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For today’s meme answer one, some, or all of the following favorites prompts:
Who is your favorite poet?
What is your favorite poem?
What is your favorite/least favorite poetry experience?
What is your favorite poetry collection?
What is your favorite epic poem?
* * *
My answers:
My favorite poet. Hmmm . . . . This is almost as hard as picking a favorite author. I love William Butler Yeats because of the complexity of his poems. I love Walt Whitman for the nature imagery and his language. I love Billy Collins for his accessibility.
My favorite poem. Nope. I can’t do it. I can’t pick one. See other Poetry Tuesday posts for some of my favorites by Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats.
My favorite poetry experience. I don’t have a lot of what I would classify as “poetry experiences,” but I do have a fond memory of memorizing Juliet’s “a rose by any other name” speech from Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade.
My favorite poetry collection. As of right this second, my favorite poetry collection is Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. Good times.
My favorite epic poem. Yep. I don’t know much about this one because I haven’t read many epic poems. I want to read The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Aeneid and Paradise Lost. I have read Beowolf. I liked it. I’ve read all of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Inferno is definitely my favorite. That’s it. Inferno is my favorite epic poem. The end.
* * *
Last week’s group poem was a big hit:
A book or two, or how about three
ducks whittled out of balsa wood
Today’s poetry meme:
Here in our little online book blogging community, we don’t always get the opportunity to embark on a creative project together. Today, we can! Let’s write a poem together, line by line. The starting line is below. Each person then crafts one line and adds it in the comments below. (Add in punctuation, structure, and line breaks as the inspiration hits you.) Next week, I’ll post the final poem.
The first line: A book or two, or how about three
Thanks for playing!
Reading and understanding poetry used to be an indispensible part of education and intelligence. However, poetry appears to me to be becoming less and less a part of curricula and the societal dialogue.
Here are some suggestions on how to make poetry a daily part of your life:
- Read a new poem every day at Daily Poetry or at Poetry.com.
- Subscribe to receive a Classic Poem Daily via email.
- Visit the Poetry 180 website and read one of the poems there.
- Purchase or borrow a collection of poetry and read one poem a day (perhaps at breakfast or before bed).
- Subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac podcast hosted by Garrison Keillor.
- Pick up a set of Magnetic Poetry and create poems while making dinner or chatting on the phone or play with Magnetic Poetry online.
Poetry Tuesday meme:
Make a resolution to make poetry a consistant part of your life. Select one of the above options or create one of your own and write a bit about your resolution and why you think it’s worthwhile to read poetry on a regular basis.
My resolution: #4. I’m going to keep collections of poetry around and try to read at least one poem a day. This will help me get through some of the poetry in my TBR pile, and it will help me to become more aware of the poetry sphere – any area of literature I tend to neglect.
Poetry Tuesday – Haiku Meme
A haiku is a poem that consists of three lines. Line one contains five syllables, line two contains seven syllables, and line three contains five syllables, for a total of seventeen lovely syllables.
The task for today is to write a haiku or two on any topic.
Here are a few I wrote:
So much depends on
One small bud and one small branch
Peeking out at me.
***
A paved path with lines
Yellow and gray, straight and fine
Guiding by design.
***
Juicy summer peach
Trickling down my chin to
Settle sticky there.
***
Two pins hold the map,
A collage of land and sea,
Up for all to see.
Giveaway Continued
REMINDER: Everyone who completes last week’s or today’s meme and leaves a comment will be entered into a drawing to win their choice of either the former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets or the current poet laureate Charles Simic’s newest collection, Sixty Poems. All those who complete both last week’s and today’s memes and leave comments will be given a bonus entry in the drawing, for a total of three entries. Thanks for playing!
As Kate noticed here, there appears to be a dearth of blogging about poetry on general lit blogs. In an effort to change my own dearth, I have been blogging about poetry every Tuesday for a few months now. I think it’s time to expand the fun to the larger blogosphere. To that affect, I’m starting a weekly poetry meme. Here is the inaugural Poetry Tuesday meme:
Step 1: Select one of the poets laureate. A list with short biographies can be found here. Read a little bit about your selected poet and then tell us who you selected and why.
Step 2: Imagine you have been selected as the next poet laureate. What kinds of poems would you write (Americana, political, free verse, haiku, etc.)? What kinds of programs would you start/endorse? What would you do to promote poetry among the masses?
And . . . the giveaway. In honor of the inaugural Poetry Tuesday meme, I’m also having a giveaway. Everyone who completes today’s or next week’s meme and leaves a comment will be entered into a drawing to win their choice of either the former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets or the current poet laureate Charles Simic’s newest collection, Sixty Poems. All those who complete both today’s and next week’s meme and leave comments will be given a bonus entry in the drawing, for a total of three entries. Welcome to Poetry Tuesday!
During the summer of 1997, my aunt gave me a copy of Mary Oliver‘s New and Selected Poems. The collection won the National Book Award. My aunt’s copy was dog-earred and loved. I have loved it (and Mary Oliver) ever since. Here’s one of my favorites:
Poppies
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of drakness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blad
from hooking forward–
of course
loss is the great lesson.
