April Brings Thoughts On Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. This 30 day celebration began in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets.  Initiated to highlight American poets and the art of poetry, National Poetry month has grown to be the largest literary recognition group. Yesterday, my blog post was titled The Birth of a Story, but a group of poets 20+ years ago birthed a movement to bring poetry into the spotlight, to encourage the reading and love of poetry, and to honor numerous American poets.

We can do three things with poetry--read it, write it, or ignore it. I have chosen the first two.

I didn't always love reading poetry. Like many students in high school, I tolerated it to complete my assignments. Much later in life, I developed an appreciation for those who could express so much in few words. What a prose writer might get across to the reader in 2,000 words, the poet can do in perhaps 130. That impressed me. The love of words drew me to poetry in my adult years. 

I don't remember the first poem I wrote but I know that I wondered who I thought I was, that I could write a poem with no formal training whatsoever. I'd never read a book about writing poetry (still haven't!). What made me think I could do it? I figured out pretty quickly that anyone can write poetry, especially free verse, if they write from the heart. I don't attempt the finer forms that require certain numbers of syllables, certain types of rhythm and more--except for haiku. I have tried my hand at haiku. Some were awful; a few were not bad. 

I wrote a narrative rhyming poem that was published in Boys' Quest, a magazine for middle grade boys. I also entered a poem in our state authors contest and won first place. If I can do that with no formal training, so can you. To be perfectly honest, many more of my poems have been rejected than have bee accepted. That's alright. It delighted me to have even a few published. I mentioned never having read a book on writing poetry, nor have I attended any poetry workshops. That doesn't mean you shouldn't. I might do so someday myself.

Our first exposure to poetry came with the nursery rhymes our mothers read to us, or recited from memory. I used them as a diversion many a time with my children when they were small. Then, we learned the silly rhyming poems that began with Roses are red, violets are blue....Next, we had teachers who made us memorize poems in English class. There were teachers who made us pick apart a poem to learn what the poet was actually trying to say. What were the hidden meanings? The metaphors? The reason for being? That may be when many kids turned off the attention button, some for good. 

If you're one of those who selected ignore it from the three choices we have with poetry, give it another try. Do it with an open mind and the attitude that this time I am going to enjoy poetry. No one likes all poetry just as no one likes all short stories or all memoir pieces. In every kind of writing, we find things that appeal to us and those that do not. I heard a poet laureate of our state speak several years ago. The man was acclaimed for his poems. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about from the first sentence to the last that evening. Hearing his speech did not make me want to read his work. Even so, I knew there were plenty of other poets whose work I would enjoy reading.

Wringing Poetic Inspiration from the Depths of Winter

Roy Beckemeyer and Friend

Today, Guest Blogger Roy Beckemeyer has some interesting thoughts about perception and writing poetry. Thank you, Roy, for enlightening us as poets and also prose writers. 

Wringing Poetic Inspiration from the Depths of Winter

by Roy Beckemeyer

Winter sometimes seems to be devoid of poetic subjects; spring has tulips and daffodils, summer her roses and trees arching over village streets. Fall's leaves light themselves up right there on the branches. You feel as if the poetic muse may have retired to Arizona for the winter. But I can generally find things in winter's bleakness that inspire me if I work at it a bit: tree branches that look like skeletons, the shadows of those branches on the neighbor's roof, snow drifting up and ghosting the world into unrecognizable shapes.

This past winter it was birds that caught my fancy. I have always loved the way the winter sparrows can scratch food out from under the massing snow. In early mornings before anyone else is out and about you can see the virgin snow impressed by the tiny tracks left by foraging birds. And in the late evening in Wichita, KS huge flocks of crows return to the city from their feeding trips to the fields outside town, arching their way across the sky and into neighborhood treetops to roost for the night. I know that those images were an impelling reason for a poem I wrote last winter.

But I also know that somewhere in my mind, as I worked on turning those images into words, my subconscious was sifting through lines of other poets' work I had read. And winter, after all, is prime season for catching up on reading, wrapped up in a blanket, a cat on your lap, a dog on your feet. I went back and found lines from three poems I had read this winter that I believe had something to do with my word choice, the shape of the sounds I used, the images that appeared in my poem.

