Acknowledgements

These poems, some in different versions, have appeared or are forthcoming in the following journals:

Appalachian Journal: “The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams”
Cloudbank: “Three Months”
Colorado Review: “Thrush”
Copper Nickel: “The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics” and “Antler”
Hayden’s Ferry Review: “What the Blood Does”
South Carolina Review: “Joint”
storySouth: “My Grandmother Speaks of Beauty”
Two Review: “On Rereading Leaves of Grass”

-------------------------------

This is the third page of my manuscript, which I sent out to another contest just today. My acknowledgement list is looking pretty good, if I do say so myself! I got my latest acceptance, from Hayden's Ferry Review, yesterday. It's a nice feeling. I wanted to note, though, that I decided to count up the number of rejections on the "No Thanks" column on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my submitted poems: 23. Twenty-three journals have rejected my poems, some of them multiple times. These journals range from really prestigous (like Poetry, which kindly sends its "no thanks" email in about 3 days) to journals I really thought would accept my work (I'm looking at you, Stylus). The whole process is such a waiting game, so the occasional news that a poem has been accepted somewhere is a boost, and a nice surprise.

Twenty Months and a Day

Monday update:

Amelia slept from 7:30 last night till 6:30 this morning without a peep. I told my mom about it, and she replied, "That's toddler sleep." I'll take it! I am hoping this is a new trend.

It's hot in Denver and very humid. It is a southern heat. I could barely run at the park this morning, and we couldn't stay long at the playground either. I have had success getting Amelia to leave places pretty easily by first telling her that we are going to say "bye-bye to [whatever it is] in a few minutes," and then pretty quickly picking her up and getting her to say bye-bye. Consequently she can now say "few minutes" and says it a lot when she wants to do something. One of the most trying of these is sitting in the car. She loves to sit out of her carseat in the car, and she obviously can't do that while we are driving, so we spend a lot of time these days sitting in the parked car in the garage. She likes to press the buttons on the radio and pretend to turn the steering wheel (from my lap). I am sure to pull up the emergency break and I stay right with her, keys in my pocket, so this is not unsafe, right? It feels sort of like one of those "don't"s in a list of toddler rules, but it's not like I'm leaving her in there alone. Another funny thing she says is "back yard" and by this she means the very back of the car, behind the back seat. (We have a Rav-4. We traded in Dean's Camry back in the fall when he realized he needed 4-wheel drive to get to many of the trailheads he wanted to get to. Plus we ended up needing it to drive on snow. Denver doesn't really plow its roads.)

We got out garden planted this weekend and are just waiting for it to grow. Expect a garden post as soon as I get some current pictures taken.

And, finally, I got an email this morning saying that the journal that accepted one of my poems will be out soon! You can see my name on the table of contents here.

Dream Away

I told Dean this morning that he will need to arrange child care for late August. I am going on this trip.

Rejection

Through an odd series of connections, I recently came across the poet Sarah Vap. I have just begun to read her poems but I like them very much, and I also like her essays.

I was reading this interview with Sarah Vap from The Southeast Review and I was struck by one of the questions:

Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?

And her answer:

A: Warm. Tender. Long.

I thought this was such a strange question until I remembered that a writer was asking the questions and another writer was answering--they were speaking about writing being rejected. These questions and answers came to mind yesterday when we returned from our trip to NC to a large stack of mail. One of the envelopes was a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

When you send off your poems to journals, you include a self-addressed stamped envelope. This allows the journal to reply to you efficiently and at no cost to them. Until I actually had a poem accepted somewhere, I figured if your poem was taken, they would write to you with a real envelope. But no, they still just use the one you sent. So when you see an SASE in the mail, if you're me, you know you've gotten an answer about your poems.

I sent off a bunch of poems in October. That's October 2010, eight months ago. Until yesterday, I hadn't heard from two journals from that round of submissions. Well, that's not quite true--I had heard from both that I had reached a second round of selections. So I had hopes that my poems might be taken. Then I came home to this SASE.

As I opened the envelope, I could tell the letter inside was long. So my hopes rose higher. But then my eyes fell on the letter's second sentence:

"Although we are unable to use your work..."

It's a very nice rejection letter. It explains the journal's (it was Calyx, if anyone's interested) editorial process, mentioning that the journal is only able to publish 2-3% of the 1000+ submissions it receives each year. And one of the editors took time to write a personal note at the bottom. She said they really liked my poems, one in particular. "Keep working on the ending," she wrote. "It didn't quite work for us."

It was funny reading that. I really appreciate that this editor took the time to write a personal note. It struck me as a bit workshoppish to say that that the ending "didn't work" for them, but I am glad for an honest response. The irony is that the ending of the poem she was talking about never quite worked for me either. I changed it during the manuscript class I took. It's different now.

Oh well. It was a bummer and I was/am disappointed. But I remembered Sarah Vap's answer about her relationship to rejection: warm, tender, long. As a writer, I certainly expect to have a long relationship with rejection, but it's interesting to think of having a warm and tender one. I was thinking this morning about what she meant by that answer. To me, it must mean to love the process of writing and sharing regardless of the response you receive, and to love your readers regardless of their responses. And maybe above all to love your writing and your writing self regardless of whether your work is "accepted" on any number of levels, literary or otherwise.

Good food for thought for any artist. And as someone who just sent off a manuscript to some very slim-chance contests, I should keep all of this in mind.

June

On New Year's Day, I took a yoga/art workshop dedicated to setting intentions for the new year. After a yoga flow session, students made collages that depicted goals or hopes for 2011.

Each participant was given a square of poster paper. There were plenty of magazines, markers, crayons, pastels, glue, glitter, feathers, old calendars, postcards, and who knows what else to go around. The room had the feel of an elementary school art classroom, happy with chatter and creation. I, however, had a hard time getting started.

For one thing, I went through a collage phase in college (ha! no near pun intended) and I wasn't in the mood to cut and paste. I had, though, come to the workshop with some vague intentions in mind, as well as a deep belief in the power of setting intentions. In 2009, I went to a similar New Year's Day workshop in DC. In that one, we wrote letters to ourselves, to be mailed to us by the instructor in 6 months, that described our lives 6 months later. The idea was to describe in present tense the life that you wanted to be living 6 months later. That year, Dean and I had just decided to have a baby and I was sending off poems to journals, but so far had only received rejections. In my letter to myself, I was pregnant and holding the journal that held my first published poem. When I found the letter in my mailbox in late June, I was 5 months pregnant. The journal that contained my first published poem was on my bookshelf, within easy reach.

