Anywhere we choose to look

Poetry is hiding. In train announcements, tabloid pages and grocery labels.

I have a new joy: The Found Poetry Project, a blog dedicated to celebrating the unintended beauty of ordinary prose.

“Anyone can write poetry and poetry is everywhere,” explains Timothy Green, who, with Megan O’Reilly Green, created the The Found Poetry Project blog in 2005. “Poetry is nothing more than finding enjoyment in the medium that we spend most of our waking hours living within. It happens by accident all the time.”

For example, with a few line breaks, a travel guide offers unexpected beauty:


From La Ventosa

roads lead
east and west.

Each soon splits

with a leg
heading inland

and a leg
following the coast.

One branch
following the coast

the other

climbing

to Oaxaca.

— Written by Mike Church and Terri Church
Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping, p. 318
Rolling Homes Press, 2005

— Found by Sandra Leigh
Nanaimo, B.C., Canada

Rather than willing words into place, the Project seeks unintentional poetry, whether it’s in a newspaper article, a blog, a letter to a friend, bathroom graffiti — anywhere you don’t expect to find it. The rules are simple: no editing other than lineation, punctuation, or omission. Titles are optional.

“Poetry,” notes Green, “appears anywhere we choose to look.”

Of heart and hurt

When writer Holly Hughes started talking about her mother’s Alzheimer’s — what she calls “a slow process of subtraction” — she quickly realized she was not alone. At readings of her poems, a crowd would gather afterward “to tell the story of their mother, father, husband, sister, wife, sister, brother.”


Alzheimer’s is estimated to affect one in two persons over the age of 80 and is being diagnosed in people as young as 50.

Seeking comfort in the solace of words, Hughes put out a call for poems and short prose about Alzheimer’s. Over 500 people responded — doctors, nurses, social workers, hospice workers, daughters, sons, wives, and husbands whose lives have been touched by the disease. From this, she chose work from 100 writers to create Beyond Forgetting: Poetry & Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, a moving account of a dreadful disease.

Oregon-based writers Kake Huck, Drew Myron and Mark Thalman will share their work as part of Off the Page, a reading event on Saturday, April 25 at 7pm at the Green Salmon Coffeehouse in Yachats, Oregon. The event is free.

“In our culture, we often talk about dementia only in the abstract, as a label, not in all its bittersweet concreteness,” notes Hughes, who teaches at Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, Washington.

Through the transformative power of poetry, the book seeks to move "beyond forgetting," beyond the stereotypical portrayal of Alzheimer's disease to honor and affirm the dignity of those afflicted. With a moving foreword by poet Tess Gallagher, the anthology forms a richly textured, literary portrait encompassing the full range of the experience of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s.

“For the many people now trying to cope with a loved one suffering from this tragic disease,” says Hughes “I hope this collection will provide solace."

Beyond Forgetting is published by Kent State University Press, and is available at www.beyondforgettingbook.com.

Writing with crayons

Blackout poems. Altered books. Found poems. I love them all.

Lately, inspired by Karen Hatzigeorgiou, Austin Kleon and other word-artists, I've been scratching away words to find new thoughts within established text.

Last month, I led the Writing Club (a group of eager and willing middle schoolers at the Waldport Community Learning Center) in 'finding' poems within old book pages. We used crayons to find fresh words and phrases, and created poems along the way.

I know, I know, it doesn't seem right to defile a hallowed text but this book was headed for the bin. In a way, we saved it from its dumpster doom. There's something a bit naughty, and therefore alluring, in doing what you've been told is wrong. And that feeling provides us permission to break rules and make art.


Something of myself

stands well
without malice

I fail, trip over detail
Roving might be useful

From my hands, I found fever
There was not a cloud

I understood it was the old matter
wasted, mourned

Immense, intimate details
demanded drama

— Drew Myron
an altered book/ blackout poem in crayon

Treat a poem like dirt

In preparation for Poem in Your Pocket Day — my favorite unofficial holiday — I've been collecting favorite poems, new poems, teachable, sharable, delicious and daring poems.

Poem in Your Pocket Day is simple and fun: During National Poetry Month (happening right now!), select a poem you love, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on Thursday, April 30, 2009.

I found this one yesterday, and it seems the perfect start.


How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual

Pamela Spiro Wagner

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.

Congratulations.
You can now read poetry.

Thick black pen


I need a bigger marker.

I wasn’t fully prepared for International Newspaper Blackout Poetry Month (initiated and declared by leading word-scratcher Austin Kleon) but I’m diving in still. As part of National Poetry Month, Kleon is urging us to get our hands dirty and our pens busy.

