Tuesday, January 30, 2018

The Tuesday Platform


Greetings to all poets, wayfarers and friends. We are bidding farewell to January and nearing the month of February which is the border between winter and spring. And for those of you who are interested it's almost time for ... wait for it... Super Bowl Sunday! It will be the 52nd Super Bowl and the 48th modern-era National Football League championship game! Oh gosh this is so exciting!

I came across this wonderful assortment of poetry read by Benedict Cumberbatch and just couldn't resist sharing it with you guys. Poems such as "The Seven Ages Of Man" and "Kubla Khan" tend to send one deep into thought and gives much to ruminate about. Moreover, the dulcet and velvet tone of the reader is an added bonus.

If you have any thoughts to share, ideas you wish to release into the wild or a world view to express, then you have come to the right place. Please share a poem of your choice and enjoy the company of your fellow scribes. We look forward to reading you and hope you have a wonderful day ahead.

SHARE * READ * COMMENT * ENJOY 

 

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Weekend Mini-Challenge: Art with Me

I believe in the power of words.

Writing and reading poetry and stories do things for me that no other activity (or person) could ever do. I can lose my Self… and find her again in the right tale. A poem is a kiss and a hug and a secret and… a gentle smack on the back of the head that reminds me that no one can be without thinking and doing (I enjoy being). A story is, well… a story is everything (to me).

I love words in the same way a mad soul adores her obsession. I keep the sweetest and darkest verbs close to my heart, value hurt-filled nouns, respect the danger that burns in adjectives that jump out of enraged tongues to do nothing but break (and unbreak) speaker and subject alike.

Im convinced that creating and sharing poetry and certain stories (and other arts) can be a way towards healing. Yes, my dear Toads, I am that crazy writer lady, the one always saying, “Write it out. Trust me. Words will help.” I believe so many things about the art of shaping feelings and living into words, so many things… 

For today’s prompt, I invite you to write a new poem that explores one or three (even thirteen) things you believe words can do for you and others.

 feel free to repost my blackout bit


Feed the direct link to your new poem to Mr. Linky.
Visit other Toads.
Art with words… and delight in the pleasure.


Thursday, January 25, 2018

Get Listed: Landslide Month

January resolutions may be fading, but it is still the month of new beginnings. Coincidentally, today is my husband's birthday. So over at our house we'll enjoy the cake of choice from his boyhood --yellow cake with peanut butter icing and a grape jelly filling. A glass of milk is required to wash it down. Yum!

For today's prompt I'll provide the word list ingredients for your poem referring to either new beginnings or a birthday (happy or sad or in-between). I'm not looking for an ingredient poem about baking a cake! I'll be full-up on dessert anyway. I want to feast on the words you insert into your new creation on newness itself, or on a special celebration you are looking forward to, or a milestone memory you recall about a loved one.

Mudslide, landslide, red velvet, carrot.... there are so many ways to mix goodness into your poem. Choose all four words from ONE of these word lists to build your new poem:

 solace                         trace                              pause                              over
 inwardness                sweat                             reflect                             beginning
 need                          forgiveness                    unfolding                        back
 thanks                       weight                            years                               ahead

I look forward to reading and savouring your respective slices of life. Also enjoy this musical inspiration from Stevie Nicks.

 

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

The Tuesday Platform

Greetings, my dearest Toads… today is National Handwriting Day. I adore holidays with writing in them, so I’m all happy cackles and delighted giggles. Let’s celebrate the art of hand-inking our thoughts and feels into words, by sharing a poem—new, old, short, long(ish)… your choice. And if the handwriting mood strikes your muse, I’m sure I would not be the only one who would love to see some of your handwritten yum. Mayhap, some of the rough draft for today’s poem, or part of the poem, or the entire poem… like I said, the choice is yours. If you choose to share a picture of your entire poem, please include a typed version as well.


 Please add a direct link to your poem to Mr. Linky. Visit other Toads (their word-ponds grow the yummiest things). Have a happy Tuesday and an even happier National Handwriting Day.


Saturday, January 20, 2018

Weekend Challenge: Play Tennis With A Ghost

"Tinturn Abbey And The River," Edward Dayes (c. 1794)

One of the most profound upwellings of poetry occurred for me in the five years after I first sobered up in 1987. After a decade of sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll, I parked that nightly mayhem for days of recovery, marriage, and professional life.

As part of that new routine, I began getting up early to read and write, opening doors within. I burrowed down into mythology and psychology with Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and James Hillman as my lamps. I also began reading poetry with a passion, plundering the public library for voices which I felt a shouting welcome—Robert Bly, Steven Dobyns, Wendell Berry, Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver.

Back then, I lived in downtown Orlando, so I could walk to my job at the daily newspaper. And so I carried a briefcase in one hand and a book of poetry in the other, reading out loud as I walked. Surely the bluebirds were amused.

For five years I walked ten blocks of Central Florida dailiness reading Keats and Wordsworth, Eliot and Stevens, Bishop and Lowell. (Swinburne’s Decadent seahorsey-versiness fit my walking gait perfectly). I read Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Keats’ Endymion. I read the Spanish poets in translation—Lorca and Machado, Jimenez and Paz and Neruda.

Morning readings had a different vibe than afternoons, the one cultural, the other revolutionary. The seasons revolved through their dominant and subdominant themes. The inward world grew massive, cathedral.