Because of one of 2009's attained set intentions--guess which one--I couldn't make it to a New Year's Day workshop in 2010. But I did in 2011, and I knew I wanted a year of change. First and foremost, I wanted more sleep. I wanted more time for yoga, more time for writing, and more time for myself in general. I knew I was going to wean sometime in 2011, and I knew I was going to think about looking for work in the fall. In general, I was hoping that 2011 would be a year of finding footing in the world of motherhood, of making room in my life for the things that had defined me before Amelia came along and became the center of my universe.

In the weeks before the 2011 workshop, I had been writing a prose poem about Amelia's birth. Some lines from the poem were floating through my head. I decided to write/rewrite the poem on my poster paper. First I cut into into a more oval shape. Think O'Keefe flowers--I was writing about birth here. And then I wrote the poem in the same oval shape. On top of it all, I wrote the a word in large block letters. I colored in some of the letters and pasted paper over others. The word was EVOLVE.

June is a rich month, sun and flowers and early summer harvest. It is the month I was married. It is the sixth month of the year, a halfway point, the perfect time to pause and consider or reconsider intentions for the year.

My plan for June is to write one blog post a day. I don't have any particular theme in mind for the posts--I won't always be writing about setting intentions, although this did seem like a good place to start--it's just that I have finished up some fairly major projects in May, not least of which was finishing my poetry manuscript and sending it off to several contests, and I would like to get back to the blog for awhile.

I have some other goals in mind too. In June, I want to

1. Drink more water. I realized I go through the day feeling thirsty a lot. (A note to Mom: I don't think it's diabetes.) I think I'm just thirsty. Denver is dry and I am busy.

2. Read more. My plan for Amelia's naptimes in June are to write on the blog and then read. I want to read both poetry and fiction. I started a Goodreads account a couple of years ago I would like to get back to too.

3. And with #2 in mind, I am setting a cleaning limit for myself in June. I have been feeling like I fritter away too much time straightening the house. It becomes a creative block, almost, a way for me to avoid sitting down to write. So in June, I am allowed to straighten up after breakfast and to do whatever chores seem most urgent for 10 minutes, and only 10 minutes, after Amelia goes down for her nap. I am going to set the timer. If Amelia happens to be entertaining herself throughout the day, I can do small things then too, but that's pretty hit or miss.

And forth, I would like to exercise more. I have been going to yoga much more often and even running, although that's more sporadic. In June I am going to try to do one or the other every day.

It will be interesting to see how this goes, since I often don't feel like writing until everything is neat. And the truth is I really hate running. On top of all that, we are spending most of June 1st on a plane. So we'll see.

In the manuscript class I just finished, the instructor talked a lot about closure, about the importance of finishing a project, even if it wasn't as perfect as you'd hoped. The great thing about letting something go, he said, is that you get to see what you're going to do next. The month of May was for me a definite time of closure--I sent the manuscript off, I weaned Amelia--so I feel that this summer is a kind of beginning. All this reminds of some lines from a poem by T.S. Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Beginning or end, I am excited to see what happens next.

History and Influences Part 4a: The Romantics and Me

Note: this is a long post with a lot of links. Just FYI.

All right, here we go. I have been avoiding this post like the plague. It's because I don't feel like I know enough to write about. But hey, a history of A's in English classes (okay, some B+'s, a lot of A-'s) says otherwise, right?

As I have been considering my main poetic influences, I came to the conclusion that my poems have been impacted by two particular literary movements, Romanticism and the Modernism. A little focused reading on both of those movements led me to what now seems like the obvious realization that almost all contemporary American poetry was influenced by the Romantics and the Modernists. That made me want to write this post even less, because there is no way I will say anything new or anything comprehensive. But, my point here is to write this all out for myself, and also for all my readers, who are kind to read it but mostly just want a picture of Amelia.

Here is one with Micah, at Easter.



We put ears on them.

Okay, focus. So I decided to tackle the Romantics first. Let's begin with

The Question Air Guide to the Romantics in 100 Words or Less:

Romanticism was an artistic movement, not just a literary one, that flourished from the late 1700s to the early or mid 1800’s, although the exact dates are hard to pin down. The English poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly and Keats are generally credited with beginning or least advancing the movement in literature; Walt Whitman is the poster-poet for American Romanticism. In a break with poetry of the past, Romantics poets declared themselves as individuals and created works that featured a great deal of personal history, personal viewpoints and personal meditation. Romantic poetry also often focuses attention on both the natural world and the supernatural.

That's actually 103 words, but I felt it was important to repeat "personal" several times. If you want to read more, here is a short guide to Romanticism, and here is another really nice summary of the movement, a little longer but more informative than the first.

I will go out on a limb and say that almost all contemporary American poetry is influenced to some degree by the tenets of the Romantic Movement. Even the experimental poets like LANGUAGE poets are reacting against it (here is another interesting example of experimental poetry); even the more political poets are probably using a somewhat personal lens. In my case, more contemporary poems were models for me than poems by the Romantics, but those contemporary poems were in some way influenced by the Romantics, or were influenced by poems that were.

(I always thought an interesting project would be to create a web of poets. I would pick a poet I like and try to figure out what past writers might have influenced her. For example, a web of Mary Oliver would have to include Walt Whitman. Also probably Thoreau. This is another huge project. I will put it on my list.)

But Romanticism has more than just a tangential influence on my writing. My own poems actually feature some of what the CUNY website I linked above calls the three "major precepts" of Romanticism: imagination, nature, and symbolism and myth. I am definitely interested in those three things.

For example, the poem that begins my manuscript in its current form is called "The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams." I actually got that title from a book I saw in a shop with my friend Laura. I didn't look much at the book, but the title fascinated me. I thought it would fun to write a poem that could be an exceprt from the book. It was the first poem I totally made up, if that makes sense. In other words, I wasn't trying to record a particular expereince or capture a memory, as I do in a lot of other poems. I was just making up my own dream symbols. The poems begins

A dream containing dogwood blossoms means
you are questioning your religion. A dream
in which you drive a Volkswagon Jetta up a river...