From a long time favorite poem I first read 40 years ago, Sydney Martin's "Letter to an Absent Friend" (Gazebo, 1977, Wichita State University Student Government Association), these lines are vivid in my memory:

"Some mornings

without my glasses

I think the black

leaves have come

but it is only

the fat cold birds

puffed up feathers"

From a new book, Marilyn Nelson's Mrs. Nelson's Class (2017, World Enough Writers, Tilamook, OR), from her poem "The Children's Moon," I found the these well-rounded lines particularly meaningful; the moon and all the "o" sounds brought to my mind a barred owl I had heard many mornings late this winter:

"Look, children, I said as they found their desks:

 The children's moon! A special good luck sign!"

And, from another new book, my friend Kelly Johnston's Kalaska (2017, Blue Cedar Press, Wichita, KS), from his poem, "Going Home to Stay,"

"In the fog of a warm December dawn,

a lone crow beckons from a cottonwood.

The rest of the murder remains quiet."

I think that, as you read my three-part poem, you will see how what I saw on my morning walks this winter, and how the words and phrases I retained in my memory from my winter's reading, influenced the shape and tenor of my own poetic vision:

Three Winter-Bird Poems

winter birds, fluffed-up puffs dark

against snow  hop,  stop,  hop,  peck

at seeds scattered, peppered, thrown hap-

hazardly, their beaks mustached

with fuzzy snowflakes with shattered

shells of sunflower husks their downy

coats filling with snow their footprints

y   y   y   yy  y  y's on the white ground

___________________

big owls, round

eyes on round bodies

drawn by first graders, under

a big round moon their

mouths, oh, so open

O's, hooting

___________________

crows bound down

the sky, caw to one

another and curve

in arcs and droops

and deviant drops

onto barren trees,

blobs on skeletal

limbs, with croaks,

creaks, rustles, they

pull night's darkness

into themselves

___________________

—Roy Beckemeyer, March, 2017

The message is, of course, that you can find inspiration without end in any season if you open your eyes to the world around you and open your mind to the words written by authors whose work you love. So go forth and write: fill poetry month with what you have seen and read and then written.

Thanks to Nancy for making the pages of her blog available to me once again. I am proud to have had her allow me to share her writing space. Happy Spring, Nancy!

Bio: Roy J. Beckemeyer is a retired engineer who conducts research on Paleozoic insect fossils and writes scientific papers and poetry. His first poetry book, "Music I Once Could Dance To," was published in 2014 by Coal City Revew and Press, Lawrence, Kansas (http://coalcitypress.com/from-coal-city-press/music-i-could-once-dance-to/).

Appreciating Poetry

April is National Poetry month. I'm pleased that an entire month to celebrate this medium is given rather than the one day that many others receive. Why?

There are so many facets to the topic between reading it, writing it, sharing it or attempting to have it published. Add the fact that there are many who say they can't stand poetry, that teachers made them hate it by requiring memorization or some other flimsy reason. Perhaps it is just that many of those people were not ready to appreciate poetry and never attempted to try reading or writing it on their own later in life. They have probably missed a lot. 

We were first exposed to poetry when our parents recited nursery rhymes to us when we were small children. Children like the sing-song rhythm Mother Goose gave us. My son loved Little Boy Blue so I often recited it while bathing him. One night, when he was about 3 1/2, I realized that he was really listening to the words and the story within it. That night it went something like this:

Little boy blue, come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow, the cow is in the corn,

Where is the little boy that tends the sheep?

He's under the haystack, fast asleep.

Shall I wake him? No, not I

For if I do, he's sure to cry. 

When I got to the question Shall I wake him? my son, with eyes dancing with mischief, hollered Yes! Before I could manage to think of a good reply, I just had to laugh. But it was obvious he knew the story of the poem.

I never thought much about poetry in my school years. It seemed part of our classwork and I can't say I either loved or hated it. It took me many more years to develop a true love and admiration for poetry and those who write it. It wasn't a revelation on one day. The appreciation of this form of writing grew slowly. I found poets whose work I especially admired and then I attempted to write a poem on my own. 