But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight–
and what are you going to do–
what can you do
about it–
deep, blue night?
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” Kahlil Gibran
Reading poetry is a challenging enterprise. I have scoured the vast resources of the internet in search of some simple tools to make the initial encounter with poetry a little more pleasurable.
Websites
I found the following “The 11 Basic Steps to Reading a Poem” here.
Step 1: Read through the poem to get a sense of it.
Step 2: Identify the sentences and independent clauses (circle the periods, exclamation points, question marks, and semicolons). For some reason, people always forget that poetry is made up of complete sentences.
Step 3: Read a few lines to figure out the meter (figure out how many stresses there are in a typical line).
Step 4: Note the rhyme scheme (look for a pattern).
Step 5: Read the poem out loud. Try to follow the rhythm. If you do this you’ll hear where the poet plays with the rhythm. And you’ll hear the rhyme scheme.
Step 6: Look up any words you don’t understand.
Step 7: Re-read the poem out loud.
Step 8: Mark off any sections in the poem. These sections may be speeches given by a character, discussions of a particular topic, changes in mood, or a new stage of an argument.
Step 9: Re-read the poem.
Step 10: Figure out the tone — the emotion — of the poem.
Step 11: Re-read the poem.
A similar checklist approach to reading poetry can be found here.
An excellent three-tiered approach based on skill-level can be found here.
Books
The Poetry Foundation has excerpted the first chapter of How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch here. The 16 sections of the book deal with 16 different ways of thinking about a poem. My favorite section is Give a Common Word the Spell. I love the way poetry makes me think about words and language in a new way.
I recently purchased Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander as a treatise on poetic form. Thus, far I have been unimpressed by the book’s organization but somewhat pleased with the content.
I also own Harold Bloom’s The Art of Reading Poetry but have not yet delved into it.
Finally, I have heard Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook touted as a must for all poets and poetry readers. It’s on my wishlist.
Any other suggested poetry resources?
Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, is a lovely collection of lyrically poems from classic and modern poets. There is something here for everyone in the well-designed categories: O Lord, A Day, Music, Scenes, Lovers, Day’s Work, Sons and Daughters, Language, A Good Life, Beasts, Failure, Complaint, Trips, Snow, Yellow, Lives, Elders, The End, The Resurrection
Here is one of my favorites from the collection (the Sons and Daughters category):
I Stop Writing the Poem
Tess Gallagher
to hold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.
This poem is a study in contrasts. Living/dying, girl/mother, giant/small, arms/hands, etc. In fact, it embodies my contrasting feelings on domesticity: bitter and condemned/calm and proud. I particularly like the contrast between the “giant shirt” and the “small girl.” A woman/womanhood is a metaphor here for writing a poem, I think. Writing a poem is hard and often gets interrupted, but it’s something worth coming back to and teaching to the next generation. I’ll keep coming back to this poem.
I recently started reading The Whaleboat House (also known as Amagansett) by Mark Mills. The book starts with a beautiful poem (“From Montauk Point”) by Walt Whitman:
I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,
Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,)
The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance,
The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps–that inbound urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shores forever.
I love the way that poetry, and perhaps particularly Walt Whitman, can make me feel something I already knew but feel it in a more profound way. The waves, constantly seeking the shore, are things that I’ve always known but now I know better and more deeply.
The vocabulary of this poem is exquisite. The poem is in constant motion via the gerunds: absorbing, viewing, tossing, curling, seeking. I like the nature images: eagle, beak, sea, waves, wild, snowy, caps, shores. It is interesting to note that the only man-made object in the poem is the ships. The ships in the distance stand in direct contrast with the mighty eagle’s beak.
In fact, the poem seems to center around a contrast of the height of the eagle and the lower level of the sea. The eagle, with it’s unmatched view of the world below, can take it all on and see the big picture, the pulsing and seeking of the waves. The location of the eagle’s height is enhanced by the religious imagery evoked by “Eastward” and by the imagery of mountains evoked by “caps.” The ships, in contrast, are tossed with waves, down in the foam. The poet, here, has a special view that allows him to see the world from a different perspective than the mortals down in the ship.
I’ll stand with Whitman up on the eagle’s beak as often as I can.
As you may know, April is National Poetry Month. Many people mock it. See comments made here. Some comment on how a national poetry month may actually deter people from wanting to read poetry. See article here.
Still, I think it is a good reminder to make poetry a part of your life. The people behind poets.org suggest 30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month. See here.
Two of my favorite suggestions are (1) to memorize a poem and (2) to start a commonplace book.
Memorize a Poem
The following are the only two poems that I can currently recite from memory in their entirety:
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
“Lazy Jane” by Shel Silverstein
Lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
Jane.
She
wants
a
drink
of
water
so
she
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
for
it
to
rain.
See the accompanying drawing by Shel Silverstein here.
Start a Commonplace Book
According to poets.org, a commonplace book is one in which a reader copies their favorite poems and quotations into notebooks to form their own personal anthologies.
I’m starting this today (and you should too)!