With those rhythms in my ear and reflections of so many mythic tales and motifs forming in my mind, I began to write daily verse in a journal—doggerel mostly, indulgent overripe juvenilia marked by hamhanded theft. How else does one learn to write? As Saul Bellow once said, a writer is a reader moved to emulation. Reading and writing became for me the hero’s journey: Go in, read the treasures, write them down in your own hand, come back. 

I went back to college through night classes paid for by my job (as professional training), and over eight years I completed my BA in English. One of my writing profs was big on reader-response theory, which has it that writers engage and magnify literature through their responses to it.  Critics of the theory say there isn’t enough appreciation of the thing itself – the literary work —and that’s where for me I have settled on a sharing agreement with the ages: I come to your library to read, and you come visit my singing hut to add resonance and heft to the stone.

So that’s the idea with today’s challenge: Go play tennis with a ghost. Take a poem by another poet you respond deeply to and write something by way of response. Maybe it’s the theme and cogitation which stirred you, or the rhyme scheme or alliteration. Write your poem as a letter to the original, offering something between wild applause and Bronx cheer. Make a myth your own; tell something of your history as it were written by Mysteries. (And know that despite what your ego is telling you, it's always good for the art to play tennis with someone far better than you.)

Your source of inspiration could be known to all or be a pet voice in a remote register. Maybe its one of our own. Whatever the case, read and respond—and then come back here to share what you found. (It would be helpful if you include the original, or link to it.)

In a tenth century Icelandic saga, ten ghosts of men just drowned while fishing appeared in communal rooms, still dripping wet and reaching out their spectral hands to warm themselves at the fire. They found their way into the literature, the same way pagan Iceland was then transitioning to Christian times. I think literature endures like that, with one generation getting spooked by shadows of the past and then singing them forward. Who will you partner up with for your game of ghost tennis?


Thursday, January 18, 2018

Wordy Thursday with Wild Woman ~ The Tree Sisters




There is a women's movement rising all over the world. Guided by Clare Dubois and her Board of Directors, in the U.K., Tree Sisters: Seeding for Change,   aim to plant a billion trees world-wide this year, and they are well on their way.




58% of the world's animals are gone. We are seeing climate change impacting people, animals and landscapes world-wide. Joanna Macy  tells us, "Do not numb your grief. Feel it, and know you are alive. We are here to save the soul of the earth.  We are meant to be a restorer, not a destroyer, species. We women will love the world back into healing. Our earth is alive and she is powerful." Given some assistance, she can heal.

I believe in the rise of woman-power, in response to where the male-driven model has gotten us. Women nurture life. We get down to the basics of planting trees and food, feeding children, and keeping those children safe. If money that funds the military-industrial complex were used in the cause of social justice, to meet peoples' basic needs, we'd have a good toe-hold on peace. 

Let's plant some poetic trees: love in response to hate, compassion in response to suffering, hope in response to desolation. Tell us how you feel about trees, or perhaps one special tree you love. Or write about Mother Nature, and the effects of climate change. But let's do it with hope, with determination, with the spirit of the women all over the world who are planting those billion trees, who are loving our world back into healing.

Mahatma Gandhi said, "You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing, there will be no result."

Use any form you wish, with as many or few words as you choose. I look forward to reading what you come up with.






Tuesday, January 16, 2018

The Tuesday Platform


Greetings to all poets, wayfarers and friends. We are midway through January and the weather here in Malaysia has taken quite an interesting turn. Due to the constant rain in surrounding areas the temperature has managed to drop to 18 degrees celsius (approximately 66 degrees Fahrenheit) and I couldn't be happier! It's a welcome change from the usual weather which is both dry and humid.

I came across this wonderful reading of "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock,"read by Anthony Hopkins and couldn't resist sharing it with you guys. There is a dare running through this poem; and the power of his tone and rhythm is as though a beating drum that sounds both haunting and melodious in my head.

If you have any thoughts to share, ideas you wish to release into the wild or a world view to express, then you have come to the right place. Please share a poem of your choice and enjoy the company of your fellow scribes. We look forward to reading you and hope you have a wonderful day ahead.

SHARE * READ * COMMENT * ENJOY


Saturday, January 13, 2018

Fussy Little Forms: Chained Rhyme

Hello, dear Friends and happy weekend to you! It is time for a form challenge. Today we will revisit a form introduced in the Garden by Joy a few years ago and enjoyed by many: CHAINED RHYME.

I don’t really think this form counts as fussy or little. But let’s do it anyway. The basic premise is that the last syllable or word of each line is followed by a rhyme on the first word or syllable of the next line. LIKE A CHAIN, get it? Hah. 

It’s not really fussy or little because the poem can be anything you want--long lines or short, many lines or just a few, strict meter or no meter, whatever you like. Just those rhymes and the end and start of your lines.

Joy’s earlier prompt is so amazing that I am being lazy (and not redundant!) by linking to her description here, check it out:

    Chained Rhyme, Part One by Joy/Hedgewitch 
 

I’ve written a few chained rhyme poems and really like this exercise.  Here is one example:

When the season turns Blue,
bruised by silence buried in snow,
no end in sight,
light a distant
remnant of Noontimes forgot,
fought over, then ignored,
stored for another dark week on Earth,
it’s worth recalling how it feels,
heels entrenched,
benched like an understudy waits,
ingratiates the Moon to draw its curtains back,
black like night,
flight impossible, no one watching under
cover of the greyest shroud--Clouds.
 
Have fun! And if this doesn’t pique your creativity, perhaps this fantastic video by 
Katy Perry will inspire. We are all chained to the rhythm!