I had a lot of fun writing that poem. It felt very free. I did actually dream once about driving a VW Jetta (which was my first car) up a river. But must dreams, and their "meanings," I just made up.

As for nature and "symbolism and myth," one of the most interesting things for me as a writer is finding ways to combine the two. I think that was true of some Romantics as well. I wrote a long poem called "Antler" that alternated two stories in 6-line stanzas. One was the story of this walk I took with my mom where we came across all these dead, decaying cows in a field. The other was about a trip to an art museum in DC. It featured this piece of art.

I was actually writing two poems, one about each experience, and I realized that two somehow were similar. I thought that putting them together would let the natural objects from the walk resonate against the made objects from the museum in interesting ways.

You know what? I generally don't put my own poems on my blog, because I am sending them out to journals to be published and some journals view any kind of web publication as "previous publication." So to keep everything simple I just don't put poems here. But this poem has been rejected by exactly seven literary journals, and it's not out anywhere now, so I am putting it up. I will leave it for a little while and then take it down. Consider it a sneak peak. Beware, it's kind of long.

[poem deleted Aug. 9 2011]


Is this a hard poem to read? Some people who have read it seem to find it confusing. It was a hard poem to write but also very fun. I was very excited when the two stories came together in the middle. It was not something I planned. That's one of the best things about writing, how even when you set out to write something in particular you don't know what's going to happen.

Anyway, there you have it. I don't want to analyze my own poem, but maybe you can see the Romantic influences. If you are an literature person and reading this, I would love to hear comments. I feel a bit at a loss writing about this stuff, but it something I want to tackle more often.

Last Day of April

At my class meeting last week, the instructor, when asked about his appearance on a Colorado Public Radio program to talk about poetry, said he really didn't like National Poetry Month. "We should celebrate poetry and the arts all year," he said.

I agree. That's the problem with delegating a month or week or day to anything. Earth DAY? We live on the earth. We should think about it every day. Ideally, poetry would be more a part of people's lives throughout the year. Part of my goal for the blog this month was to allow readers to think and write about poetry on their own terms, in the hopes that more poetry would begin to permiate their lives.

I think that all of the guest posts allowed us to do just that. We considered poetry as a place of refuge and poetry as a guilty pleasure. We saw how poetry can connect friends throughout the years or... in my lucky case... be a catalyst for a new and lasting relationship. We read original poetry, saw connections between poetry and music, and considered the source of poetic inspiration.

As you can see by the relatively small number of posts by me over the past 30 days, I could have never have celebrated National Poetry Month alone. I actually did a lot of poetry-related work this month, for my class and on my manuscript, but sadly not as much as I wanted was for the blog. So, as April turns to May, I want to extend my invitation for guest bloggers. I can think of at least three people who had hoped to write guest posts, but like me, were too busy to get to it in April. If you would like to help me in extending the spirit of National Poetry Month throughout the rest of the year, I would still love to hear from you. And I, as much as I am avoiding it, still have to finish my "History and Influences" series. In fact I think I am going to vow that part 4 of it will be this next post on this blog. And I have a lot of cute Easter pictures and a list of new Amelia words to post. So maybe that will help hurry me along.

On this last day of April, though, I will leave you with a few more poetry-related links.

This is the radio program that featured my instructor mentioned above, Chris Ransick.

And finally, one of my favorite poets, Kay Ryan, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry. You can read about her life and see some of her poems here. Her poems are like tiny, dense universes. Read them twice, aloud, for wonderful surprises in sound and subject.

And until the next time, happy poetry.

Special Guest Post!

Today's lovely poem and post are brought to you by Gano, also known as Mary Sanderford, Amelia's great-grandmother.

This poem spoke to me, especially the first two lines, after I had the opportunity to visit my childhood friend, now in a nursing home.

I had not seen her in probably twenty-five years--what fun we had talking of our childhood experiences, things none of my present friends would even know about.

There seem to be people and friends for all seasons of our lives--and I thank God for that.

A Friend

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

There is no friend like an old friend
Who has shared our morning days,
No greeting like his welcome,
No homage like his praise.

Fame is the scentless flower
With gaudy crowns of gold,
Bur friendship is the breathing rose
With sweets in every fold.

History and Influences, Part 2

As I have mentally traced my poetic "career," I have realized that my falling in love with poetry has been a falling in love with writing. As in, with my own writing--not that I have loved everything I have written (I certainly have not) but with being able to write. After the childhood experience of reading "The Listeners," I didn't really read poems for a long time. I had some great teachers, including Chuck Sullivan at NC Governor's School, who explained poems to me in a way that made me love them, but I wasn't exactly discovering or reading any poetry on my own. In college, I was lucky enough to have a roommate/best friend who was interested in creative writing. I decided to take a fiction class, but, as chance would have it, that class was full. Introduction to Poetry was open, so I took that instead. Ever since my first assignment from Alan Shapiro to write ten rhyming couplets describing a view through a window, I have been hooked on writing poems.

Typing that out, it seems pretty obvious, and I am sure I am not alone. I remember starting the poetry classes I taught by asking the students, "What is poetry?" Almost everyone included in their answer the idea of self-expression. Perhaps stereotypically, that answer always made me think of an angst-ridden teen scribbling sad or angry poems in a notebook, but it's true. Even if you are not a writer, you have probably written a poem. And if you have ever written a poem, think back--it was probably sparked by some deep emotion or vivid experience, something you had to flesh out for yourself, in your own words.

I say all of that to explain my realization that the poets who have most influenced me have been the poets who have said things I want to say. Whatever their style or specific subject matter, their words, at some point in my life, rang so true to me that when I read them, it was as if I had said them myself (or so I wished, anyway).

Today's post (which took 5 days to write) is about two of those poets: Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver. These two poets have a lot of differences, but, in my mind anyway, they also have a lot in common. They are both poets I discovered outside of any classroom, and their heightened attention to their subject matter, different though it is, created poems that were exactly what I needed to read at two particular points in my life.

