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Poetry Activity: Cento (Patchwork) Poem

April 10, 2022 by

Check out Write Shop for more on Cento poems

The Cento is one of the easiest poems to create because it is a collage of poetic lines from other poets’ poems.

According to the Academy of American Poets, John Asbury’s “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” and Peter Gizzi’s “Ode: Salute to the New York School” are two of the most famous Cento poems.

Please feel free to check out other examples, here.

For our cento, I’d love for everyone to take a look at my starting line and add their own (please identify the poem and poet):

How dreary – to be – Somebody! (Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? – 260)

Add your lines in the comments and I’ll post the full cento at month’s end.

Filed Under: Events, national poetry month Tagged With: ,

Virtual Poetry Circle: Naomi Shihab Nye

April 9, 2022 by

Hello everyone! It’s National Poetry Month and in honor of April as Stress Awareness Month, I wanted to share one of my favorite poems from Naomi Shihab Nye.

Sometimes There Is A Day

Sometimes there is a day you just want
to get far away from.
Feel it shrink inside you like an island,
as if you were on a boat.
I always wish to be on a boat.
Then, maybe, no more fighting
about land. I want that day to feel
as if it never happened, when Ahmad was burned,
when people were killed, when my cousin was shot.
The day someone went to jail
is not a day that shines. I want to have a clear mind
again, as a baby who stares at the light
wisping through the window and thinks,
That’s mine.

In this poem, I see that island. Maybe there’s a large erupting volcano, much like the stress we can face from war, pandemics, etc. Even little eruptions that strike fear and deep loss in us, like the bills piling up or the dead end job or family drama, can seem overwhelming. In this poem, we get to journey away from that island on a boat, watch that stress shrink until we are babies discovering the world anew.

What are some of your favorite poems that provide you stress in times of solace or just speak to you about stress/turmoil in general?

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Poetry Events: Roundup of Weekend Poetry Events

April 8, 2022 by

I wanted to share some poetry events that are happening today and throughout the weekend. There’s a mix of online events and in-person events for your pleasure.

I hope you’ll check out some of these poets:

In Person Events near Washington, D.C.:

Busboys & Poets presents 9th Hour Poetry Slam hosted by Charity Blackwell at 2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009 (April 8 at 9 p.m.) Bring something to read.

DiVerse Gaithersburg presents Pamela Murray Winters and Rocky Jones at Java Junction 5 S Summit Ave, Gaithersburg, MD 20877 (April 9 at 1:30 p.m.) Bring something to read at the open mic.

Politics & Prose presents a Poetry Panel with Danielle Badra, Carol Jennings, Phil Goldstein and Angelo Nikolopoulos at 5015 Connecticut Ave NW Washington, D.C. 20008 (April 10 at 3 p.m.)

America Poetry Museum presents the Where We Stand: Book Launch (my review) at 716 Monroe St NE #25th, Washington, D.C. 20017 (April 10 at 3 p.m.)

Online:

Indelible Literary and Arts Journal presentsPoetry and the Diaspora with André Naffis-Sahely, Anthony Anaxagorou, Antonia Taylor, Maria Taylor, Omar Sabbagh, Roula-Maria Dib, Kostya Tsolakis via Zoom (April 8 at 11 a.m.)

If you know of any and would like me to share them, please email me the details and I can update this post.

I’d love to hear about what events are near you.

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Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon

April 7, 2022 by

Source: Book Publicity Services
Paperback, 108 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon is a collection of poems that reflect on how home is not always the haven many of us feel that it is or should be. “The vast dark but sunlight-speckled ocean/While knowing they have everywhere/And nowhere in the world to flee.//” (from “Involuntary Endurance,” pg. 13)

The opening poems of this collection explore the dark shadows of home, and the narrator often tells us that they wish for a “happy ending,” but these are not those kinds of poems. Canyon unflinchingly explores the scars of abuse, neglect, and the fear that propels the narrator to consider suicide. “I held the knife in my hand/I propped open the blade/I sharpened it against petrified wood/But I could not slice my flesh//” (from “I Wish I Could Tell You This Has a Happy Ending,” pg. 15) The poems also explore what it means to be a woman and a Black woman in a white world.

