Today, our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 2 of February’s Open Write is Linda Mitchell of Virginia. She inspires us today to make a mash-up poem. You can read her prompt here, along with the poems of others. Here is the basic process she describes:
Read two works, perhaps poems you have loved for a long time. Find lines that speak to each other. Take a line from one poem and mash it up against one from the other. See how many lines complement each other as a new work. Write these lines, or copy and paste these lines, into a new work.
My all-time favorite poet is Mary Oliver, and my favorite poem is The Storm, from her collection Dog Songs. My father gave me a book of poetry entitled Poetry’s Plea for Animals by Frances E. Clarke, and in it there is a poem by T. A. Daly entitled Da Pup Een Da Snow, which may have actually inspired Mary Oliver’s poem The Storm. Oliver’s lines are in bold, and Daly’s are not.
Our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 3 of the 5-day January Open Write is Dave Wooley of Connecticut, who inspires us to write WHY poems in list form, choosing a list of purpose and then explaining it in 10 because reasons. Hop on over and read his prompt and the poems that are born into the world today. I’ve chosen a prose poem to combine with the list poem just because I got rambling a little bit on the bird soapbox……
Why I Watch Birds
Because Eastern Phoebe, see, she’s the forest drunk and she hiccups and calls her own name like she’s forgotten who she is and where she’s supposed to be, and she makes me laugh first and then cry later like that time at the Atlanta Braves game when that lost woman looking for her seat stumbled down to the front of an entire section and yelled up to ask if ANYBODY recognized her
Because Brown-Headed Nuthatch, see, she’s always in the middle of a domestic dispute telling somebody how it’s gonna be, telling her man he ain’t got a lick of sense and he ain’t coming all up in her tree stirring up no trouble, better carry his ass on out there and find another nest to be a deadbeat dad, and she makes me cheer her strength
Because White-Headed Nuthatch, see, she’s the Social Media Gossip, laughing like an evil circus clown at all the crap she stirs up in the woods, revealing her own true self in the mirror, projecting her sins through the rough-bared face of the forest trees, and she helps me see the weakness and insecurity of people who laugh at others like this
Because Great Horned Owl, see, he’s an all-nighter with all this early morning coffee shop talk across the farm, like he’s an old man sharing some great wisdom when all it is, is a ploy because let’s face it — the man sleeps all day and sheds no light on anything pertinent to school, so why they ever put a cap and gown on him baffles me, and he reminds me not to let his kind fool me
Because Wood Thrush, see, he’s a bird that blends into the scenery, yet his song is the most beautiful of all, kind of like those normal-looking people who step behind a microphone and belt out a song that’ll bring you to tears and give you chills and wonder to yourself, where did that come from? And who else am I underestimating?
Because Eastern Wood-Pewee, see, he’s always answering roll call, saying his name like he’s entered the building and the party can start, like a kid with a bad case of Senioritis who is perpetually late and wants to be sure he’s marked present so he’s not caught skipping
Because Northern Cardinal, see, he’s a woman-whistler, cat-calling at every woman who walks by, calling her pretty, pretty, pretty, just like some will do – some with good intentions, some with not-so-good intentions, but still giving me the gumption to tilt my chin up and carry on with the day
Because Ruby-Throated Hummingbird, see, she will ask for her food and thank me for it, then hover directly a foot from my face and look into my eyes like she’s blessing me with good vibes of peace and joy to feel like I can make a thumbprint-size difference, reminding me that all hope springs forth and wells up from a tug the size of a tiny thimble into a cascading waterfall
Anna Roseboro of Michigan is our host at http://www.ethicalela.com for Day 2 of the January Open Write, where educators gather to write poetry and share thoughts. Today’s prompt has us thinking about the motivation of a book character – what drives them to action. I thought of the book I’m reading, An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor, and decided on two limericks today, showing the relationship between the old doctor O’Reilly and young doctor Laverty. (I changed the last line of the first limerick about twelve times…..you can guess the obvious struggle with that last word, but I kept it clean since it’s Sunday – my own motivation and reason).
The Young and The Old
There was a young doctor from Belfast whose countryside practice in green grass was learning the ropes in this village of folks from an old mentor doctor with wise sass
When Laverty finds Doc O’Reilly he bites his tongue, sees raw truths wryly patient respect is a must as country doctors earn trust before they’re regarded so highly
Fran Haley and I are hosting this week’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com as we prepare for April’s discussions on Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind. You can read Fran’s prompt today here or below. Be inspired and come write with us!
