Tag: challenge

The Poetry Friday Roundup is HERE!

I’ve moved the picnic table into the shade of the weeping birch in the back yard of my childhood home, and the Poetry Sisters are arriving with yummy offerings for today’s pot luck. 

Nope. While I DID grow up on the arid high plains of eastern Colorado, that’s WAY too dry. Let’s try again.

Right tree, wrong size of lawn. Maybe the third time will be the charm?

Close enough! Let’s get this party started!

Tricia arrives carefully balancing the dish her mom made and took to church every week for years.

Liz is bringing a family recipe as well – her grandmother’s strawberry rhubarb kuchen.

Sara, bless her, is providing the salty goodness that will balance the sweets – a lowly but always welcome bag of chips.

Tanita‘s offering is a little bit wobbly — Ms. Sandy McMahon’s red jello salad.

Laura sent some flowers for the table. She won’t be joining us with a poem this week.

More than any other season, Summer, to me, is a taste: fat green grapes at swim meets, nectarine juice running down my chin, warm cherry tomatoes straight off the vine, fresh garden green beans cooked with a ham hock and potatoes, sliced garden cucumbers tossed in vinegar and sugar, butterscotch dip cones from DQ…but what I finally chose for my poem was Three Bean Salad.*

I’m going to do the roundup “old-school” this week. Leave your link and a brief description of your post in the comments and I’ll add your links to today’s potluck.

MAIN DISHES
Susan is in with a link to Eve L. Ewing’s poem “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” at Chicken Spaghetti.

Robyn, at Life on the Deckle Edge, is sharing a couple of new Americana bookmarks and Whitman’s classic, “I Hear America Singing.

Tabatha has an original poem today at The Opposite of Indifference.

Tracey interviews Jone about TILT! at Tangles and Tails.

Molly, at Nix the Comfort Zone, has joined the Pádraig Pantoum crew with one so delicious you’ll want to read and reread it!

SIDES
This week Jama is sharing Kim Dower’s poem “How to Shop for a Poet” with thoughts about her “ideal” poet at Jama’s Alphabet Soup.

Cathy is bringing a whole carousel of offerings to the picnic at Cathy Stenquist!

Amy, at The Poem Farm, brings us this delicious side dish all the way from Utah!

Carol has left The Apples in My Orchard and is also dialing in from Utah with gorgeous photos and haikus.

Let’s serve Margaret’s Pádraig Pantoum alongside a serving of funeral potatoes from Tricia’s poem (see above.) Margaret’s pantoum is at Reflections on the Teche.

DESSERTS
Let’s put some candles on the birthday cake for Michelle at More Art 4 All! Today is her birthday and she’s written a Golden Shovel in celebration.

Jone’s sharing “her” fourth grader (in the class where she was subbing) sweet “I Am” poems at Jone Rush MacCulloch.

Carol offers up a plate of springtime thoughts, peonies before and after the rain, through nature photography, digital art, and a Golden Hinge poem at Beyond LiteracyLink.

Irene treats us to the sweetness of letter writing and snail mail at Live Your Poem. (After lunch, let’s all sit down and write a few notes!)

DRINKS
Quench your thirst for all things birds with Jan at Bookseedstudio!

Over at Reverie, Patricia is reviewing Mary Oliver/Melissa Sweet’s GOLDFINCHES, a book to sip and savor!

AFTER LUNCH ENTERTAINMENT
Jane, at Rain City Librarian, wrote about…a sea slug! A ridiculously adorable, itty bitty little sea slug that looks like a cartoon character.

Linda wrote a Pádraig Ó Tuama-ish pantoum this week. Find her on Substack at Another Word Edgewise.

Alan shares the simple, yet beguiling ‘Stornello’ -a traditonal Italian tercet – at Poetry Pizzazz.

Rose is celebrating an almost-milestone anniversary and offering a bit of entertainment with words and music at Imagine the Possibilities.

