Country Evening
rural countryside
full moon rising, stars falling
Great Horned Owls conspire
November 7 – Country Evening
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:
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.
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????
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
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
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.            Â
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
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
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:
October 25: Zip Odes
I created a writing workshop with two of our Humanities teachers 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. Today’s poem is a Zip Ode.
Zip Ode Poetry
A Zip Ode takes a Zip Code of a place, written vertically, and uses that many words on each line.
Example: Sevierville, Tennessee’s Zip Code is 37764
Zip Ode to Sevierville, Tennessee
3 Jesus came along
7 with us on our family vacation in
7 October, keeping children and adults in check
6 Hiding Him, Finding Him, Remembering Him
4 in thoughts and actions
October 24 – Writing with Students
New Poetry Forms Nonet
today I get to write with students
showing them new poetry forms
#hashtag acrostics await
poems taken from prose
hidden in the lines
existing text
there for the
prompt of
words
When the high school teacher called asking if I would be willing to come write poetry alongside students, I jumped at the offer. As a District Literacy Specialist mostly wrapped up in the operational world of data and school improvement, I miss the opportunities of the classroom. That’s where we make the biggest difference.
She read to me the AP Standard on taking poetry from prose and wanted to feature blackout poetry. As we chatted, I shared with her my blog post that day and gave her a copy of 90 Ways of Community, a book on poetry written by one of my writing groups. Together, we considered the various poetry forms that we could use if we modeled the process ~ blackout and found poetry were already on the list, but we added Haiku, X Marks the Spot, Acrostic, Golden Shovel, and Zip Odes as a geographic timestamp bonus of sorts. The students have already created their own personal writing, and we’ll show them how I used a blog post to extract poetry and urge them to do the same.
We’ll model the process.
We’ll feature an overview of possibilities – – a menu of choices – – and then watch their creativity flow onto their paper like they’re mining for gems that they pull out to polish and sparkle.
I’ll remind them that poetry is a process – – not a product. In fact, I’ll probably open the class with something like, “poets and artists have a mindset of creating a lot of bad poems and a lot of bad art.” They’ll wonder who the crazy lady is, but I’ll explain what I mean: perfection is not the goal. Writing is the goal. Thinking is the goal. Not every race is a marathon, not every photo wins awards, and not every book gets 5 stars – – it’s finding the pieces of what we do well and building on those parts so that the process becomes somewhat of a habit. I’ll explain to them that I think in metaphors and syllables, and I take a lot of random pictures to come back to little things I see that will work their way into poems.
Take this, for example:
These kids are a big part of my life. Here stand five of my seven grandchildren in the very spot at the top of a mountain in Sevierville where their parents were married in May 2012. Their other grandparents own that land, and at the bottom, there is a fishing pond. Let’s take a deeper look.
I see two boys (yes, they’re boys – they just have lots of hair) exploring the trail that leads to the pond, tacklebox in hand, ready to to cast a line and spend time fishing. I’ll explain to them that already, my thoughts are swirling in metaphors of adventure, seeking, a quest, a tackle box of what it takes to find, a hook for the found thing to be caught, and the patience and grit to stick with it – and the treks through the mud and the weeds to get there.
Because fishing isn’t about the fish. You can go to the grocery store and get fish. You can order fish from a restaurant – or better yet, you can Door Dash fish.
No, fishing is no more about the fish than poetry and art are about perfection. It’s about the adventure and the process, and the wait for just the right inspiration.
It’s about engaging in what it takes to do a thing, whether writing a poem or creating art or catching fish. It’s having the stick-to-it-ness to stand still and be quiet for two hours of a morning and be determined when you’d almost always otherwise be doing something else, but you learn to love a thing and know that there is something, something, something that will bite and that you’ll reel it in and be proud of it, whether it’s big or small.
You’ve caught something you’re proud of, and you can’t wait to share it with the world. So you pose for the photo, holding a fish mouth open the way you’ve been taught, holding the fish a little closer to the camera to make it look bigger than it actually is, and you see the great things about your fish.
And then you release it back into the world, knowing that next time you come back, you may catch that same one again – – or something different, like that turtle your sister caught.
Either way, the one thing you cannot buy, like that Door Dashed fish, is the mud on your own shoes from the lived experience.
And that is what poetry is – life, experience, thinking, waiting, casting a line and seeing what comes up on the end of the hook.
So while I may say I’m going to school today, what I’m really doing is going fishing
And I can’t wait to see what all we catch!
Common Threads 