Posts Tagged ‘Poetry Friday’
December 16, 2010 @ 8:51 pm | Filed under:
Poetry 
An archive of my sporadic contributions to Poetry Friday. For the schedule of hosts, check here.
This week’s host is the amazing Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm, whose daily original poems are a source of great delight to me! (Oh my goodness—I posted this last night and now, early on the 17th, West Coast time, I have awakened to discover Amy’s Poetry Friday roundup today contains a beautiful gift for me—a poem! Most wonderful wonderful, out of all hooping. Thank you so much, Amy—what a gorgeous gift.)
(This archive is a work in progress. I’m still working backward through 2006.)
June 2006
“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney
“Portrait by a Neighbor” by Edna St. Vincent Millay—“Before she has her floor swept/ Or her dishes done,/ Any day you’ll find her/ A-sunning in the sun!”
“Patterns” by Amy Lowell (a poem I first encountered as a teen in Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins)
One for newborn Rilla: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
“Childhood” by Rilke
And while they’re not technically Poetry Friday contributions, I want to include these poems in my archive so I can find them easily: our family “Where I’m From” poems. Mine, Jane’s (age 11), and, in a special gift to me, my father’s.
August 2006
Jane’s pick: “I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill” by Keats
September 2006
“The Author to Her Book”—Anne Bradstreet
“Ho Ro, My Nut-brown Maiden” (scroll way down)
“Moving” by Randall Jarrell—“Never again will Orion / Fall on my speller through the star /Taped on the broken window by my cot…”
January 2007
Rigs o’ Rye—a Scots ballad I quoted in Little House in the Highlands, a story-poem I dearly love. “This lad he was a gallant bold, / a brave young lad nineteen years old;/He’s made the hills and valleys roar,/ and the bonnie lassie, she’s gone with him…”
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—a Keats poem we encountered in Swallows and Amazons
February 2007
On the Sonnet—Yes, it’s Keats again
“Oh happy living things!”—Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
March 2007
“So the world woos”—one of my favorite poems: “Letters from a Father” by Mona van Duyn
April 2007
“A Green Cornfield”—Christina Rossetti
March 2007
Sisters—an original poem courtesy of wee Rilla
April 2007
Good Friday, 1613—“Riding Westward” by John Donne
“Thou little tricksy Puck”—my girls’ favorite poem, because it’s about their brother: Thomas Hood’s “A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months”
June 2007
“Forests at the bottom of the sea”—Whitman’s “The World Below the Brine”
“That has made thee mine forever”—Bonnie Mary o’ Argyle
July 2007
“What is the grass?”—Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“For my heart’s a boat in tow”—Loch Tay Boat Song, my favorite Scottish ballad
August 2007
“I wonder if the gardener knows”—Rachel Field’s “The Little Rose Tree”
September 2007
“The music in my heart I bore”—Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” and selections from his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of their tour in Scotland, which served as research for my Martha books
October 2007
“Let fall one by one”—Heaney’s “Clearances,” chosen on the heels of a “Tolland Man” quote from the previous day’s Helixes post
August 2008
“The water is wide”—another Scots ballad
October 2008
“Understanding”—the poem by Sara Teasdale; the prayer by St. Francis of Assisi
“We must love one another or die”—Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
April 2009
“Fortify your inner life”—some Seamus Heaney
May 2009
“Oh for a bee’s experience”—during the height of my honeybee obsession, a bee trail and some Emily Dickinson
August 2009
“The Triangle Factory Fire”—a Robert Pinsky poem
And not part of Poetry Friday, but related to the post above:
Speaking of Robert Pinsky
It’s a Small Internet After All
September 2009
“The Fairy Tales of Science”—a rambly post inspired by Ransome’s Winter Holiday, with only a snippet of “Locksley Hall”
November 2009:
“Like little mice”—“Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, plus bonus picture of Johnny Depp
January 2010
“We are not really at home”—from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “The First Elegy”
October 2010:
Poetry Friday, we meet again—a reposting of my poem, “Lena, Waiting for the Mail”
November 2010:
“Spend all you have for loveliness”—one by Sara Teasdale; one by me
Sestina—an original poem written in 1993
The Huck Edition—an original poem, “Olympian Heights,” courtesy of my 22-month-old son
November 25, 2010 @ 9:26 pm | Filed under:
Poetry Just a morsel today. I’ve been working on an archive page for my Poetry Friday posts (because I find WordPress’s archives obnoxiously unwieldy), and I came across this entry from March of 2007. I had to laugh, because it turns out last week wasn’t the first time one of my bairns made a contribution to Poetry Friday. I’d forgotten that Rilla had a turn when she was eleven months old.
