Category: Creativity

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November Tricube

Sometimes when I tap my pencil or my fingers, I feel the rhythm of a poem I hadn’t planned on writing. It’s like hearing music and wanting to dance, only there’s no music and I don’t want to dance. I think this might be like the call of the spirit wolf to the cub who spent hours on end reading poetry with a flashlight as a child and has now grown up – – and something rhythmic this way comes on a howling wind outside. Or something Iike that.

One of the poets in one of my writing groups – I believe it was Denise Krebs – introduced us to the tricube form a few years ago. It’s three stanzas, each with three lines,

each with three syllables. The rhyme pattern is a,b,c,a,b,c,a,b,c, and the meter is trochee with stressed/unstressed/stressed. These are just fun to write, especially using seasonal words. Try one today!

November Tricube

turkey stew
pumpkin spice
gravy boat

fireplace flue
windshield ice
hooded coat

vibrant view
saffron rice
.....did you vote??....

A Challenge for the week:

Fellow blogger Anita Ferrari inspires a new poem today. One I have not yet written. She writes of the six seven syndrome going around. You can read her post here. This week, I’m going to try several variations of six seven poems – – poems with six syllables on one line, seven on the next. Poems with six words, then seven, and even six stanzas and then seven. I’ll post them this week and then one again next Tuesday. Anyone up for the challenge?

Let’s write six seven poems this week! Who’ll join me??

Thanks to Two Writing Teachers at Slice of Life
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November Gift Basket

One type of poem I’ve been writing this year is a gift basket poem – – what would I give a recipient in any given month of the year? For November, the choice is clear: it’ll be filled with brown things. 

If I were giving
you a gift basket
I’d go basketweave brown!


you’d receive
a caramel cake, fresh-baked and glazed
to gratify all visiting gobblers


a leather-bound gratitude journal
to gather your blessings this holiday season


and a warm wooden photo frame
to season your photos like a perfectly browned turkey ~
a cornucopia of nourishment sure 
to fill your appetite!

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November 7 – Country Evening

Country Evening

rural countryside

full moon rising, stars falling

Great Horned Owls conspire

Now that the trees have been harvested, we can see shooting stars from our front porch!

We have a pair of Great Horned Owls who like to chatter late into the night.
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November 5

On the first Monday evening of each month at 7 p.m., I meet with a small group of Stafford Challenge poets via Zoom. We’re also members of EthicalEla, and we’ve presented together at NCTE. Periodically, we’ll text each other a poem or prompt. Our evening meetings include time for writing and sharing.

Our group consists of Glenda of Idaho, Denise of California, Barb of Iowa, and me. We weren’t sure whether or not Denise was going to make it this week, but she texted us a prompt in case we wanted to try the writing prior to the meeting and have something to share.

This was her prompt:

Screenshot

Steering clear of adverbs was challenging (I think of Stephen King’s words: the road to hell is paved in adverbs). Writing without them is not easy. I noticed the need for doubling down on adjectives to meet the sensory part of the prompt and also accepting that this would be a major run-on sentence. Here is the poem I shared with my small group on Monday night:

we’re listening to Christmas music, joy

filling our hearts and souls ~ chicken pot pie

piping hot and broiler-top crisped and browned

our three schnozzles snoozing by the fireplace

Sam’s Club Members Mark Old Vine Zinfandel

spilling from a ruby red wine chalice

catching each sparkle of shimmering light

Vermont Flannel blankets warming our toes

in forest green and rich brown earth-tone plaid

on this crisp night here in rural Georgia


I’m so thankful for my writing friends who always inspire me to try new forms and challenges. And Denise showed up – – after a long day of travel, in a Chipotle, still not yet having arrived at her destination for the evening. The four of us each shared a poem and caught up on life, and for that time of fellowship, I am grateful.

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November Noel No-Nonsense Nonet

I used to laugh at those memes where families come home from trick-or-treating and put up the Christmas tree. I used to remind myself to give the turkey its day in the spotlight. I’ll admit it: I used to judge those folks, those ridiculous early decorators.

No, no, no, no, no! Not anymore.

The older I get, the more I realize I need to pace myself in decorating. It takes moving a chair to make a space for a tree, unboxing the Nativity set, and spinning a fresh bow for the year-round wreath on the east-facing front door (I love the way it frames the early morning sunrise through the door glass from my living room chair). If my husband and I are going to do all this decorating in our sixties, we need time to recover and to enjoy it before it’s time to take it all down again.

I’m firmly in the camp that if I’m putting it up, I want six to eight weeks to enjoy it. Anything less is too taxing on this body.