Title: Birdspiration
Our Host
Fran Haley is a literacy educator with a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and dogs. She lives in the countryside near Raleigh, North Carolina, where she savors the rustic scenery and timeless spirit of place. She’s a pastor’s wife, mom of two grown sons, and the proud Franna of two granddaughters: Scout, age seven, and Micah, age two. Fran never tires of watching birds and secretly longs to converse with them (what ancient wisdom these creatures possess!). When she’s not working, serving beside her husband, being hands-on Franna, birding, or coddling one utterly spoiled dachshund, she enjoys blogging at Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life.
Inspiration
As previously mentioned in this series of Open Writes: Come April, Kim Johnson and I will be honoring National Poetry Month by facilitating discussion of The Hurting Kind, the most recent book by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón(you can join us via Sarah Donovan’s new Healing Kind book club).
In preparation for this event, I came across a May 2022 interview with Angela María Spring of Electric Lit in which Limón speaks of inspiration for her book and the way humans search for community: “It’s the Earth and it’s the animals and it’s the plants and that is our community.”
What a glorious opening for birds today.
Over several summers past, I facilitated a writing institute for teachers. We spent a portion of one session crafting poems about birds, for, truth is, everyone has a bird story of some kind. Just as we went out for lunch, two doves flew into the building to land on the windowsill of our room. How’s that for symbolism?—and awe.
Process
Listen to or read the brief transcript of Episode 674 of The Slowdown, Limón’s podcast. Here she shares a poem by Hai-Dang Phan entitled “My Ornithology (Orange-crowned Warbler)”. Note Limón’s reflection: In observing birds and their world, we learn something true about ourselves. Experience Phan’s warbler up close and personal through every rich detail in the poem.
Now, consider what you’ve learned from birds in some way. Find a kinship. You don’t have to love or even like birds; you could contemplate the Thanksgiving turkeys sacrificed for your holiday table.You might go on a birdwalk or watch awhile through your window for birdspiration.
Explore birds and their lessons for your life in a short form like haiku, senryu, tanka, or a series of stanzas with the same number of lines. Invent a form! Phan uses three lines over and over. Consider how enjambment and varying sentence lengths can create bursts and phrases like birdsong. After all, poetry is about sound.
Play with form today. Let your lines sing.
What truths have birds taught you?.
Fran’s Poem
Harbingers
That Morning You Drove Me Home From the Medical Procedure
back country byway, winter-brown grass trees, old gray outbuildings, zipping, zipping past small pond clearing, wood-strewn ground bald eagle sitting roadside—too profound—
I thought it was the anesthesia until you saw it, too, before it flew.
And I knew.
On the Morning I Returned to the Hospital After Your Surgery
lanes of heavy traffic, day dawning bright our son says you had a painful, painful night dew on the windshield, fog in my brain all hope of moving past this gridlock, in vain but for the glory of autumn leaves, a-fire against cloudless blue where a solitary flier glides by, white head and tail gleaming in the sun…
Fran Haley of North Carolina and I are hosting this week’s writing prompts at http://www.ethicalela.com for the November Open Write. You can read today’s prompt below or here on the website. We’d love to have you join us as we write and share!
Give Me This – an Ada Limon-inspired Poem
Our Host
Kim Johnson, Ed.D., lives on a farm in Williamson, Georgia, where she serves as District Literacy Specialist for Pike County Schools. She enjoys writing, reading, traveling, camping, sipping coffee from souvenir mugs, and spending time with her husband and three rescue schnoodles with literary names – Boo Radley (TKAM), Fitz (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Ollie (Mary Oliver). You can follow her blog, Common Threads: Patchwork Prose and Verse, at www.kimhaynesjohnson.com.
Inspiration
As part of Sarah Donovan’s Healing Kind book club, Fran Haley and I will be facilitating a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. Preparing for these conversations led us to choose several of Limon’s poems this week as inspirations for topic, form, or title. In Give Me This, Limon watches a groundhog steal her tomatoes and envies the freedom of this creature in the delights of rebellion.
Process
Use Limon’s poem as a theme or topic, form, or title (or combination of these) to inspire your own Give Me This poem.
Kim’s Poem
I’m using a moment I would love to re-live, a moment I did not want to pull away from, as my inspiration for today’s poem, and I’m choosing the Nonet form, in which each numbered line from 1-9, or from 9-1 has that many syllables on each. I’m writing a nonet and a reverse nonet to form a concrete (shape) poem resembling a prairie dog’s hideout.
This week, Fran Haley and I are hosting the November Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. Come join us as we write poetry together. You can read Fran’s full prompt on the website along with the poems of others or the prompt only, here below.