Sisters, by Rilla
They scoop me up and say I’m delicious;
They grant practically all of my wishes
(Except when I wish to gnaw on a Lego).
Mostly I wish to go where they go.
Jane is the one who totes me like mother
And won’t let me pull out the hair of my brother.
Rose guards me from anything ’ticingly teeny.
The one who twirls me around is Beanie.
I’m not sure whether the ache I get from this photo is because that baby has grown so big, or because that rug has grown so dingy. Ah, the cruel march of time. And feet.
This week’s Poetry Friday host is Jone at Check It Out.
November 19, 2010 @ 12:16 pm | Filed under:
Poetry Today’s Poetry Friday contribution is brought to you by my 22-month-old. Visit Random Noodling for this week’s roundup.
Olympian Heights
Four blocks. Five. Six. Seven.
Look, universe, and marvel: Heaven
Is closer now.
Nothing’s not in reach.
Eight, and if the crash
Comes, all the better.
Hold construction for a moment!
Mom’s phone, her full mug—
The fit is perfect, the splash
Spectacular.
Not to seem smug
But I’m confident
She’ll be pleased
Or lively, at least:
Her fire-red wail
Loud as my fine red truck
They flew to fridge-top
Last night at dinner.
Now I see: I’m Hercules;
That truck’s my next labor,
Since I’ve conquered the blocks.
………………………….Amazon box.
…………stepstool—
Chair—
November 11, 2010 @ 8:42 pm | Filed under:
Poetry For Poetry Friday this week, another one of mine. Like Lena, it’s an old one, written during grad school. It came to mind recently because I realized I’d borrowed an image from this poem for a newer manuscript.
When I wrote this poem, I wanted to try my hand at a sestina, which is a strict form comprised of six six-line stanzas, each line ending with the same six words but arranged in a different order in each stanza, ending with a final three-line stanza in which every line contains two of the repeated words. Um, did you follow that? It sounds more complicated than it is—it’s a simple form, though devilishly hard to write.
For the narrative of the poem, I wanted the speaker’s reality to reflect the repetition; I wanted to place someone in a situation where a few stark elements would be dominating her world. Thus the prairie homestead setting.
In the Dugout
July 15, 1892
Hard to write with my arm so sore but right now I need
the comfort of this dear book. I’m burning what’s left
of the oil but Lucas he won’t know, he’s out in the fields
and he’s like to stay there all night.
It’s cool in here this evening, a nice wind
singing in the grass on the roof, but again
no sign of rain. Looks like we’re in for it again.
Another dry year. Oh dear Lord how we do need
some rain, with the land dry as burlap, blowing off in the wind
till I don’t believe we’ll have any topsoil left.
And I can’t keep Lucas from straying out night after night
to dig holes between the rows in all our fields
because he thinks if he frees the moisture, the fields
will produce, pushing up corn and potatoes again
like in the good years. I remember the nights
we used to spend catching stars for each other, no need
for neighbors. But those times left
so long ago, carried away by this never-ending wind
and dried up by the summers. And maybe the wind
is what whipped that parched man in the fields,
took his grand schemes and his spark and left
him slack-eyes and broken, muttering those fool words again
and again about rainfall following the plow. All we need,
Lucas says when he’s clear, is a few nights
of good solid rain, the kind to soak a sod roof overnight
which I’m sure wouldn’t take much with this place. The wind
shrieks in through a dozen holes as it is. I need
a new cloth to hang above the table so bits of field
won’t sift into the food again.
But that muslin I used for my sling was all I had left.
