Unexpected Intersections

Hi everyone! Thanks for coming to the Poetry Friday party today! I'm so glad you stopped by. Last week, Mary Lee Hahn reminded us of the August Poetry Peeps challenge :  We’re writing after the style of Jane Yolen’s eight line, rhyming poem, “What the Bear Knows,” a poem  written in honor of her 400th book ,  Bear Outside . Our topic is  What the ____ Knows .  I love Jane Yolen's work and was excited to take on this challenge.  We love to hike, and one of our favorite things to do when hiking is to look and listen for marmots. They are abundant in the Swiss Alps, and we have spent many a peaceful hour watching them, as other impatient hikers pass us by, unaware that silence and patience will be rewarded with glimpses like this:  I'm looking forward to reading the other Poetry Peeps responses, as well as all of your poetic goodness. Thanks for joining the party! You can add your links here. Click here to enter

Over the summer I've been inspired by the Poetry Friday poets who have written villanelles. This was a new form for me, and I have been simultaneously drawn to and intimidated by this form with its many restrictions. The Villanelle form was floating around in my creative primordial ooze all summer, but no evolution occurred until it bumped up against my desire to write a poem for my daughter's first day of school.  As expected, it was a challenging form to work with. I pretty quickly settled on the number of syllables, and the refrain lines and rhymes, but I was struggling with the second half. I was trying to work with a fixed meter (some sources I looked at said traditional villanelles are written in iambic pentameter). Finally I read over the first half of the poem and asked myself why I liked it so much better than the many lines I was throwing away. I realized that in those lines, I hadn't tried to follow a strict metric pattern, and I liked the internal rhyme that see...

 This week passed by in a whirl of appointments and to-do lists. One of the highlights we participating in Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong 's workshop on Poetry Anthologies. It was jam-packed with insights on the poetry market and practical tips about anthologies: both seeking publication in them, and producing them. If you're interested, they're holding the workshop again on October 16th. There are still a few spots available. For more details about the workshop and how to register, check out this post . My poem today was written early in the summer, before the recent extreme rain and intense storms. As I was biking through the forest, the sounds of summer around me made me want to play with onomotopaeia .  I stopped and pulled out my notebook and pen and tried to capture the essence of the sounds I was hearing. Those were the seeds of this poem. I've been revising it off and on over the summer and this is the version I'm happiest with (so far ;-). Thanks for stoppi...

Another summer poem this week.  Last week while I was waiting for a train, I watched wisps of clouds slowly stretching, twisting and folding back in on themselves. It was mesmerizing - like watching nature's version of a lava lamp.  That experience inspired today's poem.  Mary Lee Hahn is our gracious host for Poetry Friday this week. I hope you'll stop by her blog where many other wonderful poems await you .