In my first celebratory attempt, I got a bit zealous in my scratching. My lopped off letters and scattered words require some translation:

Shape the place

You are tethered
get away
laugh
shape the place
where crying arrived

Upset the dream
Days away, check the door
read, share, relate
know what it means
to have hope

A month of riches

As if it's not enough for daffodils to rise, leggy and proud, and sun to shine, full but coy. Now, April brings two more reasons for glee: National Poetry Month and International Newspaper Blackout Poetry Month.

The official Poetry Month poster, at left, lifts a line from T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:


. . . And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse . . .

It's an embarrassment of riches, really, to pack International Newspaper Blackout Poetry into this very same, shortish month. But word-artist Austin Kleon perseveres. He's finding poetry in every column inch, producing a poem each day, and inviting us to join in the fun. His kick-off poem, at right, deftly captures the spirit of the form (for a larger look, click on image).

Off the page

Clear the calendar. Save the date.
The 3rd annual Off the Page event nears!

Enjoy an evening celebration of free expression, free music, and free admission as eight Oregon writers -- and a singer/musician -- share their works of poetry, fiction, memoir, and more.

On Saturday, April 25 at 7pm

At the Green Salmon Coffeehouse, situated in the center of the oceanfront village of Yachats, Oregon.

Featuring writers Khlo Brateng, Sheila Evans, Flip Garrison, Kake Huck, Kate Maloy, Drew Myron, Rick Schultze, Mark Thalman and musician Richard Sharpless.

Doors open and music starts at 6:30pm. Reading at 7pm.

All ages, attitude & experience welcome.

More tanka, please


Good news. The tanka poems keep coming!

This poem was penned by Auburn McCanta, an Arizona writer and reluctant, though award-winning, poet.


Soon this summer

A humming desert
Lifts its skirt of sand to kneel
Its prayers scorch the eye
Rabbits run from grazing hawks
Scorpions waltz in the moon

Morning comes early
Midday wears its beggar’s coat
A dirt rag of sky
Summer’s so close I can feel
It’s breath going up my shirt

My skin is a heat
Air thermals rise in the throat
Orange blossoms dangle
Hope, yet midnight I’m shaking
Scorpions out from my shoe

- Auburn McCanta

Tanka time

Last week I extolled the pleasures of tanka, the 5 line Japanese lyric poem. Tanka Online provides a great overview. I encouraged others to tanka, and share their work here.

I'm pleased to post a poem by Marjorie Power, of Corvallis, Oregon. She offers a tanka mosaic, a series of tankas linked together in mood, tone and story. She strays from the traditional count of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, and maintains instead 31 syllables per stanza. This poem is soon to be published in the The Hawaii Pacific Review.

Spring Dusk, Yachats

Salal blooms –
pale pink droplets, red stems.
Its leaves go gray with fungus.
My cousin, too, is uniquely
beautiful and unhappy.

If you love someone
who has everything
but still sounds hollow,
after sunset listen only to the ocean.
Gather shadows.

Try a narrow path
used by rabbits and deer.
Disappear among shore pines
and Sitka spruce. Be your absence.
Be present to that.

Return to the beach
where the ocean grows dark
and the tide delivers your name.
Where the hollow might stroll
and the new moon rises.

Along the rocky trail,
a blast of fragrance
offered by wild roses
while their cultivated sisters
hunker down, play it safe.

— Marjorie Power

Coincidentally, I am writing spring, too. I stray a bit from the traditional line count (and take comfort in first knowing the rules, and then breaking them). I like the idea of linked tankas, the way in which they stand strong as one stanza, and gather even more strength as a group. I'm not sure, with these, if they are better individually or linked. It wasn't until the end of the week — after I had written on, about and through gloomy weather — that I realized a theme.

Pulling Spring

Beauty surrounds
I press against wind and cold
fight against ocean
no longer see abundance
just this lashing fatigue

This static grey day
wears away the art in me
all color scrubbed
faith fades, milky and weak
is this winter’s gloom, or mine?

The sky stays in place
everyday, like a job, shows
up, pays attention
seeks no answers beyond the
ether of the everyday

— Drew Myron

Burst, blue, blooms

Crocus burst from damp earth
moody sky their only demand
how little it takes
framed by light and hope
to close winter’s heavy door

Sky turns from slate to shine
I want to wear this weather
Spring, I say, show me
a bit of blue, a dash of warm
She opens a closet of blooms

— Drew Myron

Revision joy

The Thursday night sessions with the Young Writers have taken a new hue. Preparing to publish our annual book, we have moved from free-write to tight-write and it’s been a bumpy transition.

Rework and revise don't invite joy. Work sounds like, well, work. And so we resist. We don’t want to work. We want to sing with words, to feel and release and breathe with relief. We don’t want to wrangle and second-guess.