First, Sylvia Plath. It's very unoriginal for a young white woman who writes poems to say she was influenced by Sylvia Plath, but there you have it. I was reading Plath during my second year of college, a time in my life when, for whatever reason (being far away from home; subsisting exclusively on glazed donuts and plain bagels; new-found feminist rage; a long, rainy winter; unrequited love) I was sad a lot. Sometimes I was deeply, deeply sad, and sometimes I was angry. I had a group of girlfriends who were going through a similar time, and we read Sylvia Plath.

Why Plath? I also read a lot of Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, but Plath particularly stands out to me as an influence. Part of it has to be her biography. She was pretty and smart; she had a rocky love life with another famous poet; she killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. That shouldn't be glamorous, but it was to me at the time I most loved Plath, and I know I am not alone. There is even a a movie about Plath's life. Perhaps it was the shock value of her life that attracted me to her at first. But what held my attention was her poetry.

My favorite Plath poem is "Elm." You can read the poem here.

I don't really want to explicate the poem, but I will say that I came across the fact that the poem was first published under the title "Elm Speaks" or "The Elm Speaks." Maybe I am slow, but I never thought of an elm speaking until I read that. Rereading the poem with the idea that the elm is speaking kind of clears things up a bit. To me, before I thought of that, I just had the idea that the speaker was like the elm.

And at the time I discovered this poem, I was like the elm too. The end of this poem especially seemed to speak to me:


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

If we want to be literal about the speaker being an elm, the "dark thing that sleeps in me" is an owl. But to a depressed and confused 20-year-old, the dark thing is/was the depression and confusion. And sometimes, in college, learning for the first time about feminism and colonialism and environmental destruction and the world's history of wars and who knows what else (liberal arts college, anyone?) I often felt "incapable of any more knowledge."

But besides the poem's subject matter, what struck me about this poem was the way it sounds. Plath's use of alliteration, rhyme, and repetition create these awesome, knife-like lines at just the right moments in the poems. Rhyming "that thing in me" with "malignity" is amazing. (Several of my teachers have commented on Plath as a champion rhymer; I am pretty sure one of them called her one of the best rhymers of the 20th century.) And that last stanza is, like a nightmarish nursery rhyme, is simply haunting:

these are the isolate, slow faults that kill, that kill, that kill.

When I was 20, those lines were in my head for months.

Then. Something happened.

Maybe the lines rang even truer? I fell in love with sadness for awhile. It fell in love with it because it was real, but paradoxically, that made it false, a kind of mask. A fault that could, in fact, kill. Like the myth of the crazy artist, it was dangerous.

I didn't want to be sad anymore, but my art was rooted in sadness. Then I discovered Mary Oliver.

Actually, Dean discovered Mary Oliver. And he gave me her book Dream Work. And then I married him.

This is Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day," which I already posted a few days ago. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Not end it by putting my head in an oven, thank you all the same.

I want to make it very clear, though, that I am not blaming Sylvia Plath for her sadness, nor am I intending to trivialize her death. Mental illness and depression are very real things. And Plath's depression and despair were real, and her death was tragic. But I don't think it was depression and tragedy that made her an artist. In fact, I think remembering Plath's suicide over her poetry cheapens her art and her life.

For me, I had reached a point at which I was in danger of wearing depression as an artistic mask. Just as Plath's poetry gave me words to name my sadness, even rage, Oliver's poetry gave me words to answer it. (In fact, in her poem "Members of the Tribe," which is not online, she does something similar, if not just that.)

Here are some poems by Mary Oliver that are online. Scroll down and read "The Journey."

Now read the first poem, "Wild Geese."

These poems are still, in my mind, tinged with a certain sadness. They are not the stuff of greeting cards. There is "despair," even "terrible melancholy." But, almost like an ars poetica, these poems allow a way out of the sadness. The way is living, choosing to live in the physical world, and if you are a writer, it is writing.

Overall, I don't find Oliver as technically exhilarating as Plath, but in my favorites of her works, the rich, almost photographically-precise images build with a measured, straightforward voice to create poems with just as much power as Plath's. Obviously, the voices are very different. But both are honest and direct. They are real. Those are certainly three qualities I hope for in my own poetry.

So thank you, Sylvia and Mary, for creating your poems.

Whew. Stay tuned for part 3, when I tackle either the Romantics or the Modernists. Or maybe both?

Today's Post, now with part two!

As of 1:20 GMT, this post is now complete with part two.

I woke up to an email from Luli, aka "Ew," who is home from a week-long visit to Colorado. (We miss her and "Goo" terribly already.) She sent me a link to artist Austin Kleon's article, How to Steal Like an Artist. It's great. Read it.

After I posted the link to the article this morning, I decided to try Kleon's idea of newspaper blackout. You can see examples of Kleon's blackouts here. (I found this site through http://www.austinkleon.com/.) Basically, Kleon takes a page from a newspaper and blacks out many of the words. The remaining words make a poem. This idea of blacking out has always intrigued me. The poet Mary Ruefle did something similar in her book A Little White Shadow, using a 19th century book with the same title and blacking out text to make a new book of poems. And I haven't seen it, but the poet Ronald Johnson did the same thing with Paradise Lost. You can read a review of both of those here.

All of this is a kind of "found poetry," which is simply poems found in the world. My students loved found poetry. I used to do a lesson in which students cut out words from newspapers and magazines and glued them together to make poems. Another fun thing is to sit around and eavesdrop, writing down words you overhear, and make a poem out of them.

Since I conveniently had Sunday's Denver Post scattered all over my kitchen table, I decided to try a blackout poem this morning with Amelia.



You can see my poem on the right and hers on the left. She did a greenout poem.

After about 5 minutes Amelia was done with blackout poems and had moved on to something more interesting



so I had to stop. I was going to publish the text of my poem but, sadly, it was lost when someone spilled milk on the newspapers. It wasn't that great, anyway, although it was fun to make. Even though the technique is simple, it takes some effort to create a good blackout poem. You need to read the text and have an idea. Or maybe not. Maybe I am taking the fun out of it. I would like to find an old book and black it out a la A Little White Shadow. I'll put in on my list of poem projects.

Switching gears, today is Poem in Your Pocket day. I had planned to really celebrate this day by sending out poems to everyone I knew, but it snuck up on me. So please take a minute to download your own pocket poem here. You click on a pocket with whatever word intrigues you most. I already read "moo" and "glass."