Every good picnic has at least one dog, sniffing under the table for dropped goodies. Denise, at Dare to Care, brings us and entire pack of Good Dogs in the form of études (a form to play with while our lunch settles).

Mona has a project for us after lunch is finished — let’s all go forth and put up poetry boxes! She has the details and a concrete poem at Mona Voelkel.

Here’s another after-lunch project — let’s all make poetry zines with Jill Dailey!

** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **

The call for roundup hosts for July – December 2026 can be found here.

All images in today’s post are via Unsplash, with the exception of the jello salad, which is Creative Commons via Flickr.

*recipe can be found in the comments

Poetry Friday: MAY!

Happy May Day! Today is an Inklings challenge day, and Heidi challenged us to “Celebrate May by writing a poem that Maykes use of the verbs may, might, could, can, ought.” It felt SO good to use more words, syllables, and lines!

Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda @A Word Edgewise

Rose has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Imagine the Possibilities.

The image is via Unsplash.

NPM 2026. The End.

All of this month’s poems can be found at Poetrepository.

It is with relief that this NPM comes to a close. I’ve learned lots about writing poetry this month. There is power in working the same form day after day. You go deep and learn it well. You start to feel it in your bones, or in my case, start to speak in three syllable chunks. Similarly, there is power in trying to put big ideas into small containers. Synonyms were my friend, I learned to work the titles, and every now and then I got a rush of joy when I stuck a landing. Brevity was both a bane and a joy. I’m definitely ready to use more words and write more actual POETRY.

I also learned lots from reading the news every day. First of all, journalists are amazing. The number and variety of stories is endless. Bad news is way more relentless than my previous glances at headlines revealed. But there is also always good news to be found. It pays to be patient because things change with about the same frequency as they erupt. When all else fails, looking out the window or walking in the garden is the perfect antidote. Even just the act of making something every day and showing up with it in public helped put the news into perspective. 

Art matters.

Poetry Friday: This Week In the News and an Ekphrastic Challenge

This final Friday of National Poetry Month is also a Poetry Sisters challenge week! We’re writing ekphrastic poems, so I chose an image from today’s NYT morning newsletter. Such a different spring view from my window and from his. When will this madness end?

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:

Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect 

Here are the rest of my poems from this week:

April 17  As If We Needed One More Example of What Narcissism Looks Like
April 18  Making Good
April 19  Primatology
April 20  Shooting Spree
April 21  A River Runs Through It
April 22  Today’s News is Outside Your Front Door

Irene has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Live Your Poem.

Poetry Friday: Another Week in the News

Today (Thursday, April 16) I needed a break from the unrelenting frazzlement of the U.S. news cycle, so I popped over to Al Jazeera for headlines from Europe. It was quite refreshing.

Here are the rest of my poems from this week:

April 10  News Fatigue

April 11  National Poetry Month

April 12  You Are a Crew

April 13  Orban Concedes Defeat

April 14  President vs. Pope

April 15  War in the Middle East

I didn’t bother linking into the roundup last week because I knew I wouldn’t be able to comment. Here’s last week’s post/poems.

Heidi has something special planned for this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at my juicy little universe.

Poetry Friday: This Week in the News

April 4  Perspective

April 5  Nostalgia

April 6  Paying Attention, Then Looking Away

April 7  Bright Spot

April 8  Breaking News from Paleontology

April 9  July 5, 1978

I’m traveling and won’t be able to comment this week. Happy Poetry Friday! Happy NPM!

Jone has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Jone Rush MacCulloch.

Poetry Friday and Poetry Every Day

Happy National Poetry Month! My daily poems are at Poetrepository here and on Substack here and in IG stories here if you want to follow along. Or just check in here on Fridays for my weekly roundup!

March 31  “That’s a Bridge Too Far”
April 1  Supreme Court Birthright Citizenship Case
April 2  Making a Difference in a Distracted and Divided World
April 3  Finally, Some Good News

Today is also Inklings Challenge Day. Linda challenged us to write an ars poetica poem, “A poem that explains the ‘art of poetry,’ or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem.” I think mine fits best in the second category.