Title: Belonging
Our Host
Fran Haley is a literacy educator with a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and dogs. She lives in the countryside near Raleigh, North Carolina, where she savors the rustic scenery and timeless spirit of place. She’s a pastor’s wife, mom of two grown sons, and the proud Franna of two granddaughters: Scout, age seven, and Micah, age two. Fran never tires of watching birds and secretly longs to converse with them (what ancient wisdom these creatures possess!). When she’s not working, serving beside her husband, being hands-on Franna, birding, or coddling one utterly spoiled dachshund, she enjoys blogging at Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life.
Inspiration
As Kim Johnson mentioned in yesterday’s Open Write: Come April, she and I will be honoring National Poetry Month by facilitating discussion of The Hurting Kind, the most recent book by current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón (you can join us via Sarah Donovan’s new Healing Kind book club).
Let me linger a moment on the word healing. How often, how long, have we cried out for healing as individuals, families, communities, nations, humankind? When a group of students asked me what superpower I’d want most, that’s what I said. Healing. Oh, to lessen suffering, restore wholeness, impart peace…
In contemplating the despair and destruction of our times—of our human history, honestly—I cannot help picking up the inextricable thread of belonging. Think on this: How much pain stems from the need to belong? To know, to have, a safe place of being?
In a May 2022 interview with Angela María Spring of Electric Lit, Limón speaks of inspiration for The Hurting Kind: “We are all part of a community, we’re all connected. And sometimes we work so hard at trying to fit in somewhere to find our community, to figure out what it is that makes us connected…you’re already connected. You already have all that you need. And it’s in everything that’s come before you and it’s in everything that’s going to come after.”
That is the spirit of today’s poetry writing.
Process
Read Limón’s poem, “Ancestors”. Note that her images and metaphors are drawn from nature. She writes, exquisitely, of being from rocks, trees, and the “lacing patterns of leaves,” concluding with “I do not know where else I belong.” There are telling lines about roots and survival.
Considering the whole of your life: Which places impart the greatest sense of belonging to you? Why? Concentrate on details and possible symbolism of these settings. What’s the story? Which people are connected to these places? They’re often, but not always, family.
Try writing free verse or a prose poem incorporating these meaningful images, perhaps borrowing the phrases I’ve come here from and/or I do not know where else I belong.
Fran’s Poem
Origins
(after Ada Limón’s “Ancestors”)
I come here by way of the king’s river a moody expanse, as vast as the sea gray-green depths with bell-topped red buoys bobbing, bobbing Right, red, returning —a rite of passage
I’ve come here from bridges yes, most of all from bridges
traversed by my predecessors seeking livelihood
—did they ever encounter bridges in their dreams
the way I have? Distorted structures of dizzying heights
spanning waters at dead of night absurd angles
impossible to navigate
I never think I can
but I always find my way.
Like a pigeon, released
driven by some coding deep in my DNA
I’ve forsaken the riverside the mammoth steel cranes
the sound of buzz saws, rivet-guns,
metal striking metal —over time, making a man lose his hearing
to return, to roost here in the dawn lands where abandoned gray houses and weathered-wood barns sink decade by decade into the earth
—for it always takes back its own
where white-spotted fawns
guarded by their mothers
step like totems from sun-dappled woods
swelling with cicada chorus
—little living buzz saws echoing, echoing in my blood the generational song
—I don’t know where else I belong.
Your Turn
Kim’s Poem
Ancestors Speak (inspired by Ada Limon’s Ancestors)
Fran Haley and I are this week’s hosts of the November Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. Each month, this writing group gathers to write for five days. We rotate as hosts and participants, and we provide encouraging feedback to other writers. Come read and write some poetry with us! You can find the direct link here. You’ll meet fellow writers who become the kinds of friends who know you better than those you see in person.
Instructions on Being a Dragonfly – an Ada Limon-inspired Poem
Our Host
Kim Johnson, Ed.D., lives on a farm in Williamson, Georgia, where she serves as District Literacy Specialist for Pike County Schools. She enjoys writing, reading, traveling, camping, sipping coffee from souvenir mugs, and spending time with her husband and three rescue schnoodles with literary names – Boo Radley (TKAM), Fitz (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Ollie (Mary Oliver). You can follow her blog, Common Threads: Patchwork Prose and Verse, at www.kimhaynesjohnson.com.
Inspiration
As part of Sarah Donovan’s Healing Kind book club, Fran Haley and I will be facilitating a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. Preparing for these conversations led us to choose several of Limon’s poems this week as inspirations of topic, form, or title. In Instructions on Not Giving Up, Limon illustrates the glory of spring through an unfurling leaf as a tree takes on new greening after a harsh winter.
Process
Use Limon’s poem as a theme or topic, form, or title (or combination of these) to inspire your own Instructions poem.