Finally, in non-poetry news, we visited Jes, Kim and Micah for Jes's 30th birthday last weekend. Micah remains super cute and he got a new hat:



Here are Amelia and Micah sizing each other up.



And, in conclusion, here is Amelia wearing a lot of bibs.

Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

Today's post on one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather", is by Tyler Mills, a poet and former UMD classmate of mine who is so cool she has her own website. You can read the poem at the link above or at the end of Tyler's post.

This poem is maybe a little trickier to follow that some of the ones I have recently posted, so I will enter teacher mode for a moment to get you started, and tell you that a rook is a bird (according to my dictionary, it's "a gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face"). If you find yourself getting lost in the poem, try reading straight through the line breaks until the end of each sentence. Thanks, Tyler, for this great post!

This day in the second week of April, a cold rain has been soaking into the concrete of the walkways that lead to the looming buildings of my city university. It is the kind of morning when rusty drips find your scalp through the cracks in the platform overhang, the train is late, and people crush you against a metal bar with their damp coats. Later, the fluorescent lights of your composition classroom show rows of pale, tired students sitting in front of the crinkled pages of their homework.

I pull out a huge pink costume scarf from my backpack like a magician, but instead of it transforming into a long knotted rope to lead us out the window, I fold the fabric in half and wear it. A few students smile.

Whimsy. I’ll take it!

For those of us in a semester cycle (or those who experience spring’s seasonal tax-season stress), National Poetry Month occurs at a time when one’s own creative projects become buried under laundry, library books, and unopened junk mail. “April is the cruelest month,” writes T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” Crocuses spike from the mud along a chain link fence, but we can’t help but smell the dirt and think of its duality—life and death—and the rain that makes this duality even more present to us. The earth is being creative, but even as we comment on its changes, our own struggle for creativity seems wan in comparison.

More bedraggled students wander into my classroom, and I point out that when they go outside, they will be able to see tiny yellow buds appearing on the bushes outside the building. A few more smile. The classroom is thawing slowly, but thawing.

In this second week of National Poetry Month, I keep returning to Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and what we—poets and non-poets alike—can expect from inspiration at a time when inspiration can seem just out of reach or absolutely absent. Plath’s poem begins this way:

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye,

The black rook “[a]rranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain” promises design. The act of arrangement seems like a mind dealing with the problem of mood and deciding what to do with it. I love how the beginning of this poem acknowledges the speaker’s search for inspiration, especially in the way the stanzas break on “accident” after the speaker confesses, “I do not expect a miracle.” But “an accident”—enjambed, hanging out in the white space of the poem’s weather—throws us into even more uncertainty. Chance cannot even “set the sign on fire/ In my eye”.

What then?

If the mood of the weather cannot give us the bird, or even some abstract “accident” inspiration, what hope is there for us in the month of April? The speaker wants “some backtalk/ from the mute sky,” but the sky remains “mute.” Yet what I love about “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is the poem’s turn that happens next:

I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

The speaker “can’t honestly complain”? (And, we can read some word play in “honestly.” Is the speaker being conversational, or is she saying that complaining would be dishonest?) One reason that the poem gives us is the presence of “minor light” that she finds in the gloom: playing off of the domestic space of the “kitchen table or chair” and created perhaps by the speaker’s own will (by the word “incandescent,” suggesting a bulb switched on). April might be “mute” to us. But,
With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles.

The speaker’s voice is hesitant, self-correcting, and critical. But, honest. And, poetry at its best.

You can read the entire poem on the Poetry Foundation’s website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178972 .

Three Poems

by my sister, Heather! These are about our grandparents and great-grandmother. Thank you, Heather, for these beautiful poems.

Poem About Granny

She was strong as strong as can be,
and now here stands a willow tree.
It represents her standing tall,
I remember it from when I was small.
We planted it when she was here,
when I look at it, it brings me tears.
Tears of laughter, shrieks, and joys,
from all the young girls and boys,
for these are her grandchildren children can't you see,
playing in the willow tree.

Nanny's Cooking

The kitchen was filled with good smells and love,
we miss her great meals, she is now up above.
Cooking was her favorite thing,
I bet Papa felt like a king.
Everyone would clear their plates,
nobody could resist the wait.
Over the last helping we would fight,
each and every single night.

Papa Brown

Papa Brown is always working,
always up to something, always smirking.
Practical joker, you better watch out...
For his mongoose is out and about!
Walk up to the cage if you dare,
but be sure to take extra care.
"That thing is wild!" he'd always say,
and it would always make his day,
to throw that animal high in the air,
for it was just a teddy bear.

From Poetry 180

Poetry 180 is/was a project whose goal was to expose high school kids to one poem a day (the 180 being the 180 days of the school year). The idea was that the poem was simply supposed to be read aloud. No analysis, no discussion. Just read and heard. Some of the poems from poetry 180 were collected in a physical book, and it was one of my favorites when I was teaching. Overall, the poems in it are what Liz called guilty pleasures: not simple poems, but poems that you can "get" on a first read. And I agree with Liz that that is a good thing. It's what I hope my poems are. Sure, there are elements of my own poems (I hope) that become more apparent on a rereading, and technical aspects that only those who have recently studied literary terms might be able to name. But I still hope that anyone, scholar or not, poetry-lover or not, would be able to pick up one of my poems and get something out of it on a first read.

In the spirit of guilty pleasures, I will offer today some of my favorite poems from the Poetry 180 project. Read them once, maybe aloud! Enjoy.

This one is a perfect one to start with, considering our conversation about analyzing poems, or not:


"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins

I always liked this one because it is about numbers:

"Numbers" by Mary Cornish

A nice short one:

"Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" by Robert Bly

I love the end of this one:

"The End of April" by Phylis Levin

And this is one of my favorite poems of all time. Luli made the last sentence of this poem into a poster for my high school classroom.

"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

On Bakhtin, poetry, and country music

Today's post is brought to you by Liz Self. Liz, a PhD student, teacher, mother of two, and my dear friend, is also the author of the blogs AD and BD. I love this post and found myself nodding in agreement as I read. Thank you Liz!

