 miles from my home in New Orleans, and part of the thrill of that week was to travel there or back on an airplane by myself. Another kind of thrill was accompanying her as she drove around town in her 1940 Ford, which inevitably broke down somewhere you’d wish it hadn’t.

“Stay in the car with the window cracked,” she’d say, as I watched her go knocking on doors until she found a telephone she could use. We’d wait until rescued by a cousin or one of my uncles-in-law. Once we rode in a tow truck.

Perhaps my most vivid memory is of Saturday afternoons, when she would sit in her rocker and prepare her Sunday School lesson for the next day. She had a small black-leather binder, where she would write out her lesson in unbelievably small script. She taught a ladies Sunday School class well into her 80s; sometimes she’d also practice her singing or piano solo for the worship service. She was self-taught in music; she couldn’t read a single note.

Those scenes with my grandmother, inevitably rose-colored by time and memory, came to mind as I read The Presence of One Word: Poems by Andrea Potos. I’d enjoyed her previous poetry collection, Two Emilys, and was looking forward to this new one. What I didn’t expect was to be taken on a journey into my own childhood.

This collection might be subtitled “Remembrance of Things Past.” Potos writes about her grandmother’s big black landline telephone (my grandmother had one, too, and on a party line). Then there’s her grandmother’s dresser, which “seemed to reign / over one half of a wall.” She recalls traveling to her grandparents’ home in Greece, a visit that included making Greek meatballs, hearing stories about her mother and aunts, and introducing her own child to her grandmother.

That sense of memory pervades the poems even when she returns to writing about her life in the American Midwest. She finds the quickest way to the community pool in the summer. She relishes the icy winter. And she offers a late apology (a very late apology) for crushing that June bug.

Late Apology

50 years later

to the gleaming fat June bug
I scrunched
under my small bare foot
on my way to the Ferris wheel
across the street from my house.
I can still see the smooth black shine
of your armor that failed you
just as I landed.

Oh creature of obsidian summer—
forgive me—I only had eyes for the twinkling
lights that twirled in the dusky nearness
while the moon, ascending,
must have eyed us
from its angle of neutral clarity.

Potos goes on to write about sitting beside her father in the hospital ICU (I’ve been in that exact same position). She describes a typical phone call from her mother, and going back to the old neighborhood 30 years later (I’ve made a similar pilgrimage). She mourns a friend’s passing and wonders about eternity, which I’ve come to understand as memory pitched forward. And she includes dreams, trips to England and Ireland, and the lists she makes.

Andrea Potos

Is it any wonder than poems like these take you into your own “memory palace” of real and imagined things?

Potos is the author of numerous poetry collections. Her poems have been featured in a considerable number of print and online literary publications, and three of her books have received Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. She’s also received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry from Rosebud Magazine and the James Heart Poetry Prize from North American Review. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

And that one word whose presence gives the title to the collection? It’s “jacaranda,” a tree that grows in her daughter’s yard across the country, a symbol of how the art of memory inhabits all generations. The Presence of One Word is one of those poetic treasures you want to read again and again.

Related:

Andrea Potos and Two Emilys

Photo by Sylvia Sassen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.