Good news this week! My poem submission to Goldfish Press has been accepted. It will be part of an anthology titled, The World According to Goldfish. I am most happy that the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Heifer Project International. This organization helps alleviate world hunger. My family has bought goats and chicks for others for many years. Now I can help in a literary way. Stay tuned!

Poetry group is over for now. I am concentrating on getting out my children's poetry collection submission this week. And because in a weak moment I became a contestant in NH Literary Idol, I am practicing my three-minute children's book presentation. The event is April 18, moderated by NH humorist Rebecca Rule. I hope I survive intact!

finding walden

Our poetry group met last night for the last time this season. The exercises have produced the beginnings of new work, and that's good. We looked at a Mary Oliver poem, "Going to Walden" and D.B. Johnson's picture book Henry Works. Oliver writes,

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
New and Selected Poems, Volume One, p. 239

Johnson ends his story with Henry David Thoreau writing, "Today I took a walk in the woods." But his walk included watering milkweed, picking huckleberries and delivering wild strawberry plants. All this before he began the work of writing.

I want to try harder to find Walden where I am. Part of my Walden is a cabin in Maine- a phone, no tv, simple food, walks, swims, kayaking.

Raindrops drum the tin-hard roof,
drip down the dense cedars.
Loon giggles stipple the lake,
keeping the white pines awake.

It's almost time!

finding spring

In this magic of spring, rainbows and pots of gold week, our poetry group focused on "found poetry." There are a variety of ways to find a poem. It's fun to flip through a book of poems and write down delicious words and phrases that pop out. Then try to arrange them, add your own thoughts and you have "found" a poem.

We grabbed a newspaper page and a magazine page. You'd be surprised what you can find in the classifieds. One ad for a lost cat started, "Answers to the name of Midnight." That's inspiration enough for me!

Scanning, we circled words and phrases, about twenty per page. After recording what we had found, our personalities took over. Some wanted to make order or meaning. These writers arranged, connected and added words to make sense. Others let the music of the words guide them. Their poems were more eclectic, and the sounds of the word groups were pleasing to the ear.

Here is my "found poem."

Hindsight

At Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, in a cobbled
courtyard, food is served round the clock
in memory of Mimi.
In Yellowstone where bison winter,
animals have been spotted. Yet,
they euthanized a newborn right whale
due to slumping ticket sales.
Particular angels can be seen reveling
downtown in a decade. Blind trust
dissolves. Taproots clatter.
Sheers of wind and breezes of change
are the cause. Can these bones live?
Breathe!
The fact of the finding is
hindsight comes easy.

forcing poems into the light

This forced tulip seems to yearn for the outdoors. It senses the light but not the snow-covered earth. We've been forcing poems in our poetry group by reading into photos. It's a form of ekphrasis - a Greek word meaning "speak out."

I gave an interview to a teen working on a career project, a nice stroke for me! She asked me about my process. I described an exercise I enjoy - sketching a painting in a museum and writing what the process reveals to me. "That sounds like ekphrasis," she said. "Describing a work of art in a poetic form."

I may have known the term from my English major days, but it was buried. So I am happy to know that I enjoy a process described by Plato and practiced by Virgil, Homer, Shelley, Rilke and a host of poets. The process is like using a third eye to see something you might miss with two. The right brain works while the left brain is occupied with line, perspective, etc.

Other artists also use this technique. I'm currently researching Malvina Hoffman, American sculptor who studied with Rodin. Her first assignment was to take home one of Rodin's plaster hands and draw it for a week.

So pack a sketchbook and pencil on your next museum visit and practice ekphrasis.

layer by layer

Another foot of snow buries spring even deeper here in New Hampshire. I'm watching my potted tulip bulbs with longing, willing the green shoots to stretch. This is the season of literary deadlines for grants and conference submissions. Maybe the snow will melt as I push through the paper piles.

Our poetry group unpacked Donald Hall's "Mount Kearsage" last night. I love Donald Hall and remember years of reading Ox Cart Man and The Man Who Lived Alone.

Listening to the poet's reading on CD, we heard so clearly the assonance of repeated vowel sounds that create "Mount Kearsage's" near rhyme. Hall's personal connection to the mountain facing his front porch is visceral. He talks to it, calls it "you." Images of porch rocking and physical descriptions of the mountain balance its ephemeral qualities obscured by haze. The immortality of the mountain is in tension with the poet's own mortality.

You can hear Hall read his poem at the Library of Congress website.
www.loc.gov/today/pr/2006/more/MountKearsarge.mp3

"Mount Kearsarge"

This week we will transpose the structure of "Mount Kearsage" into a poem about our own strong images. The goal is to discover a response to them we may not have considered before - to unearth the qualities that make these images everlasting to us. Layer by layer, we will try to "write thick."