I accepted the challenge thrown at my feet. And by thrown at my feet, I mean the Facebook post stopped my scroll. I clicked on Learn More and read the details. A poem a day for a year, starting January 17. They call it the Stafford Challenge, and registration ends today.
Sounds like my kind of adventure.
I signed up, and my backpack is ready for the year ahead. My computer is charged, my coffee is hot, and my momentum is high. I’m looking around – – where is the inspiration in any writing time? Never farther than a foot away. I see my coffee cup, white with a black butterfly etched in the surface. Me. I see myself – caffeine for the long journey ahead, and the freedom to make it.
I have a Zoom tonight to see what it’s all about, but for today, all I need is my poem.
Today is the final day of the November Open Write, but this is a fun form today. Fran Haley and I have enjoyed hosting this week. You can read today’s prompt at http://www.ethicalela.com here, or read below.
Title: Doggerel
Our Hosts
Fran Haley
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.
Kim Johnson
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
We have enjoyed collaborating on this series of Open Writes inspired by the work of Poet Laureate Ada Limón! Next April, honor National Poetry Month with us by taking part in the discussion of Limón’s book, The Hurting Kind (you can join via Sarah Donovan’s new Healing Kind book club).
In the past few days we’ve written along many themes in Limón’s work: Family, community, belonging, nature.
Today we expand all that to include a celebration of our pets—in our case, dogs! We decided to end our Open Writes on a fun note.
Or should we say a punny note?
Time for some doggerel!
Process
Doggerel is intentionally bad poetry (what a relief)! Dictionary.com defines it as “comic verse composed in irregular rhythm…verse or words that are badly written or expressed.”
Many nursery rhymes are considered doggerel. Remember this?
I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on my knife.
—Frequently attributed to Anonymous and Ogden Nash
Speaking of Odgen Nash, consider these lines of his:
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggerel…
Today, celebrate the pets (hopefully dogs) in your life with a short whimsical, silly, rhyming or non-rhyming verse. Perhaps a limerick…
or write some haiku
and if you don’t have a dog
—sigh. A cat will do.
Just have pun! Er, fun!
Fran’s Poem
A Bit of Doggerel in Honor of My Granddog, Henry
Time for a nap
time to recharge
if only for a bit
on a teeny-tiny pillow
that ain’t a good fit
this is what comes
of living large
Kim’s Poem
(Texts and verse written with Boxer Moon as he delivered wood and saw the dogs at my house – I asked if I could use our texts for doggerel, and this is what we wrote in our rural Georgia vernacular):
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 at http://www.ethicalela.com, Tammi Belko of Ohio is our host for the second day of the October Open Write. You can see her prompt and read her poem here as she inspires us all to write. Today, we are writing about what our shoes would say if they could talk. I got a little concerned about the reality of this ever happening…….all my secrets would be told!
If My Shoes Could Talk
If my shoes could talk
they’d tell all my dark secrets:
sweets-binge hiding spots
Common Threads 