I know it’s wrong but I’ve got so I wouldn’t care if he left.
The way he flew at me all wild last night
because I killed a broody hen again.
We got to eat, don’t we? Can’t live on dirt and wind
and we certainly ain’t getting anything else from those fields.
But—sometimes I think maybe that is all I need—
just what we’ve got left: earth and wind.
One night I’ll go out and plant my own self in the field
and drink wind till I’m full again, with no burning need.
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at Scrub-a-Dub Tub.
October 29, 2010 @ 7:37 am | Filed under:
Poetry One of my biggest takeaways from Kidlitcon was a resolution to get back in the groove of participating in Poetry Friday. I was a regular, in the beginning. Somewhere between babies #5 and #6 I seem to have fallen out of the habit, mainly because I’m no longer entirely sure when Friday is.
Twitter tells me today is Friday, so that’s good enough for me.
Here are some things to do on this fine Poetry Friday:
• Take a trip to The Poem Farm.
• Read Laura Purdie Salas’s account of the wonderful Poetry Friday panel that so inspired the crowd at KidlitCon.
• Go see Karen, because her Poetry Friday offerings have never failed me yet.
• Visit my new friend Toby Speed for this week’s Poetry Friday roundup!
And here’s my offering. To celebrate my return to regular PF participation, here’s a poem of my own. I shared it here about a year ago, but not on Poetry Friday. I wrote it during grad school before I shifted my MFA focus to fiction. It was published in the Summer/Fall 1994 issue of Quarterly West. (Some of you may remember how delighted I was, afterward, to discover that the editor of that issue was none other than Sally Thomas, who had become—and remains—one of my favorite bloggers.)
Lena, Waiting for the Mail
This time of day the split-rail fence
lays its long shadow in the road,
as far from the house as it ever gets.
Straight and mean, that shadow,
like train tracks heating up in the sun.
I’m always watching for the train.
Plenty of shadows in this yard, but no shade.
Janie and Mack crouching in the spare grass
behind me pour the dogs’ water out for mud.
The ground sucks it in, little snaps and hisses
in my ear. Eleanor wrote last time her ears
are pierced, had it done when she was four,
I can’t believe it, and she got diamonds
on her sweet sixteen. That what girls
like Eleanor call it. I bet it feels sweet to be them, curled
and black-lashed, wearing Pop’s last forty hours
through your earlobes. Davy, shouting, runs
three times around the house, gets as far as Mars
before Pop hushes him. Mack orders him to help
with the mudcastle. “Lena,” Mama calls,
“I wish you’d keep them quiet.”
Patrick McFadden wrote to say he “freefalls
from airplanes for fun.” He’s the only boy I write.
Pop thinks “Pat” is a girl. Pat loves the color blue, the smell
of coffee, and Bruce Springsteen. This mailman
will never show. Anita’s letter is due today,
and maybe Sabine Heyl’s. That fragile paper like the skin
you peel out of an open eggshell. Purple ink
like you’d write magic spells with—Janie’s blinking
back tears. Mama’ll kill me. “You kids come away
from the house,” I say. “I’ll tell you a story.” Can’t I tell
myself a good one: A girl with a hundred letters
spreads them flat like a quilt. She sticks them together
with Elmer’s since sealing wax is in short supply.
She climbs on and waves her hands in a spell.
The rustling paper rises like a prayer into the sky.
(Originally published in Quarterly West, No. 39, Summer/Fall 1994, Salt Lake City, UT.)
This week’s Poetry Friday roundup can be found at The Writer’s Armchair.
What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):
“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”
Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.
“I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.
“How many of the Pleiades can you see?”
“Six,” said Dorothea.
“There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”
Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall’)…”
“Oh, hang Tennyson!”
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”
“Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer in the darkness.
But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.
“Shakespeare died 1616.”
“What?”
“Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start…”
“But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “the light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that…”
“Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.
But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckles a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.
