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But Does it Rhyme?
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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.
MAPPING
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 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. 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
“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.
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.) 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 ...................................................................................................................................
Inspiration Last month, I asked about other writers’ sources of inspiration, and Virginia poet Eric Forsbergh stepped up:
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. ...................................................................................................................................
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
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