A few phrases in my poem were borrowed from Pádrig Ó Tuama’s 3/29 Poetry Unbound Substack “Belief and Wonder.”

Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda @A Word Edgewise

Matt has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.

Poetry Friday: Celebrating Twilight

This is a double-duty poem. First, it celebrates the Book Birthday of Marcie Flinchum Atkins’ new release, WHEN TWILIGHT COMES. Congratulations, Marcie!

Second, it’s a Poetry Sister challenge poem. This month we tried our hands at Ovillejos. According to Writer’s Digest, “The ovillejo is an old Spanish form popularized by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). This 10-line poem is comprised of 3 rhyming couplets (or 2-line stanzas) and a quatrain (or 4-line stanza).” Easy, right? Oh…there’s more: “The first line of each couplet is 8 syllables long and presents a question to which the second line responds in 3 to 4 syllables–either as an answer or an echo.” (I think we mostly ignored that part…but there’s still more!) “The quatrain is also referred to as a redondilla (which is usually a quatrain written in trochaic tetrameter) with an abba rhyme pattern. The final line of the quatrain also combines lines 2, 4, and 6 together.” WHEW!

I pretty quickly discovered that in order to have a final line that made sense, I would need to start there and reverse engineer the whole poem. It felt like part puzzle, part fill-in-the-blanks. But I’m not sad about how mine turned out in the end!

Marcie has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Marcie Flinchum Atkins, and I can’t wait to see all the ways the community is lighting up the twilight skies in honor of her new book!

Here’s what the rest of the Poetry Sisters came up with this month:

Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect 

Poetry Friday: Becoming

Ever since Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” was the Poem of the Day this past week on Poets.org, I’ve been going back to it over and over again, working to memorize it. Sara T. and I go way back. My fourth graders and I memorized “Barter” my first year of teaching. I wish I had memorized a poem a year with every class. Just think of the library of words and images I’d have at my beck and call.

The turn in the middle of “There Will Come Soft Rains” comes as a gut punch. Especially now. I know that Nature wouldn’t miss humankind, but I desperately want her to know that I am mourning all that humans have destroyed, all that the current administration is determined to destroy. I want to bear witness to her ordinary miracles (cue Sarah McLachlan) and celebrate the life force that makes and heals our planet.

Margaret gave the Inklings this month’s challenge to write a poem using the word “becoming” somewhere in it. You might be able to feel the influence of Sara T. in my writing.

Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met this month’s challenge:

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda @A Word Edgewise

Karen has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Karen Edmisten*.

Poetry Friday: After Arthur Sze

Without actually meaning to, the Poetry Sisters have done great service to the Poetry Friday community by shining a spotlight on our current Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. Were you, like us, not very (or at all) familiar with Sze’s poetry? We were delighted to dive in and discover his distinctive style of close focus on minute details in combination with big expansive ideas. We hope, if you joined us in the challenge, you were similarly delighted. And if you are just along for the ride and reading all the various takes on this challenge, again, we hope you are treated to a sense of delight.

I chose Sze’s poem “The Chance” because I loved the way the speaker ponders while they drive (as I am also wont to do). I loved the double meanings — “And as I approach thirty” can be miles per hour, or an age. As I approach my next birthday that ends in a zero, I absolutely agree that “the distances / are shorter than I guess.” I whole-heartedly agree with “I want a passion that grows and grows.” And those last two lines — swoon!

Rather than using those last two lines as the striking line for an acrostic (aligned vertically on the left), or a Golden Shovel (aligned vertically on the right), I used a new form (still under construction) that Heidi Mordhorst is calling the Fault Line Form, with my striking line through the middle of my poem.

On the topic of new forms, in March, the Poetry Sisters will be attempting to unravel the Ovillejo!

I look forward to reading what the rest of the Poetry Sisters, and all who are joining us in conversation with Arthur Sze, have written!

Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect 

Margaret has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reflections on the Teche.