These poems make you weep. In “Thoracic Biology,” the narrator says, “For the most part I want to learn to let go,/to hurt a little less./My heart is what hurts the most.//Where did I learn to/breathe through the pain, to/cut off the sword piercing through//” I find that I do this; try to breathe through the pain of whatever moment I’m in. Where did we learn to do that? Why is it OK that we need to do this? My experiences are not the same as Canyon’s or any other Black person, but I empathize with those feelings of deep loss, fear, and emptiness. These poems make you want to take action; reach inside these lines and pull these young children out and protect them from harm.

At 13, I found a Bra

...
Along my Sierras grows an
    orchard of knowledge of good
    and evil. I take my beatings. I 
    bind myself in woman's hood.

I hook the clasps
along my curved spine.
Only the band knows
the stress of my heart.

I am told every woman 
pays her debt with pain.

    When the daffodil opens,
    the last breath of childhood releases.

Canyon asks the reader how can we survive home when it is at the root of so much trauma? Shall we keep on praying as the narrator suggests in “A Plea to the Inane”? Or do we “hold my brother’s hand./I clench my breath./His scream lowers to a bleat.//” (pg. 47, “All Day Long”)? How can so much pain not force us to go crazy, to lose our minds? Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon is a harsh look at abuse, racism, gender discrimination, and so much more; it is a testament to survival and what it means to hold hands and push through the pain and into the light.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Katerina Canyon is a 2020 and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in New York Times and Huffington Post. From 2000 to 2003, she served as the Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga. During that time, she started a poetry festival and ran several poetry readings.

She was featured in the Los Angeles Times and was awarded the Montesi Award from Saint Louis University in 2011, 2012, and 2013. She has published multiple chapbooks and an album.

Filed Under: challenges, Events, national poetry month, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , ,

Useful Junk by Erika Meitner

April 6, 2022 by

Source: GBF
Paperback, 104 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Useful Junk by Erika Meitner is a poetic exploration of memory and desire, but also a collection of perspectives on the body and how it is seen and what it sees. The collection opens with the poem, “I would like to be the you in someone’s poem.” Here, Meitner’s narrator expresses a desire to be seen in all her glory and quirkiness, even if it is just a fiction.

When you enter this collection, you’re in a surreal world where the poet explores what the junk mail knows about us and our finances, but also what junk mail fails to know about our feral nature and our desires to be wanted and seen with all of our flaws. Meitner’s poems offer vignettes of “multitudinous and wild pasts” and our many futures. “don’t you worry about how/scattered memory gets (pick-up-sticks, a box//of buttons, shards of plastic beached across/an entire coastline) and how we’re just trying//to find the origin,” (from “All the Past and Futures” pg. 18-9)

She tells us in “Medium Adam 25”: “I am not an abstracted/self in the wet night. I am not a static/enterprise either, and as I move through//time and space, many things are vanishing/in exchange for a wanting with no end…” Isn’t it the truth of each of us. We are not this abstract perception that others have of us; we are fluid and changing even if it isn’t as obvious by our physical selves — though those change too.

Useful Junk by Erika Meitner is intimate and existential all at once, and readers will swim in the morass and indulge in memory and perception imparted with quick wit and contemplative angst. Meitner provides us with a bridge between our memories and their changing patterns and our desires to be seen coupled with the anxiety of how we are perceived by others and ourselves.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Erika Meitner was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She attended Dartmouth College (for a BA in Creative Writing and Literature), Hebrew University on a Reynolds Scholarship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, Events, national poetry month, poetry, Poetry Reading Challenge, Read in 2022, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Poetry Activity: Texting Poems

April 5, 2022 by

I love to share fun and inspiring poetry creation activities, and one of my favorites is still to come. But as I was checking around for new activities, I came across one for students that I think writers might enjoy trying.

We all know how to text each other on our phones at this point, so how about we create a text poem in the form of couplets.

  • Couplets: two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

For this writing exercise, you can choose something conversational you would have with a friend and write just 2 lines with the same meter (usually we speak in Iambic pentameter) and a rhyme.

There’s also this Rhyming Couplet Generator, though it is a bit more formal.

We can start a conversation in the comments if you’re up for it.

