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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)

books
Richer Resources Publications

 

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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.
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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 Jacqueline Jules sat in and noted these words of wisdom: 

·   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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A ‘Genius’ Poet

Congratulations to Ellen Bryant Voigt, poet, teacher, and winner of a 2015 MacArthur “genius” award. A Virginian by birth, Voigt now lives in Vermont, where she served as poet laureate for four years. Her poems “meditate on will and fate and the life cycles of the natural world while exploring the expressive potential of both lyric and narrative elements,” said the MacArthur Foundation, in announcing the award.

Voigt explains her work in more down-to-earth terms: “The world is so full of meaning we can’t even grab it by the tail,” she says in a video on the MacArthur site. “I try to make poems that capture something of the world and of the human experience of living in the world, which is fraught. It’s fraught, it’s challenging, it’s complicated.”

Her poem "The Last Class" is one example. The poem opens with these lines: ‘“Put this in your notebooks: / All verse is occasional verse” and goes on to describe an incident of a drunk man bothering a woman at a bus station. But the poem is less about this small occasion than about examining why Voigt felt driven to write about it:

I tried to recall how it felt
to live without grief; and then I wrote down
a few tentative lines about the drunk,
because of an old compulsion to record,
or sudden resolve not to be self-absorbed
and full of dread—

I wanted to salvage
something from my life, to fix
some truth beyond all change …

“It’s all failure in the making of art,” Voigt says in the video, “because you always fail to reach that thing that’s glimmering out there, that has no shape or form yet.” She pauses, then says, “If you didn’t fail, why would you write the next one?” Read more about Voigt, plus a sampling of her poems, at the Poetry Foundation.
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And Now This …

Lately it seems all my poems are about nature or childhood memories or both. Here are links to two recent pieces:

• In its “My Sweet Word” series, Silver Birch Press was sweet enough to include my nostalgic poem "Watermelon Pickle," along with pictures of me then and now.

• One of my nature poems is still blooming at Heron Tree: "Note to My Younger Self." (Another note: you’ll have to click again when you get there.)
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The Roof Over Our Heads

Here in the East, it was a summer of downpours. We installed a drainage ditch in our backyard to keep water out of the house, and one thing led to another. When the contractor examined our gutters, he found that the wood behind them was rotting … as was the wood beneath the roof. Some time and some dollars later, we now have a beautiful new roof. I was reminded of a poem of mine that was published in the November/December 2014 issue of The Broadkill Review, available online only to subscribers. Here’s the piece:

Home Improvement

The sigh of leaves overhead
the stipple of sunlight on the road
the expectation of ending in the air

You and the workmen take down
the rotted marquee by the door
cut straight new boards of fir
miter precise corners where beams
will meet in geometric rectitude
then build it new, joints tight
wood painted shiny chocolate
to match the window trim—
an angled arbor pointing
due north to echo the line
of the brick walk

The old marquee lasted eleven
winters and the new should do no less
but for now the ginger cat rolls
on his back in the sawdust
opening his belly to the sky

Last week was the equinox
autumn now with its color and sorrow
wwinter still a good ways off

© 2014, Sally Zakariya

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Inspiration

Last month, I asked about other writers’ sources of inspiration, and Virginia poet Eric Forsbergh stepped up:

“What inspires me can come from anywhere,” Eric wrote. “It helps to have a rich treasury of varied life experiences. I grew up on a farm in Tennessee, spent summers on the New England coast, served in the Navy in Vietnam and the Philippines, scrubbed as a surgical orderly, went on three dental mission trips (one in Appalachia, and two in Guatemala), and have cultivated relationships with people not from my cultural background. Like many poets, I am also inspired by events in childhood, when our receptivity is so open.”

Other great sources are stories and situations Eric encounters. “For example,” he continued, “a woman once told me she'd gotten an accidental black eye, and when two repairmen arrived at her house, they did not utter a peep about it. As they left, she asked them, supposing she had a broken leg, would they have asked what happened? They admitted they would have asked, but not about the black eye. This story immediately presented the tension for a poem concerning false assumptions, in this case on the frightening subject of domestic violence. At any rate, I am a sponge for stories and situations. As a result, prompts are always showing up for me.”

Eric’s poems are available in Imagine Morning, published by Richer Resources Publications.

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Quoted

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”—Randall Jarrell, who clearly lived up to his own definition.

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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