I am not a poet. I know that every English teacher likes to think that they can have their kids read and write some poems and call them poets (in the hopes of making them like poetry and authentic writers), but I am not a poet. There’s something about poetry and being a poet that is at odds with my nonfiction reading and writing self.

I like poetry, some poetry. But I mostly like poetry I don’t have to think too hard about. I’ll analyze the theme of some fiction, critique the author’s tone in some nonfiction, even get into a little drama (Cyrano de Bergerac really saved drama for me; ironic since he is, in the play, a poet). But I don’t want to have to think too hard about poetry. I like my poetry like I like my country songs* – it just has to sound good and be a little fun or say a little something about life. I don’t want to get too deep. I know there’s a lot of poems I’ve heard and thought, “Ooh, I like that,” and there’s way more to it than I even realize. But I don’t want to know all that. I just want to like my poems.

I recently read some Bakhtin for my sociocultural theories class, and he talks about the role of different genres. He writes, “Each genre is only able to control certain aspects of reality. Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration.” He continues later, “The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre. A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it.” I know it is a favorite assignment for English teachers to have students transpose texts into different genres – turn a dialogue in some fiction into a drama piece or a newspaper article into a poem. I’m not sure Bakhtin would like that. I think poetry has a place, and it’s not something that can be interchanged with other genres.

One of my favorite poems of all times – and the poem I always started every poetry unit with (yes, former English teacher here, too) – is Marianne Moore’s “Poetry.” Most people know it from the first few lines (or even words: “I, too, dislike it…”). The full poem, though, goes on to make several important points. First, it talks about getting to read poetry with contempt for it. That appealed to me. Second, it talks about “the genuine” in poetry, and that resonated with me, too. And it made me think about, with respect to Bakhtin, poetry’s place in the world (both literary and otherwise). Poetry for me is something that I want to connect with. I can read fiction and nonfiction and drama about all kinds of things that baffle and confuse and frustrate me. But poetry – I just want to like it. I want to go, “Hey, that makes sense to me.” Moore writes, “We do not admire what/we cannot understand.” I can understand a complicated poem – my AP scores from high school attest to that – but I don’t want to work that hard if I want to like it. And I’m not saying that poems that are easy for me to understand aren’t deep poems or are “light” literature. I’m saying that for me, poetry’s place is simply to resonate with me, to make me feel something – not so much to make me think. I go to my fiction and nonfiction for that. My sense is that it’s different for others, though. Poetry might be just the place for others to go to get a mental workout. For me, I want it to be more like People magazine – something light and fun and just enjoyable. A guilty secret, perhaps.

So what are my guilty pleasures? Most of them are African American poets. There is universally among them a freshness and directness that belies the depth (both literary and experiential) beneath. I read and learned about these poets while teaching my predominantly African American students (at an all-girls school) and fell in love with the themes and styles. I like a variety – almost anything by Nikki Giovanni (love “Kidnap Poem”), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” (read it and then look at this photo of Chris Rock, taken by Annie Leibovitz), “Incident” by Countee Cullen, Alice Walker’s “I Said to Poetry.” Maya Angelou is a given – the woman is genius. On and on, I could go. But one of my absolute favorites is Lucille Clifton. This woman knew how to capture a perspective, a life experience, womanhood, African American womanhood, in poetry. Who else could write “homage to my hips” and “to my last period.” The one I loved to teach: “i am accused of tending to the past.” There’s a depth to these poems that reveals the African American experience and a breadth to them that makes their message universal to any reader while retaining their roots. Some are for fun; some are very serious. But all of these poems are about the genuine.

These are not simple poems. These are not poems written to be someone’s guilty pleasure. But that’s how I enjoy them – the sound, the feel, the movement, the first read. I know there’s more there, and perhaps one day I’ll read more into it. But for now – I’m gonna do what real poets do and just feel it. (Insert the sound of snapping fingers here.)

*Interestingly, one of the earliest poems I remember reading and totally missing the point on was John Donne’s “The Flea.” the thing over and over and never realized it had anything to do with sex. I think my literary analysis professor (a frightening Russian man with bushy beard who was suspect of my German last name) thought I was an idiot. He may be right. But then a few months ago I heard Brad Paisley’s song, “Ticks,” and this time I did know it was about sex. So evidently I can be taught. And furthermore, this really makes my point about the relationship between poetry and country music.

History and Influences

My poetic past (ha) is littered with huge projects I was going to complete. The title of this post is/was the title of one of those big projects. I was going to reread (or, to be more truthful, read in full for the first time) the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. And, on this long, long roll of paper I had purchased, I was going to illustrate a timeline of my poetic influences, including excerpts from my favorite poems.

First I was going to complete this project before Amelia was born. Then during her first year. I did get started, beautifully illustrating (if I do say so myself) some Anglo-Saxon riddles. For those of you who don't have the Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of you at the moment, that got me through maybe the first 4 millimeters of the giant book. When we moved to Denver, I just decided to throw the whole project out, both figuratively and literally.

Anyway, every time I have tried to decide what I am going to post about poetry during this month, I kept going back to that project. Apparently it is something I need to do. So I thought I could try a version of it here, writing a series of posts about some of my more memorable poetic influences. Today's post will be the first of that series.

My life as a poet began when I read a poem I loved. It was in an elementary school literature text book--I don't remember what grade I was in, maybe 5th. Before I read this poem (and, to be honest, for a long time after) I was more of a fiction fan. I loved reading stories but I found poems rather tiring. That day, however, I was bored in class and I had probably already secretly read all of the stories in the book. So I decided to tackle a poem. I choose one with an intriguing illustration of a man on horseback in a mysterious looking forest, one with a compelling first line.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler--

It was Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," and it was the first poem I ever really read, on my own, in full. I think part of my problem with reading poetry, both then and now, was the way I read. I am not sure how to describe it but when I read prose my eyes or brain seem to take in chunks of text at once. It let (and still lets) me be a fast reader, but it's a sloppy way to read. It made me good at reading a lot of stories in a short amount of time, but impatient with reading poetry, probably because it is a terrible way to read poetry. (And I'm not saying it's a great way to read anything.) When you read poems too fast, you miss the whole point of reading a poem in the first place.

So when I decided to really read, not just absorb, this unknown poem in my literature book, I made myself be patient and read it slowly, line by line, word by word.