There have been years we didn’t decorate at all – – those years we went places and knew no one would be here to celebrate since we’d be in others’ homes in other states. But as grandchildren visit and we gather with friends and other family who often come on different weekends between now and the first of the year, we’ve come to understand those silly home-from-Halloween-now-let’s-put-up-the-tree memes.

Even though we decorate simply and minimally in the quiet shades of nature when we do, we realize it’s all about creating a Christmas ambiance that welcomes visitors who drop in anytime during the holidays. A simple burlap and twig tree, a box shrub wreath, a Nativity set and we’ll be ready to welcome the season. Come see us!

November Noel No-Nonsense Nonet

the older we get, the more we see

we need to decorate early

to recover from the work

(pacing is not enough)

dare I admit that

our Christmas tree

is going

up this

week????

Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers for providing teachers a space to write and share

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November 3

After a long weekend working in the yard taking advantage of the gorgeous middle Georgia weather, the best remedy for the sore muscles was a Sunday evening glass of wine in my favorite glass. It’s a ruby chalice that belonged to my parents, and I found it as we were cleaning out the house on the heels of Dad’s death back in June. Red was my mother’s favorite color, and so I brought this cup home with me for those wine nights when I need to unwind and relax. I like that there’s not another one quite like it that I’ve seen anywhere – – and that I can remember Mom as I kick back and take it easy at the end of a productive weekend.

Peaceful, Easy Feeling

I have half-filled my ruby chalice

with Sam’s Club Old Vine Zinfandel

the best affordable wine

here in front of the fire

Eagles music plays

my sore muscles

feeling peace

with each

sip

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October Candy Sweetsaholic Shadorma

October, the perennial month of Candy, is the kiss of death for a sweetsaholic like me. Things can spiral out of control in a skinny minute in a month like this, and the closer it gets to a day like today, Halloween, the stash set aside for any trick or treaters has dwindled considerably. Today seems a great day for a Shadorma – a poem with six lines in syllables of 3,5,3,3,7,5.

Sweetsaholic Shadorma

confession:

sweets are my struggle

today I

ate three rolls

of Smarties (the giant kind)

and have no regrets

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October 28 – X Marks the Spot Poems

X Marks the Spot Poem

I worked with two Humanities teachers last week on writing poetry from prose, using a blog post I’d written last week. I remembered that Mo Daley, a friend from one of my writing groups, shared this technique after attending a conference where she learned more about how to engage students with writing.

To pull poetry from prose, students took their own stream of consciousness writing from the previous week and marked an X on it. They listed the words under the X marks and used those words to create a poem.  To write X Marks the Spot poems, you can add other words and you don’t have to use them all – the idea is to create a word bank from the words you X.  You can use any form of poetry for this – this is merely an idea technique.             

  My words:

                  abide      daily        we            Jesus      car           granddaughter     unison    play         they         Silas        of           patient   tempted                  packaged               gathered                 can          to              died         children                                                       how         did           story       because                  for            when       boxes                        the           Tennessee              toys         kitchen  remind   and          of              daughter                 challenging           game      was          since                  Jesus      and          together

       Belonging

we gathered in the kitchen

with the children

laughed in unison

at the stories

as we ate together

at a table that seated

everyone – past, present, and future

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October 27 – Golden Shovel Poems

I worked with two Humanities teachers in our school district to acquaint students in our 9th Grade Academy with way that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used to mark the geography of a place from our writing. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.

Golden Shovel Poems

A Golden Shovel poem takes a sentence or phrase from prose (or another poem) and writes it vertically, placing those words at the beginning or end of each line.  Ask me about double, triple, quadruple and quintuple shovels…..

Singing Off-Key

We spent the week together having fun and

Can’t wait to 

Leave on our next family trip, singing

Jesus, Take the Wheel with Carrie

In off-key high notes through the back roads of

Tennessee, Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain

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October 26 – Found Poetry

I worked with two Humanities teachers in my school district to design a writing workshop for students in our 9th Grade Academy with ways that they can create poetry from prose. Here is one form of writing we used in two variations: found poetry and blackout poetry. I was using my blog post from Tuesday to model how to let prose inspire poetry.

Found Poetry

Found poetry is poetry that is found in the words of existing poems or prose and created as a new original work.  Some poets use pages of discarded books or those from Little Free Libraries as a supply of pages. Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry.  In found poetry, you use any existing writing and swipe those words to go in your own poem.  In blackout poetry, you draw black lines through the words you did not select for your poem.  

A Silly Selfie

I thought it

   was a

          silly 

                selfie

                            this gift ~ 

                                                     one of the grandchildren 

            posing

                          playing

                                            the look on his face

                                                                      priceless

Here is what my blackout poem looked like in print form: