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Welcome to
But Does it Rhyme?
We're a small, but
hopefully growing, band of poets who like to
talk about our craft and share what we've
written. We'll highlight favorite poets, review
new books, and explore the process of writing
poetry from inspiration to conclusion. (We might
venture into essays and short fiction, too.) We
hope you'll like our blog — and contribute your
own thought and poems.
Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications
Charan Sue Wollard
(LivermoreLit)
Kevin Taylor
(Poet-ch'i)
Sherry Weaver Smith
(SherrysKnowledgeQuest)
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| ARCHIVES |
Feeling Flaky
Eliot may have said “April is the cruelist month,” but around here, it tends to be February or March, not to mention January. Snowmageddon, snowzilla, la tormenta de nieve di diablo—whatever you call it, we’ve had a lot of it lately, including dustings like lamb’s wool as March came in. Hence two poems about snow:
Late Snowfall
All that bluster, and only a little meaning,
for only a little while. The flowering quince
can wait it out, forsythia bide its time,
but crocuses, tuned to another reckoning,
appear on cosmic schedule anyway,
it seems, in spite of interruption.
It doesn't matter. Order will be restored
by afternoon, when schoolgirls coming home
will make their plans without regard to weather.
Geller, who calls himself an old poet from Boston, now lives in Northern Virginia. His amusing poem “Foodish” was the opening act in our 2015 anthology
Joys of the Table.
And speaking of old, here’s a poem I wrote some years ago:
Lullaby for a Winter Evening
Lie down and let me tell you about snow
about geometry and silence
two parts cold to one part marvel
let me tell you of the twofold
mystery of its nature
how a single flake
dissolves at once
how two flakes linger
when they gather
whitely on the ground
Lie down and lift your face to snow
drifting down like petals
in a spring orchard
taste it on your tongue
a fleeting kiss of ice
Lie down and listen to the
wind wind through the apple trees
twisting the bare twigs
into complex runes
against a curtained sky
spelling out a recipe
for snow
(first published in
Innisfree Poetry Journal, Spring 2014)
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Views from the Balcony
Last year, my friend Beth Isham
wrote
about her “through the window glass” daily poetry journal. Here are a few of her 2015 observations:
January 11
“These observations of the morning sky serve as rough drafts for future poems, short stories, and memoirs,” Beth writes. “I grew up in a smallish town with open and wide Michigan skies. My adult life was in cities with sky seldom visible. What a joy it is to meet again the majestic colors and shapes of space—freedom!”
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Fun with Form
Mel Goldberg, whose moving poem “The Chocolate Cake” appeared in
Joys of the Table, recently sent us a piece that shows his versatility and impressive mastery of complicated form. “The poem has 8 stanzas of 8 lines each with an alternating iambic pentameter rhythm of 8 and 6 syllables,” he wrote. “The rhyme scheme of the stanzas is a,b,a,b,c,c,d,c with the rhyme of the 7th line as the dominant rhyme of the following stanza.”
The Pig Who Wanted to Be a Jew
What are you trying to hide?
Wet blanket stretched
across the horizon.
Tree skeletons holding up the sky
but the sky is not there.
Only the fog.
The moisture particles collected en masse
into a gray nothingness.
January 12
A band of golden yellow
Across the horizon.
Bright flames leap into the sky.
Morning has begun.
February 9
Small particles of sky
fall earthward
and appear as snowflakes.
Mel manages to tell a meaningful story in a light-hearted but challenging format. I stand amazed.
One morning Pig sat up in bed
He’d had his dream anew
To all the animals he said,
“I want to be a Jew.”
Creatures came to have their say
Began to shout and bray,
“What makes you think,” they said in scorn,
“That you can get your way?”
Ram trotted up and shook his horns
“I once became the life
That saved young Isaac, the first born
When Avram raised his knife.
I was the sacred sacrifice
In place of Isaac’s price.
My horn’s the shofar blown to say
Only atonement will suffice.
.
Pig felt chagrined and walked away.
Lamb said, “We gave salvation.”
She sneered at Pig and shook her ears,
“We saved the Hebrew nation.
They smeared our blood upon their doors.
We were God’s conspirators.”
Pig felt great sadness for each one
of all his ancestors.
.
“Then Pharaoh lost his first-born son
And set the Hebrews free.
To wander in the desert sun
Each one a refugee.”
Though Pig was sad he was not glum
He cried, “I won’t succumb
To scorn. I will pursue my quest.
A Jew I will become.”
Then Goat said, “That’s a fool’s request.
While I must carry sin,
You have done nothing to be blessed
So Jews may all begin
A year with spirits fresh and clean
And every soul serene.”
Then Pig let out a heart-felt sob,
“I might have never been.
Why do I have no sacred job?
It really isn’t fair.
I do not wish to be a snob
But what good is my prayer?”
A somber God heard Pig complain
“You’re needed just like rain
In my beloved eternal plan.
Your loss would be a stain.
Although I placed you in the ban
In Deuteronomy,
Your place is quite significant
In air on land or sea.
You serve to constantly remind
All Jews that they must bind
Themselves to honor the Torah
And work to help mankind.”
Then Pig stood tall, puffed out his chest.
He had a job to do.
He’d take his place and do his best.
Perhaps he always knew
All creatures have a place.
