this morning, over oatmeal

poems read at breakfast & other thoughts

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crafting a chapbook, contd.

More resources for chapbook creation (writing, selecting, and organizing, not handmade creating-a-book): 

At Poetry.com  (love this:  “Difficulty:  hard.”  So true.

[a poem by Jack Caseros, “How to write a poetry chapbook,” captures it pretty well]

At Poemfish.com   by Elizabeth Stinson. Nice explanation of what a chapbook is!

To repeat my earlier link, Khara House organized a Chapbook Challenge, with a month-long series of posts in February, 2013, which are definitely worth reading.  This links to the explanation.

In fact, why not take on your own Challenge this February?  

If you DO want to make your own chapbooks, Poets&Writers has a DIY post with links.  

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Poetry to read

Posting here so that I don’t lose the link: Washington Independent Review of Books recommends 2015 poetry titles 

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crafting a chapbook

There are some resources that I’ve found helpful in pulling together a chapbook collection of poems --

In 2013, Khara House held a month-long chapbook immersion challenge, and the first blog post is here; the whole series is worth a look.

(more to come)

[poetryfoundation]

Poetry’s January issue focuses on ecojustice poetry, poetry that lives at the intersection of culture, social justice, and the environment. The issue features a gallery of visual poetry by Diana Sudyka entitled “Biophilia Hauntings” and the cover “Ventifact: Breath Drawing (detail),” 2013, by Susannah Bielak.

Browse the issue online and subscribe.

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including Naomi Shihab Nye!

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Carrie Fountain

Here  Burn Lake  and here Experience, with explanation of how the poem developed over time

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Now reading

Sasha West’s poems, at B O D Y 

at La Fovea

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What a time to be alive... (I'm) dazzled every day.

Poet Saeed Jones, during a panel on “Why We Write,” @ Poets & Writers Live: Inspiration, Austin, TX. January 9, 2016. 

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(Books with black covers)  I’m packing up the poetry books today and took another look at these (all collected from Lancaster/York). I feel fortunate to have heard Dustin Nispel (The Tower) and Le Hinton (The Language of Moisture and Light) perform, and their spoken voices reverberate and whisper from the pages as I read ... and Fledgling Rag, a journal edited by Hinton, offers something unexpected each time I open an issue.    

I’m looking forward to more poetry discoveries in the new year!

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Reflection

The bird was created from a word cloud, last year at this time, reflecting my hopes and intents for 2015.  And it was helpful, to have those words frame my decisions throughout the year.

Although for me, September is still a more natural starting point for the new year (annual school rhythms run deep!), resources for reflection float up about now.

The Holstee reflection worksheet is a useful tool

An article on how to think like a creative genius has a link to a free online summit to be held in January

Brian Johnson has a workbook (and will be offering a class) on your Greatest Year Ever.

There’s an older, still useful book, called Your Best Year Yet! by Jinny Ditzler (possibly a source for many of the later iterations), that may be available through your library system 

And putting some of your written reflections and intents into a word cloud generator can help you create a fun, reinforcing, visualization -- try it!

Or maybe focus on ONE word as your intent for the year; Christine Kane has a word of the year discovery tool

* tip:  many of these resources require email signup; you may want to create a new email address just for this. You can also use it for daily positivity blasts (Seth Godin, Martha Beck, Christine Kane, Brian Johnson, etc offer daily e-newsletters that may be of interest)

Go forth, reflect, and create...

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Two of the books that are feeding my daily writing and review -- The Poetry Home Repair Manual, by Ted Kooser (I’m probably the Last Poet Ever to discover how helpful and full of insights this is!) and Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Everyone who’s interested in creativity should read Big Magic -- in other words, everyone.

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This morning, I’m reading happy moments collected in New York Mills, Minnesota, during December 2015. The jar filled with memory, senses, feelings, place, pets, family, friends -- 

as poetry, perhaps, can be

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Although I was drawn to the charming illustrations of this version of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, it took me a while to realize that they were by Ellen Raskin. Ellen Raskin!  Children’s book author!  This morning I am remembering my dad at Christmas, playing a reel-to-reel tape recording of Thomas reciting these words.  Merry Christmas!

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You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. You can battle your demons... instead of battling your gifts.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

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As I revise and write again, looking for something more-than-anecdotal, something true or beautiful or a slant window of light onto a familiar landscape -- I am reading Mary Oliver, whose poems feel more than personal.

The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so

briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone

longing to be ground down, to be part again of

something livelier? Who can imagine in what

heaviness the rivers remember their original

clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile

time with them. And I suggest them to you also,

that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life

be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as

you feel how it actually is, that we -- so clever, and

ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained -- are only

one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

from A Thousand Mornings (2012)

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Regional words, found at the local library; Lake Region Review No. 1, 2011,  and Farm Girls, by Candace Simar and Angela F. Foster, 2013.  (Simar and Foster are sisters).  In both volumes, there are intimate and specific images that convey a sense of place and time, yet also a feeling of universal experience .

Farm Girls (Angela F. Foster)

“Farm girls know the alarm clock of a rooster’s crow early in the morning before the sun pulls into the eastern sky, before the smell of perked coffee, before the slamming backdoor... We know all the promises: After the chores are done. After the animals are fed. After harvest...“

I am thinking now that every local library should have local poetry on the shelves...

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... and yet a chair in snow is always sad...

A Chair in Snow,  Jane Hirshfield, in POETRY April 2013.  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245606

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Some mornings I read for voices new to me, and other mornings I read to find something fresh in the familiar...

Today, in Jane Kenyon’s, Let Evening Come (1990)  this feels right, with the nights long and sunrise slow to come -- an excerpt from:

At the Winter Solstice

The pines look black in the half-

light of dawn. Stillness ...

While we slept an inch of new snow

simplified the field. Today of all days

the sun will shine no more

than is strictly necessary.

...