I started with free verse because it seemed the easiest, no rhyming, no particular rhythm, no meter pattern to follow. I still write mostly free verse but have done some rhyming poems, as well, and even a narrative poem that was published in Boys' Quest magazine. I tried haiku after listening to a fine poet at a writer's conference. Recently, I have worked on a prose poem. Are my poems great? Not by some standards. They did allow me to express what I felt in fewer words than a 1500 word personal essay might. 

Two of my poems have placed in a contest, two more have been published. The rest sit in files where I work on revisions now and then. That old revise and edit thing works the very same way in poetry as it does in fiction or creative nonfiction or article writing. We can always make something we've written a little bit better. 

I've had the pleasure of getting to know some of the poets in my state author's group. As a result, I've increased the amount  of poetry that I read. I've purchased the books they've put out with collections of their poems and I've read them all more than once. There's pleasure in reading poems many times for a reader might see something new or from a different perspective on multiple readings. 

Give poetry a chance. Don't attempt to drown yourself with it all at once. Try a little here and a bit there. Learn what type you like and search out more of the same kind. I will admit that there are some poets who write words that have meaning for themselves alone. Anyone else reading it might not have a clue what was meant. That's alright. Move on to something that you can understand and enjoy. 

So, this month, check our some poetry websites. Browse the shelves of the poetry section at your local library. Pull out those poetry books on your own bookshelves that have been there a long time and read them again. You might even try to write a poem yourself. Aww, go ahead and try it.

Here's the poem for kids that was published in Boys' Quest back in 2004.

Chinatown Cat

                                          Ling Po had a ginger-colored cat,

                                          not a very pretty one at that.

                                          Near a window he oft slept by day.

                                          Nights he went out and far away.

                                          Where in Chinatown did he go?

                                           Ling Po really wanted to know.

                                           Night after night Cat went

                                           As if on a mission he’d been sent.

                                          One warm and moonlit night,

                                           Ling Po followed on Cat’s right.

                                           Cat slid by cans for trash,

                                           then Ling Po padded softly past.

                                           He stayed a bit behind,

                                           while Cat continued down the line.

                                           Cat didn’t even seem to slow

                                            when sirens began to blow.

                                            On through dark and eerie streets,

                                            Master and pet moved on silent feet.

                                            Farther and farther, past store upon store.

                                            Ling Po could not take much more!

                                            Now, beyond temple and pagoda.

                                            This Chinatown boy needed a soda.

                                            Then, Cat stopped, looked all around

                                            and crouched down close to the ground.

                                            He lay there, green eyes peering

                                            at an ancient man now nearing.

                                            “There you are, my friend,” he fretted

                                            “Come close to be petted.

                                             Ling Po waited behind a car.

                                             Was this the reason they’d come so far?

                                              The Old One bent, pigtail swinging,

                                              from Cat’s throat, a purr like singing.

                                              Now Cat belonged to the pair,

                                              for Ling Po knew he would share.

                                              This cat who loved both young and old

                                              was surely worth his weight in gold.

                                              With patience, Ling Po watched the two,

                                               no more than that could he do

                                               until Cat turned to take his leave

                                               and Ling Po followed him home with relief.

                                                                                             --Nancy Julien Kopp

            

    

                                       

April Celebrations

Yes, this is a poem

Hard to believe that what you see above is a poem. Read the book titles from top to bottom, considering each title a line of a free verse poem. I saw this on facebook and was intrigued enough to delve a little deeper.

Not only is this National Poetry Month but we also celebrate National Library Week this month. Susan Gaylord wrote about this unusal form for a poem on her blog.  She seemed as intrigued as I am about it. She also writes about a contest 

If you are interested in trying to create a book spine poem yourself, read how to do it and how to enter a contest here. Caroline Kennedy is the Honorary Chairperson of National Library Week. You may  remember that I wrote a post earlier this month about her latest book Poems To Learn By Heart. Even if you opt not to enter the contest, it might be fun to do this with books at your library or from your own bookshelf at home. Teachers could create a project that is fun, creative and thoughtful with their classes.

For those who love reading, poetry and prose, April gives us cause to pause and celebrate both poetry and our amazing libraries. If it's been awhile since you've visited your public library, put it on your list of things to do soon. 

The Manhattan Public Library that I use on a regular basis