To the teens, I say: Editing is part of the art and process of good writing. You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly run a race. You practice and train. You slog through the rain and cold and move your body against sleep and sleet until your breath is easy, your legs long and lean.

They hear: Writing is work.

I don’t know how to create an appetite for editing. I look to other writers for back-up:

Wally Lamb, bestselling author, says:
Learn to love revision. Listen to suggestions about what you might add, cut, reposition, and clarify in your work-in-process. Welcome such feedback with gratitude and humility, returning to your words with sharper insight. Make mistakes, lots of them, revising draft after draft of your continuing story.

Kim Addonizio, poet, says:
If you don’t think your work needs revision, here’s a tip: Don’t try to be a poet. You will never — I mean never — be any good.

For a bit, we are buoyed by encouraging words. Our initial disdain turns to inadequacy: Where to start? What to delete? What to keep? We need direction, guides, rules.

There’s no lack of writing guides, but where are the can-do books on the art of revision? I’m not talking Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Grammar guides are abundant. I’m looking for an encouraging, practical, you-can-do-it guide to take us from raw goods to polished gems.

It's a slippery thing, writing, editing, art. It's not paint-by-numbers, I know. The joy of creation is in finding your way. But surely there are rules we can follow and then, with knowledge, break.

What's your process? How do you begin, and end? For you, is it all instinct and choice, or are there defined rules and routes?

Tanka anyone?

long winter night . . .
my mind wanders back
to a northern stream
that once answered
my every question

— Jeanne Emrich

The tanka has me rapt.

For days now, my every experience searches for a short form verse that will compress, nuance and make it mean more.

Do you tanka? Cousin to the haiku, tanka is a 5 line lyric poem with Japanese roots. Like haiku, a tanka poem offers concrete images, understatement and control. A tanka has a specific form but — here’s the good part — the rules are a bit elastic.

Traditional tanka requires a 31 syllable count with lines of 5-7-5-7-7. But the modern American tanka allows for fudging.

Tanka Online tells it best: The contemporary tanka in English may be described as typically an untitled free-verse short poem having anywhere from about twelve to thirty-one syllables arranged in words and phrases over five lines, crafted to stand alone as a unitary, aesthetic whole—a complete poem. Excepting those written in a minimalist style, a tanka is about two breaths in length when read aloud.

“The tanka aesthetic is broad and all-encompassing,” encourages poet/instructor Jeanne Emrich.

With an anyone-can-do-it spirit, the site offers a Quick Start Guide to Writing Tanka. It’s a manual, an art form, a get-up-and-go guide!

I like the attitude. And then I found Jack Cantey. He’s writing a rush of tankas, posting five to six poems on his blog each week.

That Erodes

I’m done with it all,
he says, drunk on wine and paint.
Winter is a force
that erodes like wind and waves.
It eats us in creeping bites.

— Jack Cantey

Inspired by Jeanne and Jack, I thought I was ready to tanka. I wrote and counted. Rewrote, recounted. Turns out the seemingly simple short form is deceptively — and wonderfully — complicated. I like the challenge.

How about you? Have you tried a tanka? Send me your work. I’ll post them here, and we’ll toast to tanka — the new, old, short form poem.

Instructions

Proving that simple is good, these easy-to-use instructions are courtesy of Anthony Burrill, a designer and illustrator working in print, moving image, interactive and web-based projects. The aphorism above was created for Wallpaper magazine. See more of Burrill's work here.

Is this a message?

Poems find me. They work their way across a page, my screen, sneak into my home and settle in, waiting for me to pay attention.

Today, Starfish by Eleanor Lerman, jumped out. I wish I had written it. Good work stirs in me the lovely ache of appreciation and envy. Do you feel this, too? The last line in the first stanza is so just right: is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Starfish

Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

From Our Post Soviet History Unfolds by Eleanor Lerman,
published by Sarabande Books.

Sit still or soar

Fred — my friend and colleague at Seashore Family Literacy — and I enjoy a friendly dispute. I say poetry comes alive when read aloud. I want to hear the words soar across the room, dip in the corners, and circle back in a way that sweeps me up and leaves me a bit dizzy and sated.

Fred likes to absorb the poem as it behaves on the page, where he can digest each word and its place on the blank canvas of paper. I see his point.

But I’m greedy, I want it all.

Now, with Linebreak, we can both be happy. Linebreak is an online journal publishing one poem a week, complete with audio versions so visitors can both read the words and savor the sound.

The site combines a clever name with quality work and a clean design. For those who want to sit still, and for those who want to soar with sound, Linebreak fills a need and greed.

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.