You can do the same now and read the poem here.

There, in whatever little classroom I was sitting in, secretly reading a poem while the teacher taught math or something, I was enthralled. It probably helped that it was narrative--it had a story--but what drew me in was more than that. It was the sound of things, the rhythm of the language, and the mystery.

I love the poem's rhythms. If I were teaching, I would point out all the anapests, which create a feeling of movement or motion in the poem.

Uh oh, now I have to be a teacher for a minute:

A "foot" in poetry means a metrical unit. Usually it is a group of two or three syllables. We (by we I mean teachers and poets, mostly) talk about the two or three syllables in a foot in terms of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the stressed syllable in Amelia is the second one: AMELia. The stressed syllable in Kimberly is the fisrt: KIMberly.

An anapest is a foot of poetry that contains two unstressed syllable followed by a stressed foot.

So the line

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

kind of sounds like this if you read it aloud

And his HORSE/ in the SIL/ ence CHAMPED/ the GRASS/ es

The last two feet up there--I have divided the feet by the slash marks /-- are called iambs. They are one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Some say they sound like a heartbeat: da DUM, da DUM. Iambs are considered the norm as far as meter in poetry. In other words, it is argued, and I think it is true, that English as a language contains a lot of iambs, so we tend to hear them as a norm or a base line for rhythm.

When you start to vary from iambs, you can create different feelings or moods through sound. The first two feet up there are the anapests, and they are quicker than the iambs because they pack an extra syllable into the foot: da da DUM. It kind of sounds like a horse galloping, which fits this poem well, doesn't it?

"The Listeners" tends to vary between anapests and iambs, which creates an interesting soundscape. I couldn't have explained any of this at the time, but looking back, the poem's meter definitely had a lot to do with my enchantment.

Okay, I think my teacher moment is over. The test will be next week; I hope you took notes.

Besides all rhythm, the poem contains a lot of nice alliteration (which is repetition of the same consonant sounds):

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
of the forest's ferny floor

Hear all the "s" sounds? Not just at the beginning but also within many of the words. And the "f" sounds?

That kind of thing is all through the poem. Plus, it rhymes.

And, besides all that, it is a poem you can make sense, of, story-wise, which I, for one, enjoy. This traveler is here, fulfilling some kind of promise. But no one is in the house.

Or are they?

During a web search for the poem I came across a snippet of an essay arguing that the readers of the poem are the listeners. Interesting. But I had never thought of that before today, and I don't think that kind of analysis is necessary in enjoying the poem. It's a mystery, a paradox even, these listeners. And that's part of what makes it a poem.

Guest Post: On Rod McKuen

Today's post is brought to you by my mom!!!

I think you are right that poetry is misunderstood as to hard. I wish I had had a teacher who knew how to teach it. Any teacher I had taught that poetry had to rhyme. I don't think that is true.

I think I must have been a poet at heart because I have attempted to write a lot but I always slam dunked it in the trash can after I read what I wrote. I missed the chance to see a famous poet when I was in high school. He came to our school in honor of a student who had been struck and killed by a car as he was walking. The student's name was Jeff Hefner and the poet was Rod McKuen. They must have met earlier. I was sick that day so I missed the experience but I bought a few of his books, which are no longer in my possession. I liked his poetry. One of my favorites is "Thirty-Six."

Note: I also found this Rod McKuen site that discusses the last words of the poem and posts the poem in a slightly different version. Also, I think I might have to steal the idea of missing hearing the poet speak for a poem. Hmm. Thanks, Mom!

Guest Post: How poetry made me feel smart

On the second day of NPM, our first guest post! Although many people might say poetry makes them feel anything but smart, this hilarious essay by my dear friend Corrie shows how poetry can be a place of solace. After six years of being an awesome high school teacher, Corrie now works as a private tutor to her beautiful baby boy. Enjoy!


I remember an oversized Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes on our bookshelf in the basement. In my best teacher voice I would recite “Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet” to all my imaginary students. It was a very good thing that the little poems rhymed and that I had memorized the illustrations because being 4 or 5 I couldn’t properly read yet. These facts were ignored by my parents who claimed to friends and family members that I could already “read as good as any grown up.” I also loved Dr. Seuss and Shel Sliverstein --who taught me that if you write poetry, you can be a man with a very odd name. I remember the weight of Where the Sidewalk Ends hunkering me down as I lumbered off the school bus.

In middle-school I had several brief love affairs with boys who wrote me sonnets and odes. Of course none of us knew what either of these poetry titles meant. But they sounded classy right? Your odds of getting to first base were particularly good if you composed a sonnet entitled “Ode to Corrie.” Also, if you could rhyme anything with Corrie besides “hunkie dorie” you might get to hold my hand.

In the dark days of high school, I tried to counterweight my cheerleading uniform with copies of Longfellow and Dickinson. After Friday’s game of chanting “Hit ‘em again, Hit ‘em again, Harder, Har, DER!” to my quarterback boyfriend, I appeased the part of my brain that called me a stereotyped airhead by staying up late and memorizing “The Day is Done” or Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” I then told myself that I was really moving up in the world by dumping the quarterback for a soulful dreamer I met on the beach, doing what? You guessed it, writing his own poetry.

In college I had Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” taped to my dorm room door. Between classes I would sit on walls or on patches of grass smoking and writing in journals—sometimes poems, sometimes pieces of nothing that someone maybe somewhere might call poetry. Both the smoking and the writing and Maya Angelou’s poem taped to my dorm room door made me feel capable of getting through four years without my family. I was mature. I was smart. I read and wrote poetry, had gotten into Carolina and was taking classes where they asked me to read very old guy’s work –Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare. I found out that as long as I raised my hand to answer some open ended question thereby breaking the horrific silence in the room, the professor gratefully agreed with me.

My total and complete failure of attempts to teach poetry to high school students somehow continued to make me feel smart. I could see them thinking I knew what e.e cummings’ “1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness” was about, and they were pissed that I wouldn’t just tell them. They really wanted things to rhyme. I abandoned all hope of ever teaching Elliot while reading Gatsby. I found the titillation of Burn’s titled poem in Catcher in the Rye always got good reviews.