His fate
Is to communicate
That every living thing has worth—
Those who serve and those who validate
Mel Goldberg has taught literature and writing in California, Illinois, Arizona, and as a Fulbright Exchange teacher in Cambridgeshire, England. His writing has been published online and in print in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico.
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Warm-Hearted Observation
Sometimes a simple event can change the way you
look at things, and that seems to be what
happened to Donna Marie Merritt. In her new
chapbook
We Walk Together, Merritt remembers an
encounter with a Jamaican man selling seashells
on the beach.
You indulged in this
once-in-a-lifetime splurge
for your honeymoon
as you start your life
she says of herself in the opening poem, “Come yah!” Then, in an effective echo of these words, she says of the man:
You are his
chance-in-a-lifetime survival
for his family
as his life nears its end
Her dismissive response is to smile a “dental-plan smile” and stir her drink. “What have I done? / What have I become?” she asks, an insight that informs these poems, each one a small tale of compassion and empathy.
Accessible, direct, clear—there’s no mistaking the message here. From the 12-year-old drug dealer seeking to deal with abandonment to the homeless man noticed more for his absence—“I like to think / He’s home with wife”—than his presence, the subjects of these poems are the people we all too often ignore. Pay attention, Merritt seems to be saying, these people are people too.
A former teacher, Merritt is the author of four previous books of poetry and numerous children’s books. Her warm-hearted observation of others—her fellow feeling for the disadvantaged and downtrodden—will repay the reader’s attention.
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Holiday Spirit
December at the Muslim’s House
Paper stars shine in the next-door window
red and green for Christmas, lacy white
snowflakes
At the table our neighbor and his wife ring in
the holidays, wrapping presents, cutting out
decorations
double-fold paper, snip out diamonds … fancy
shapes … scraps falling free, patterning
the floor
Their son practices his piano lessons
harking to herald angels, calling all
the faithful
No stars and carols in our house this month
no wreath or tree festooned with lights
but still
frost drew crystalline stars on our window
this morning, bringing icy sky down
to our room
bringing my Muslim man and me our own
winter nest for dreaming the oneness
of the world
Merry Christmas!
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Mapping the Poem
Poets are word people first and foremost, but visual images can spark a poem or even provide a kind of roadmap for its development. Of course we often write about what we see, but I hadn’t thought of using pictures to help shape the poem. North Carolina poet Jo Barbara Taylor has taken that concept to heart. Taylor, whose poem “Genevieve” and recipe for poppy seed cake were in
Joys of the Table, recently sent me this essay on poem mapping:Consider the Process
Not long ago, I signed up for a class in Mapping, Collage, and Writing. I write, and I've been experimenting in mixed media. I didn't know exactly what "mapping" was, but I was sure the class would be just what I was looking for. On the first day I toted the suggested art supplies in a margarita bucket. We didn't use them at all. Instead we wrote about why we wanted to be in the class and what we expected to learn. We discussed mapping, its purpose, and how to do it.
I toted my art supplies back home, but as with all happy accidents, the concept of mapping caught my attention. It turns out just about anything can be mapped if the cartographer is inventive. I chose to map the process of writing of a poem I had begun a couple of months before on a warm night under a supermoon. I remembered the steps that resulted in the poem and, through mapping, saw how one image led to another, how random things converged.
My map is a series of pictographs (stick people and dogs, a fairly round moon, the outline of a plane headed east) connected by a path of arrows. The charting process prompted me to really think about how a poem begins, the discovery that gets one started, how it pulls in other elements (images, sounds) that become their own catalysts. The visual display of how those elements emerged and fit together provided a few “aha" moments
For me, the value of mapping is seeing where I have been. It leads me to consider how I write—where poems begin, what the beginning conjures up, what words fit and what ones don't, the images, how I rearrange, how it all comes together. Understanding where I have been may show me where I might go.
Though I do not map every poem I write, I find that when I do, I make discoveries and am able to experience the poem on its different levels. Some of those discoveries send me in new directions. (Isn't all writing the result of going off on a tangent?) I hope that I'm unconsciously bringing awareness of process to everything I write even when I don't draw the arrows. Here’s a little poem describing the process:
MAPPING
how to get from here to there
then farther
paths to explore
points on the compass roes
the legend of the trek
places you will see and see
find treasure
or kiss goodbye
Jo Barbara Taylor lives near Raleigh, NC. Her poems and academic writing have appeared in journals, magazines, anthologies and online; she leads poetry writing workshops through Duke Continuing Education. Of four chapbooks, the most recent, High Ground, was published by Main Street Rag, 2013. A full length collection is forthcoming in spring 2016 from Chatter House Press.
The Wisdom of Laureates When some 20 current and former poet laureates got together recently in Manassas, Virginia, ideas and inspiration were on the agenda. The occasion was “In the Company of Laureates,” a symposium sponsored by the Poetry Society of Virginia and Write by the Rails, a Chapter of the Virginia Writers Club. My friend poet Jacqueine Jules sat in and noted these words of wisdom:
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· Heightened language that distils emotional truth—that’s poetry.
·
Poetry should suggest but
not be ambiguous.
·
Write what you are in the
midst of. Words rub against each other in a new
alchemy.
·
Every poem is an
experiment. You should always be figuring out
something new, a new discovery.
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What Are You Writing?
Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your
latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish
the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please
let us know if the poem is accepted or published
elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines
about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message
to:
poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com