Here’s my attempt:

I walked at dawn in the orange glow.
My boots crunched on icy snow.

Something very simple for your Tuesday!

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Mailbox Monday #677

April 4, 2022 by

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Velvet, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

The Switch by Beth O’Leary from Audible.

When overachiever Leena Cotton is ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, she escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some long-overdue rest.

Eileen is newly single and about to turn 80. She’d like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn’t offer many eligible gentlemen.

So they decide to try a two-month swap.

Eileen will live in London and look for love. She’ll take Leena’s flat, and learn all about casual dating, swiping right, and city neighbors. Meanwhile, Leena will look after everything in rural Yorkshire: Eileen’s sweet cottage and garden, her idyllic, quiet village, and her little neighborhood projects.

But stepping into one another’s shoes proves more difficult than either of them expected. Will swapping lives help Eileen and Leena find themselves…and maybe even find true love? In Beth O’Leary’s The Switch, it’s never too late to change everything…or to find yourself.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary from Audible.

What if your roommate is your soul mate?

A joyful, quirky romantic comedy, Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare is a feel-good audiobook about finding love in the most unexpected of ways.

Tiffy and Leon share an apartment. Tiffy and Leon have never met.

After a bad breakup, Tiffy Moore needs a place to live. Fast. And cheap. But the apartments in her budget have her wondering if astonishingly colored mold on the walls counts as art.

Desperation makes her open minded, so she answers an ad for a flatshare. Leon, a night shift worker, will take the apartment during the day, and Tiffy can have it nights and weekends. He’ll only ever be there when she’s at the office. In fact, they’ll never even have to meet.

Tiffy and Leon start writing each other notes – first about what day is garbage day, and politely establishing what leftovers are up for grabs, and the evergreen question of whether the toilet seat should stay up or down. Even though they are opposites, they soon become friends. And then maybe more.

But falling in love with your roommate is probably a terrible idea…especially if you’ve never met.

What did you receive?

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Local D.C. Event: Gallery Opening of Photopoetry by Gordana Gerskovic, Serena Agusto-Cox, and More

April 3, 2022 by

What: Opening Reception of Photopoetry
When: Sunday, April 3 at 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Where: Foundry Gallery at 2118 8th Street NW, Washington, D.C.

Two of my poems have been paired with Gordana Gerskovic‘s wonderful art. I hope that if you are in the area, you’ll drop by the opening reception on April 3.

Also featured:

We will host a reading later in the month.

Filed Under: announcements, Events, national poetry month Tagged With: , , ,

Virtual Poetry Circle: Nikki Giovanni

April 2, 2022 by

 

Hello everyone! It’s National Poetry Month and in honor of Women’s History Month in March, I wanted to share one of my favorite Nikki Giovanni poems.




Legacies

her grandmother called her from the playground   
       “yes, ma’am”
       “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old   
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn’t say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less   
dependent on her spirit so
she said
       “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”
with her lips poked out
and the old woman wiped her hands on
her apron saying “lord
       these children”
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and i guess nobody ever does

I love how the exchange here between the older woman and the girl is simple. It is a normal conversation between an elder looking to teach a child and a child’s response, but there is that undercurrent of fear and connection that I love so much about this poem.

The child wants to stay connected to this woman, but knows that death is nearing for her and she hopes that by rejecting the teaching, she can stave off that inevitable moment and disconnection.

What are some of your favorite poems celebrating women?

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National Poetry Month 2022

April 1, 2022 by

This is the 2022 winner of The Academy of American Poets poster contest. Lara L. is an eleventh grader from Saunders Trades and Technical High School in Yonkers, New York.

As always, poetry is coming this month on the blog. I am eager to share poetic events and some poetry with everyone.

I’ll be at the Foundry Gallery on April 3 for an opening reception for photographs from Gordana Geršković and poems created by myself and other local poets. Our poetry reading will be on April 24.

On April 23, I’ll be participating in a National Poetry Month celebration through an online virtual reading. More details to come.

On May 1, I’ll be at Tunnicliff’s Tavern reading with other Poets on the Patio for Literary Hill BookFest.

I’d love to hear what you have planned to celebrate poetry this month.
Add your links or comments below:

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