The first time I sang “Row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream” to my nine month old, he squealed like a pig and looked up at me with eyes that said “Awesome!” And I felt, brilliant.

The Cruelest Month*

I woke up this morning full of thoughts and ready to write. By (Amelia's) naptime I am worn out. I have lost all of my energy. She has been on full speed since the moment she woke up. We heard her in her crib yelling "No! No!" As soon as she got out of bed she wanted to "See! See!" everything in her path. We spent at least 5 full minutes naming all the items on a high bathroom shelf. The moment she came downstairs she was off and running. It took about five more minutes for the floor to be covered with Cheerios, baby dolls, and crayons.

Anyway. It was a good morning, just nonstop.

Oh and on the weaning front I decided it was better to cut back a little more quickly than I originally planned. Yesterday Amelia nursed only 4 times, remarkable since we went to toddler yoga--the last time we went, she nursed about 150 times in 45 minutes. Today she has nursed only twice, one long session right when she woke up and a short session when we came downstairs. If I stay on track from yesterday she will only nurse one more time, around 5:00 pm.

SOOO--seamless transition between breastfeeding and poetry--it's officially National Poetry Month. I am sure celebrations are abounding. I have been having a hard time deciding what to write about for my first post. I thought I might start with why I wanted to mark this month on my blog. For one, I don't think poetry gets enough attention. I think it is misunderstood as too hard, something mysterious and inscrutable. And to be honest--some of it is. But I think I also have been trying to figure out how to integrate more poetry into my own life, in which I exist primarily as a Mom, aka Homemaker. For pretty much all of my previous life, at least since late high school, literature in general and poetry in particular have been my main focuses, something I spend much if not most of my time reading, thinking about, studying, and teaching. But now... not so much. And, despite the fact that I have a graduate degree related to poetry, sometimes I feel lost answering people's basic questions about poetry in my life. These are questions like what kind of poetry I write, who are my main influences, even who are my favorite poets. So I guess I want to explore some of those questions here too.

Today, though, let's read some poems. Poets.org, which is a website I love, has collected a group of poems about poetry. A good place to start, I think. I am going to link to a few of them, and use these examples to explain some of the reasons I love poetry.(Note: any time the text is a different color, you can click on it to see the website I am linking to.)

I love poetry because it so often lets you connect seemingly unconnected things in a way that is often magical. In this poem by Sharon Olds, "Take The I Out," the title alludes to the idea that the personal self, or "I", doesn't belong in poetry. But in the poem, the I quickly becomes something else (while also remaining the first thing). And the end it becomes something else again.

I love poetry because it can let you create an entirely new universe. In this poem by John Brehm, "The Poems I Have Not Written," the title launches the poem into a world of hypothetical, of "ifs" and "mights" that lets the speakers live, for the space of the poem, somewhere else. Plus, it's funny.

And, despite what I said before, I love poetry because sometimes it IS mysterious and hard to figure out. The sad thing is that poetry tends to be taught in a very analytical way, as though poems had one right answer. As a (former?) teacher myself, I see the value in helping students learn to puzzle through poems, and one important way of doing that is helping them find in poems what others have found before them. However, an equally important skill is imaginative thinking. Let this poem, "And It Came to Pass" by C.D. Wright (who is one of my favorite poets for mysterious images and sentence fragments) mean whatever it means to you. And if parts of it don't make sense, let it not make sense. Read it--maybe read it aloud. And let it be.

If you have more time, read some more of these poems about poetry. And there is still time to send ideas for guest posts! Until tomorrow... happy NPM.

*A note on the title: if you have a couple of hours and a good tolerance for migraines, see this webpage. I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist the allusion.

Tomorrow

is the first day of National Poetry Month! I spent the wee hours of the morning planning my post and came to no decisions.

Anyway, I found 30 Ways to Celebrate on Poets.org. Start planning!

If anyone is still considering being a guest blogger, please let me know! I received a comment with a good question about whether favorite poems can be published on the blog. If they are your poems (as in, you wrote them), and they haven't been published anywhere else, sure! But otherwise, any poems you want to include need to be included through a link. In other words, if you can find them elsewhere on the Internet, we can link to them. But because of possible copyright issues, I don't want to just copy down poems word for word on the blog. If the poem can't be found on the Internet, you can provide title and author information, and of course can cite lines of poems as you would in an essay.

Just a reminder, if you want to write a post, you need to submit a comment with your idea and your email address so I can contact you. I promise not to publish your email address for the whole Internet to see.

In the meantime, happy planning! I am going to spend the rest of Amelia's nap reading some of the 8 books about toddlers I got from the library yesterday. I think I just wrote last week that having a toddler was easier than having a baby... the universe is chuckling at me now.

National Poetry Month: A Call for Writers

April is National Poetry Month. A couple of weeks ago, I had this great idea. I was going to write a poetry-post a day, one every day in April. I planned to write about poems and poets I love, poems and poets that have influenced me as a writer. I even made a spreadsheet with dates and ideas.

But. If you have read this blog long enough, you will remember other great ideas I have had where I was going to a a certain number of posts about certain things. And most of those posts did not happen. (I blame Amelia.) So I came down to earth a little bit. I will simply say this: during April, National Poetry Month, I will write some posts about poetry.

I want there to be as many posts as possible, though, so I want to invite you to write a post of your own. Yes, you, reading this blog right now. Will you be a guest blogger? Will you write a post about poetry for National Poetry Month?

Maybe there is one poem you always remember, one that sticks with you. You could write about that poem and why it means so much. Maybe there is a teacher who introduced you to poetry you could celebrate. Maybe you have taught poetry or read poetry to kids and want to share that experience. Maybe you write poems of your own. You could share the poems here, or write about how or why you write. Maybe you study poetry and have something specific you would like to share with a wider audience. Heck, maybe you hate poetry and want to say why. I would like to invite any and all readers to share any and all thoughts about poetry here during National Poetry Month.

If you are willing go be a guest blogger, let me know. If you know me, you can email me or call. If you don't, leave a comment here with your email address, what you would like to write, and what week in April (the first, second, third, or fourth) you would like to send me your post. I won't publish these comments, but I will get back to you to confirm your post date and answer any questions you might have.

I am excited to spend a month thinking more about poetry, and I hope you can help!