Back when I issued my challenge to the Inklings, I thought my Poetry Month project would be Dictionary Hopscotch — I would randomly choose 4 words from different spots in the dictionary and then use at least 3 of them in a poem.
So I challenged my fellow Inklings to use 3 of these 4 randomly chosen words in a poem: knuckle, denial, turn, cautious.
It’s a Poetry Quadfecta this week! It’s the last Friday of the month which means it is time for the Poetry Sisters’ challenge AND it’s the last day of March which means it’s National Poetry Month Eve AND the Poetry Friday roundup is here PLUS the 2023 Progressive Poem will launch right here tomorrow morning! (See sidebar for links to the rest of the lines/month.)
Let’s start off with my poem for the Poetry Sisters’ challenge. This month, we wrote etherees, a poetry form that begins with one syllable in the first line and continues growing each line by a syllable until the tenth line has ten syllables. Additionally, we tried to stick to our year-long theme of transformation. I’m using my etheree to announce my Poetry Month project.
I wrote my etheree to announce my National Poetry Month project, which will be a month of cheritas.
This year, my National Poetry Month project will feature the cherita form. At the website The Cherita, the form is defined thus: “Cherita is the Malay word for story or tale. A cherita consists of a single stanza of a one-line verse, followed by a two-line verse, and then finishing with a three-line verse…The cherita tells a story.” Like last year, I will be publishing my poems daily at Poetrepository and crossposting here each Friday for Poetry Friday.
And now, for your poems! Click to add your link to the roundup:
Remember that time when you had your poem ready to go weeks ahead of time, but when you got ready to post, you double-checked the definition of “anaphora” and realized that your poem was an excellent example of repetition, but not at all a poem demonstrating anaphora? Yeah, me too.
What can you do except create a flash draft definito to clarify in your mind the difference between repetition and anaphora?!?
Margaret gave the Inklings our challenge this month. Here’s how the rest of the crew wrote using anaphora:
Outside the Dayton Art Institute stands “Pathway,” by John Safer, always reaching skyward with energy and beauty, and looking different in every season and from every angle. It draws the eye up and the mind in.
Here is a closeup I took on one visit last year:
The lower part seems to blur the sharp architecture of the building, while the upper part seems almost transparent. Here’s where that combination took my imagination:
Fitting for the Poetry Sisters’ yearlong theme of transformation, this poem commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis/surgery/chemo/radiation year.
Next month, the Poetry Sisters are writing etherees. This ten-line form begins with a single syllable, and each line expands by one syllable until the tenth line has ten. We’re continuing with our 2023 theme of transformation, but how you interpret that topically is up to you.
…a time when you felt so consumed with the act of making something that you lost all sense of time, and your mind seemed to clear? What allowed you to enter this mindful creative space?
I wrote a draft about embroidery (no surprise), which makes a fine companion to Catherine’s knitting poem. But I also lose myself when I’m baking, especially when I knead the dough. The recipe I use for white bread is my paternal grandmother’s, and I feel a visceral connection to her and all my other bread-baking ancestors when I’m kneading.
Here’s how the rest of the crew met Catherine’s challenge:
This month, the Poetry Sisters wrote Cascade poems that perhaps address our year-long theme of “Transformation.” The form is cookie-cutter easy, but evocative-images hard. I wrote plenty of the first kind before I found the first stanza of this draft in my notebook jottings on January 2.
In February, we’ll be writing Ekphrastic poems. If you’d like to join us, find a piece of art that moves you to write. Bonus points for including the theme “Transformation.”
Jan, at Bookseed Studio, is our kind and gracious hostess for this week’s Poetry Friday roundup.
Heidi gave the Inklings our January challenge: “Write a poem which weighs the pros and cons of #change. For extra fun, use any form, but consider starting in one form and gradually transitioning in the course of the poem to a quite different form.” Oof. Not a small challenge to tackle in the midst of the holidays, and other assorted moves, births of grandchildren, and COVID episodes (none of these mine).
This past Monday on our Zoom, sensing (hoping) that we were all slightly poem-less, I changed up the challenge and suggested an Exquisite Corpse Poem. One line would be written and sent to the next poet via private chat, who would send only her line to the next poet, and so on until we had, if not a poem, then at least some words to use as seeds to grow a poem.
Here’s what we wound up with:
Leaves on the forest floor understand and submit Submit without challenging the direction of the wind to wander and wind along our way the wind unwinds us day by day, shifting clouds, shining light or casting shadows Where steps and stones still lie.
Eight drafts later, I offer this:
.
Our planet’s slow, interconnected natural changes are sharply contrasted by the selfishly rapid changes humans have caused, presumably to benefit our species, but which in reality are destroying our home.
Here’s how the rest of the crew met Heidi’s CHANGE challenge and/or CHANGED the lines we began with on Monday to make a new poem:
The topic for the Poetry Sisters’ December Challenge was Box. We met to write and brainstorm on Boxing Day, after opening a few boxes on Christmas. Box is such a rich topic: boxes of chocolate, thinking outside the box, boxes of family heirlooms in the basement, feeling boxed in. They constrain and contain, have sides, edges, vertices, volume (we study them in math). They store ashes for interment and prisoners for internment. Flat ones are glowing digital screens. And there are windows, doors, blank notebook pages, the space for a signature, the place to mail a letter. A delivery van is a rolling box filled with boxes in which are boxes…all headed to the building-box known as the food pantry which is a place where those who are boxed in by financial constraints can fill a box and some bellies.
Such a rich topic.
There are also poetry forms that pose as boxes. The 4 x 4 poem is a kind of box, and Lewis Carroll, the avid mathematician, gives us the square poem form.
I combined “thinking outside the box,” my boxes of embroidery floss/threads, and these two forms in my poems. “What next?” is a big question for me as I finish up the year of weekly embroidery mandalas. My 4×4 poem addresses that question, while my square poem reassures me that I will find my way.
Patricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at Reverie, and the call for roundup hosts is here. January’s looking a little thin, but I have faith! The schedule always fills!
Here’s how this poem happened: 1. Molly’s challenge for the Inklings this month was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s recent post in which she invited writers to answer an unasked question. 2. I spent 4.5 days with my brother’s family in CA after NCTE. There, I met my niece and nephew in real life for the first time. Together we played, doodled in our notebooks, snuggled for read aloud, considered square and cubic numbers, explored tide pools, studied a world map, worked in the garden, and climbed to the top of the rope climber at the playground. 3. I found the poem, “Because A Redwood Grove” (by Joe Cottonwood…how fun is that?) on Your Daily Poem. 4. You didn’t ask, but this poem’s the answer to the question of what happened to my heart over the course of those 4.5 days in CA with my brother’s family…with MY family.
Here’s how the rest of the crew met Molly’s challenge:
The Poetry Sisters’ challenge for November was to write a recipe poem. I’m cheating just a bit since I’ve had little/no writing time during NCTE and visiting family for this holiday week after NCTE. As it is, I am posting from SFO before I board the redeye back home! This poem can be found in THE POETRY OF US, edited by J. Patrick Lewis.
A(nother) Year of Reading 
