In season

This week, on the wet, west coast I spotted the first crocus bursting from the earth. The next day, I found this spring-ready poem at Four and Twenty, a downloadable short form poetry journal.

Untitled

Brendan McBreen

plant everything
that hurts
the earth
will forgive you

Once daily

I like Amie Hollmann’s work (at right). As an artist and writer, she shows style. But even more, she’s got commitment.

Her Verse Project is a daily creation of art. She’s made a one-year commitment to create a daily expression of faith on a postcard-size canvas.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about commitment and marveling at the various demonstrations of creative dedication.

The prolific poet William Stafford is famed for awakening at 4am each day to pen a poem. In his 79 years, he wrote 67 volumes of poetry.

Earlier this month, as I was berating my own writing practice (as in, Why don’t you write a poem a day? What’s wrong with you?) I received a Valentine note in the (real, old-fashioned) mail. It was from Carrie, a client-turned-friend, who wrote that her New Year’s resolution was to write a message by hand daily. I was that day's recipient. I love this idea.

Much like Amie’s Verse Project, Carrie’s daily commitment provides pleasure for both the creator and the audience. Perhaps this is the secret: When we create for ourselves, we make others happy, too.

Judyth Hill offers a simple and profound perspective on creative commitment. In the poem Take It from the Top (from her book Black Hollyhock, First Light) she writes:

Writing a poem a day is difficult.
But if the world can start from scratch daily,
how hard is it to notice?

And the crowd cheered 'Yes!'

“The best medicine is not Prozac. It’s applause and accomplishment.”

— Regie Cabico, a three-time National Poetry Slam finalist who teaches workshops at the Bellevue Inpatient Adolescent Unit in New York City. Cabico has been featured on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and his work appears in over 30 anthologies.

Capricious creativity

Feeling daunted by the creative process? Don't fear, says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Creativity isn't in you, but on loan to you.

Gilbert has thought long and hard about creative genius. Here, she gives a funny and lifting talk about the "maddening capriousness of the creative process."

Filmed at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in February, the annual conference brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives — in just 18 minutes.

A gallery, a puppet, and more

How will Forecast inspire you? We asked the question but I’m not sure we were fully prepared for the response. Forecast, the word-art pairing that began as a collaboration of my poems with Tracy Weil’s paintings, has stirred unexpected elaborations.

Created first as an art exhibition, Forecast showed last fall to enthusiastic crowds at Weilworks Gallery in Denver.

Then it was an exhibition book, in vivid four-color, hardcover glory.

Then it was an online gallery, offering links to the book, poems and poster prints.

Then it was a Fan Club, drawing Facebook applause.

With Forecast, Tracy and I aimed to blend the creative arts to reach an audience of people who wouldn’t normally appreciate or gravitate toward art or poetry. Again and again, we asked: How will Forecast inspire you?

And the answer is: Forecast has now gone nutty, with an endearing puppet providing a dose of literary levity.

What’s next? An Ice Capades interpretation? A showing at the Disney World art gallery (and is there such a place?). Forecast is now hitting the road, looking to drop in for a chat, a film, a showing near you. Have you room? time? desire?

Snort, sigh, read & thrive

We’re renegades, I recently told a friend, making art that blurs defined lines.

We combine visual art with word art. We seek to give art air, offering paintings and poems to people and places in unexpected ways. Such a blending is not an especially unusual idea but still I sometimes feel out of step with writers and artists taking more traditional routes.

We’re traveling a pebbled path, I tell my friend, but we’re not alone on the trail.

Elizabeth Bradfield, editor and founder of Broadsided Press, is right here with us. Broadsided is “busting poems out of their perfect-bound covers, to free art from frames, to bring literature and art to the streets.”

Every month, BroadsidedPress.org publishes a new literary/visual collaboration available as a single-sheet PDF to print, enjoy and share — for free.

"Vectors" then print the sheets, called broadsides, and post them in public places, such as cafes, hallways, and bathroom stalls.

“Before paperbacks and pocket books, before blogs, there were broadsides,” explains Bradfield, a writer and designer. “Let's put words out there for people to snort at, sigh over, argue with, and read.”

Vectors are situated across the globe. I’m a vector! And you can be a vector, too. In fact, a few states are woefully vector-less. Alabama, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wyoming need volunteers to spread the joy of words and art combined.

Consider this a call to action, to artists, to writers, to creatives of all sorts: Take to the streets. Share art and thrive!

Speech is a mouth

When poetry is everywhere, the motions of life lift from everyday to elevated. All life is art. All art is life.

With its inspired series of animated poems, the Poetry Foundation has freed words from books and let them fly loose to lift and stir.

Try one here: The Language by Robert Creeley.

Go to the Poetry Foundation for more of the Poetry Everywhere collection.

More reasons to write

Need a creative jog? a jag? a kick in the pants? Writing classes call. Don’t leave home. Write here. Write now. With these easy, affordable online courses, there are no excuses, just more reasons to write.

Southeast Review's
30-Day Writer’s Regimen
The Southeast Review Writing Regimen is for poets, essayists, and fiction writers who want to produce a body of work by establishing structure to their writing life, and, at the same time, find new and innovative ways to approach their craft. Only $15.00.
Go here.

Write Free Month-Long Playshop
A fun, self-paced Write Free Playshop begins in March. The authors of Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life offer a four-week course for only $19.95.
Go here.

Poetry for the People – Scholarship Available
Poetry for the People, an email class led by Sage Cohen, starts March 11. Act fast and you may enjoy the class for free (normally $199.). Scholarship applications are due February 15.
Go here.