—from Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome,
one of the Swallows & Amazons books
Where it took us:
* We read the opening of “Locksley Hall,” a long and complex poem which I enjoyed thinking my way through later in the day. With the kids, I read and discussed the first several stanzas, all of us lingering especially over:
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
* Of course after that we had to see the Pleiades. Discovered Google Sky. Oh. My. Goodness. Truly, we live in an amazing age.
* Spent a long time playing with Google Sky, looking up many constellations including all those mentioned in the Winter Holiday chapter. Rose told me the story of Orion being chased by the serpent, and we read the legend of the Pleiades, those seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Beanie fetched D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths because both she and Rose wanted to read me several relevant passages.
* Hunted up our copy of Rey’s Find the Constellations and read about the different magnitudes of stars, among other things.
* Rose found Sirius, the Dog Star, her favorite star, says she, because she loves Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel, Dogsbody, so.
“Here about the beach I wandered,” Tennyson’s poem continues, “nourishing a youth sublime / With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…”
I don’t know about “sublime,” and we’d have to substitute “internet” for “beach,” I suppose, but yeah, it was a pretty nourishing morning.
Want more poetry? This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Wild Rose Reader.
It’s still (Poetry) Friday here on the West Coast.
The other day I mentioned a book I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about:
I wanted a few days to savor the novel I finished earlier this week: Lost by Jacqueline Davies, a spellbinding account of—well, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, sort of, but really that’s a backdrop to an achingly moving tale of loss and grief, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl (whose narrative voice may be my favorite of the year so far) who works in the factory.
And Beth of Bookworm Journal commented:
Melissa, the book by Davies sounds very good — thank you for posting about it. I’m acquainted with the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire only through Robert Pinsky’s poem “Shirt.” You may know it already, but if not, I encourage you to google it (it’s on various websites). Truly an amazing poem, and might be a good accompaniment to the novel…
Before Lost, I was acquainted with the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire primarily via a TV movie I watched as a girl—I remember so vividly the terrible image of a young Irish woman being urged by her desperate chum to jump out the window together before the flames devoured them, and the Irish girl sobbing that she couldn’t jump, she was Catholic and jumping was suicide and she wouldn’t do it, and the other girl stepping out the window as the Irish girl’s skirts caught fire. A horrible image. And would you believe that all this time, until I looked up the link for this post, I thought that movie was The Towering Inferno? Which entirely different film I must also have seen at some point—clearly I have conflated the two because I would have sworn Paul Newman was in the Triangle Factory movie, and now IMDB tells me he was part of Towering Inferno‘s all-star cast, along with Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire for goodness sake, and O.J. Simpson.
The film I’m remembering must have been this 1979 TV movie, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal, featuring Tom Bosley, Stephanie Zimbalist, and Charlotte Rae. It won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling.
There is something terribly poignant about that thought. 146 people died in the Triangle Factory Fire, most of them young women trapped on the 9th floor of a building with flimsy fire escapes, no sprinklers, and no fire alarms. 68 years later, someone won an award for getting their hairstyles right on TV.
Robert Pinsky’s poem, “Shirt,” which I had not read until Beth directed me toward it (for which: thank you so much), captures that disconnect, that jarring history wrapped up in something so simple, so unnoticed, so miraculous when you stop and think about it, as a plain cotton shirt.
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
(Read the rest at the Internet Poetry Archive.)
***
Today’s Poetry Friday is hosted by The Book Aunt.
(Poetry Friday visitors, Miss Dickinson awaits you at the bottom of the post.)
I mentioned I’ve become hooked on beekeeping blogs ever since reading Fruitless Fall. Here are a few of my favorites:
Hive Mind Bee Blog. A backyard beekeeper in Washington. I especially enjoyed his account of a swarm in his neighborhood:
When they’re flying in the air, there’s nothing you can do but watch, but when the queen lands, the rest of the swarm will land around her in a huge, sedate clump that you can put into a bucket or a box and put back into a hive. Julie made a quick call to Dawn of the Puget Sound Beekeeper’s Association, got some info on how to proceed, and we were back in business. I threw on some overalls and my bee shirt, grabbed a bucket and a spatula, and I’s ready for action. First, though, I stopped off at the school across the street where kids and parents were doing landscaping and upkeep on the grounds and let them know that we had a science fair moment, if they were interested. A couple of the moms gathered up a dozen or so 5 – 10 yr olds and they all trooped over to see the bees.