Kim’s Poem
I’m reflecting on a moment I spent beside a lake watching dragonflies dart around chasing each other as my inspiration for today’s poem, borrowing a couple of starter lines from our U.S. Poet Laureate to drive my thinking about form. The greening of Limon’s tree leaves and new growth reminded me of the color changing moltings that dragonflies undergo throughout their lives as they continuously evolve.
Today’s host for our final day of the October Open Write is Anna Roseboro of Michigan, who inspires us to write Take a Word for a Walk poems. You can read her full prompt here, along with the poems of others and the responses to writers.
Anna writes: Take a word for a walk. Students might choose a word from the class generated vocabulary list or from a list of concepts or abstract terms. Move this word through the poem so that it appears in each “X” position. There can be six words in each line. Use color, abstraction, or other poetic devices in your poem. Use this formation:
X – – – – –
– X- – – –
– -X- – –
– – – X – –
– – – – X –
– – – – – X
Master of the House, Doling Out the Charm, Ready with a Handshake and an Open Paw
Today’s host for the final day of our September Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Glenda Funk of Idaho, who inspires us to write Barbie poems. You can read Glenda’s full prompt and her poem here. I can’t wait to see all of the poems born into the world on this topic, so please hop over to the site and take a read. I chose a reverse nonet today, crafting nine lines with each numbered line’s syllable count on each in descending order as if going back in time, seeking Fountain of Youth Barbie.
Turning Back the Years Reverse Nonet
We’d line them up like kickball players
at recess, then pick one by one,
taking turns to get the best
looking Barbies. Next, we’d
choose accessories ~
whip worlds to life
narrating
stories
dreamed.
As part of this post today, I’m sharing the remaining poems from the poetry marathon last Friday, where a poem and hour was written either by someone in my family, a friend, or me. Here they are:
12 a.m. hour – Kim Johnson – Hashtag Haiku
#meanness
Fruit of the Spirit
my tree needs fertilizer
nothing much blooming…..
1 a.m. hour – Tanka – a five line poem with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7
Cinnamon apples
sliced, wax-sealed in Mason jars
cane sugar syrup
for Thanksgiving dessert pies
prepped-ahead ingredients!
2 a.m. hour – Naani – a poem consisting of four lines, with twenty to twenty-five syllables on any topic
Pumpkin Harvest!
Pumpkin Spice!
Pumpkin jack-o-lanterns ~
glowing face with the slice of a knife!
3 a.m. hour – Senryu – a three line unrhymed poem similar to Haiku, about nature
Midland water snake
basking in Gibbs Gardens grass
misunderstood
4 a.m. hour – Tricubes – three stanzas of three lines with 3 syllables per line
Poetry
Wings to Fly
Words to heal
Poetry
Weatherproof
Warmth for cold
Poetry
What if prompts
Why not now?
5 a.m hour – Cinquain – a poem that has two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six in the third, eight in the fourth, and two in the fifth (it was early, and I was watching my Honey Nut Cheerios dance in my plain Greek yogurt)…..
mOrning
cOffee hOp!
cheeriO’ed yOgurt prOm
O’s d-Osi-dO with pOetry
hOedOwn!
6 a.m. hour – Kim Johnson – Ode – a poem of praise, often written directly to a person or object
Memories of Miriam
Dear Mom, you come to me in the missing with tingly spots that turn warm in the heart, help me exhale~ my fingers circling my temples bringing back all the whens
of this Bernina your fingers guiding mine under the foot, stitch by stitch learning to sew a lime green terrycloth bathcover, now sewing quilts for your great grands on your fine Swiss machine
of hawks, talons clutching wires checking that my seatbelt is fastened as I drive past, shaking your pointing finger if I forgot, knowing that whatever I’m thinking at that moment, you’re there in it
of strawberry figs, last summer wave just picked, my own weakening fingers twisting tender fruits free ~ canned this very week, Mason jars sealed tight with summer’s sweetened warmth for coming winter
of spiced Russian tea, the Tangy orange and lemonade mixed with clove, sugar cinnamon and tea ~ a medicinal brush of your invisible fingers through my hair in sore throat season
of rippled milkglass with resurrection fern springing to life unfurling its brown dry fingers into open arms
Gayle Sands is our host today for the second day of the August Open Write at www.ethicalela.com. She brings us a challenge to write a nestling poem in the essence of Irene Latham. You can read her full prompt here.
I’m reading Ada Limon’s collection of books, and I chose Forgiveness from The Hurting Kind as my base poem. If I were adding to a list of the things I would hold close forever, it’s Limon's poem. Here is mine, taken from hers:
Silent Water
dumb hearts
hurting each other
shadowy places
scars
bound to the blades
bound to outrun
Common Threads 