Knitted, knotted, mine

“What’s writing really about? It’s trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

— Ted Hughes
from Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry

I am . . .

I love new words. Words that aren’t words at all but when you hear them you think, Yes, of course.

In the student writing groups, we collect words. Our favorite words line the walls to create a playground of possibility.

We write I am poems. This fun and easy form combines images and actions, punctuated with a declaration. In writing these poems we create and define ourselves anew, every line, every time. Youngsters (and adults, too) take to this form quickly. Most of us like to write about ourselves, and I am poems give us permission to play with our words.

Here, a few lines, from a nine-year-old poet:

I am loveful.
I am wind.
I am Mother Nature’s friend.
I am a secret.
I am a hoper.
I am a lover of pie.

When she asked me if loveful was a word, I hesitated. It could be, it should be, it’s such a sweet and, well, loving word. By the time she read I am a hoper, I was cheering along with her. Is it a word? I’m not sure. I don’t care. I want to be a hoper, too!

By chance, By poem

Some days I am asleep and slog through the weight of darkness, expecting and (no surprise!) finding no chance for change. But when I am wide awake, synchronicity is everywhere. I stumble into chance encounters and collide into unexpected joy.

Recently, a friend shared with me a lovely book of poems by Mari L'Esperance, who, it turns out, is a friend of a mutual friend. (We live in a Facebook world in which everyone is connected by the tenuous thread of knowing everything and nothing about those we claim as ‘friends’).

I was touched by the gift. I had just returned from a visit to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and still felt a glowing appreciation for the city’s hard-working history and rugged beauty. As I paged through the book, I landed on this poem — featuring the iconic rivers that run through Pittsburgh’s heart — first.

Synchronicity, it seems to me, made apparent by a poem.

As Told by Three Rivers

Eight a.m, up too late the night before
learning the nose and throat, the bones
of the hands. Rounding a corner
on the seventh floor of Eye & Ear, the view
from the window takes you by surprise:
the city of Pittsburgh fanned out before you,
its verdant wedge of land softened
by the arms of three rivers, their names alone
like music — Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio —
threading their slow eternal way home,
knowing. You think of Naipaul’s book, how
that distant mythic river in that distant
unnamed place reminds you somehow
of these three rivers meeting, the purpose
in their joined ambition as it should be,
how their journey tells the same story,
a story of becoming, of knowing one’s place
in the world. Standing there at the window
you see how everything that’s come before
has brought you here, how it all makes sense,
the three timeless rivers moving forward,
deliberate and without questions, telling the story
of the life you have chosen, of the life
you could not help but choose.

— Mari L'Esperance
from The Darkened Temple
Winner of the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

Pity the apostrophe

The apostrophe is a troublesome little bugger, but to eliminate it entirely?

Birmingham, England's second largest city, is leaving punctuation purists across the globe incredulous with a decision to drop all apostrophes. I like that grammar can cause such a stir, and I really appreciate the snappy writing by reporter Meera Selva:

LONDON – On the streets of Birmingham, the queen's English is now the queens English.

England's second-largest city has decided to drop apostrophes from all its street signs, saying they're confusing and old-fashioned.

But some purists are downright possessive about the punctuation mark.

It seems that Birmingham officials have been taking a hammer to grammar for years, quietly dropping apostrophes from street signs since the 1950s. Through the decades, residents have frequently launched spirited campaigns to restore the missing punctuation to signs denoting such places as "St. Pauls Square" or "Acocks Green."

This week, the council made it official, saying it was banning the punctuation mark from signs in a bid to end the dispute once and for all.

Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city's transport scrutiny committee, said he decided to act after yet another interminable debate into whether "Kings Heath," a Birmingham suburb, should be rewritten with an apostrophe.

"I had to make a final decision on this," he said Friday. "We keep debating apostrophes in meetings and we have other things to do."

Mullaney hopes to stop public campaigns to restore the apostrophe that would tell passers-by that "Kings Heath" was once owned by the monarchy.

"Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed," he said. "More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it."

But grammarians say apostrophes enrich the English language.

"They are such sweet-looking things that play a crucial role in the English language," said Marie Clair of the Plain English Society, which campaigns for the use of simple English. "It's always worth taking the effort to understand them, instead of ignoring them."

Mullaney claimed apostrophes confuse GPS units, including those used by emergency services. But Jenny Hodge, a spokeswoman for satellite navigation equipment manufacturer TomTom, said most users of their systems navigate through Britain's sometime confusing streets by entering a postal code rather than a street address.

She said that if someone preferred to use a street name — with or without an apostrophe — punctuation wouldn't be an issue. By the time the first few letters of the street were entered, a list of matching choices would pop up and the user would choose the destination.

A test by The Associated Press backed this up. In a search for London street St. Mary's Road, the name popped up before the apostrophe had to be entered.

There is no national body responsible for regulating place names in Britain. Its main mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, which provides data for emergency services, takes its information from local governments and each one is free to decide how it uses punctuation.

"If councils decide to add or drop an apostrophe to a place name, we just update our data," said Ordnance Survey spokesman Paul Beauchamp. "We've never heard of any confusion arising from their existence."

To sticklers, a missing or misplaced apostrophe can be a major offense.

British grammarians have railed for decades against storekeepers' signs advertising the sale of "apple's and pear's," or pubs offering "chip's and pea's."

In her best-selling book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," Lynne Truss recorded her fury at the title of the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice," insisting it should be "Two Weeks' Notice."

"Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point, and the pun is very much intended," she wrote.