Honey Run Apiaries. Great pictures, thoughtful discussion, wry observations.
I recently read an 1858 book ‘Phelps Bee-Keeper’s Chart‘. The book is obviously horribly out of date and out of print (though it is available on-line). Though it is interesting none-the-less for several reasons. While it does cover a lot about honey bees, much of it is for the purpose of promoting the authors patented ‘Ohio Combination Bee-Hive‘ saying that he expects it to ‘ supersede all others’. Sadly, while it apparently claimed honors at the Ohio and other state fairs, his book was published 6 years after Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth’s book ‘The Hive and the Honey Bee’, which details the bee hive most of us use today in the US and in other parts of the world.
Fruitless Fall discussed the rise of the Langstroth hive, so that was a neat connection for us. Amusing tidbit at the bottom of that post:
The running joke is that if you ask 5 beekeepers in a room a question, you will receive 6 different answers. Apparently this is one of the oldest beekeeping jokes on record. Phelps wrote nearly 150 year ago that ‘there is scarcely any subject on which such a diversity of opinion exists, as on the form and size of bee-hives, and the general management of bees.’
Linda’s Bees might be my favorite beekeeping blog so far. She writes from Atlanta and posts the most incredible pictures, really informative shots that let you see the action inside a hive. Her hives have fun names like Bermuda and Mellona (the Roman goddess of bees). Excellent sidebar full of links we’re exploring as time permits.
We rented this NOVA film about bees: Tales from the Hive. The cinematography was fairly stunning. The corresponding website has video of the different bee dances and an interview with the filmmaker about how he managed the breathtaking closeup shots of bees in flight.
The next step was to find out how I could fly with the bees, because they are fast. I told myself, if I can’t fly with the bee, then the bee has to fly with me—that is, with the camera, directly in front of the lens. It was like the work at a clockmaker’s. We used a pair of tiny tweezers to form a wafer-thin wire. We then tied the bee up with this—very carefully, because we did not want to harm the bee, and we wanted to make sure it had the freedom to move its wings. A special kind of arrangement enabled us to fix the wire to the camera.
The film was made in 2000, before the beginning of bee colony collapse and I think possibly even before the massive varroa infestation that has crippled so many hives in recent years.
My dear daddy sent me some cool links:
How to make a house for mason bees
Pursuit of the perfect pollinator
(Thanks, Dad!)
Since today is Poetry Friday, let me leave you with a little Emily Dickinson.
The Bee
Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry
Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While she, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.
Her feet are shod with gauze,
Her helmet is of gold;
Her breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.
Her labor is a chant,
Her idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!
April 17, 2009 @ 7:56 am | Filed under:
Poetry Scott just sent me the link to this LA Times article about the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
In a recent interview, Heaney said he was often asked what the value of poetry was during times of economic recession. The answer, he explained, is that it is at just such moments of crisis that people realize that they do not live by economics alone. “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness,” Heaney said.
At first, that may seem like a quaint observation — one of those poet-as-holy-fool lines. Yet an effort to “fortify your inward side,” Heaney explained to another questioner, can act as a kind of “immune system” against material difficulties.
I have a collected Heaney and a collected Keats Yeats* in a basket by my rocking chair for those moments during the day when I need a little fortifying.
Even better is hearing Heaney read his poems aloud. That rich voice, oh my.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
(Read or listen to the rest.)
The Poetry Friday roundup is at Becky’s Book Reviews today.
*I typed Keats by mistake. I meant Yeats. I’m a rather ardent Keats fan, too, but his poems reside on a shelf, not in my rocking-chair basket. Somehow it’s the Irish poets I return to the most often, those wry observers, mouths quirked to one side. Their lush imagery and the obvious delight they take in hunting the right word, like wall-builders seeking the perfect stone to fit into the next spot, knowing all the while that the wall won’t keep the evils out entirely but will, for a time, protect a quiet space of peace. More fortification, I suppose.
