stonepicnicking_okapi

I finally finished the poetry anthology This is the Honey edited by Kwame Alexander and now have moved onto Poetry Unbound: 50 poems to open your world edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama. This is the first one.

Wonder Woman by Ada Limón

Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the Urgent Care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell good and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirling
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, a girl, maybe half my age,
is dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She struts by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stand to clap (because who wouldn’t),
she bows and poses like she knew I needed the myth,
—a woman, by a river, indestructible

1. Minor leaves on his first trip away from home, 5 days with the chorus in Nashville, at 430 am. I have been rushing around trying to get him ready. When he's finally gone, I'll just collapse.

2. But not completely. I had a new client today and will have another on Thursday and I had a different new client last Friday, all men, all different situations, from mostly independent to hospice care. It's a lot of new things.

3. My client last week had me paint the floor white. That was interesting.

4. Minisculus has gained too much weight per his annual check upand is back on his 'caloric modification' also a lot of parental discussion about sports for next year.

All this to say, it's kind of stressful, even more than usual.

Do you know Fable the raven?

ETA: there's a prompt fest at Spring Renewal if you are into that: https://spring-renewal.dreamwidth.org/

So I went by my public library and they were doing the tiny scrolls of poems for National Poetry Month so I got two (one for me and one for Minisculus who I was taking for his annual check-up) so I had us unroll them at lunch...and they were the same poem! No fair! This one. So I used it in a collage.

Monadnock in Early Spring by Amy Lowell

Cloud-topped and splendid, dominating all
The little lesser hills which compass thee,
Thou standest, bright with April’s buoyancy,
Yet holding Winter in some shaded wall
Of stern, steep rock; and startled by the call
Of Spring, thy trees flush with expectancy
And cast a cloud of crimson, silently,
Above thy snowy crevices where fall
Pale shrivelled oak leaves, while the snow beneath
Melts at their phantom touch. Another year
Is quick with import. Such each year has been.
Unmoved thou watchest all, and all bequeat
Some jewel to thy diadem of power,
Thou pledge of greater majesty unseen.

Wednesday's word is...

...choc-a-bloc.

1. very full, tightly packed, or crammed together

I found this in my Rebus omnibus.

Yes, we were left a lot of old stuff when we bought this place. The store-rooms were choc-a-block.

What intrigued me was the origin.

The term has nautical origins dating back to the early 19th century. It comes from the combination of "chock", derived from "chock-full" meaning filled to capacity, and "block", referring to the pulleys (blocks) used on ships. When two blocks in a tackle system were hoisted to their maximum, they would jam tightly together, described as being chock-a-block.

1. New client is an architect. Seems to be okay but we'll see. The one issue is that they (he and wife) have never ever had a caregiver so we'll see what they decide to do with me. There is something to be said for jazz man who has had caregivers 3 to 4 times a day every day for years and my Indian lady who grew up with actual servants that they know how to order me around properly. :) I also will try out a new Friday guy. He is hospice. :(

2. Spring break was fine. Easter was fine. The boys are back at school.

3. BTS will have the first concert of their tour on Wednesday. They have dropped much content, which is enjoyable. I have made a new ARMY friend of a long-time commentor on my fic so that's nice.

4. I just finished a biography of Keats, which I will talk about tomorrow. I am also making my way through an Inspector Rebus short story omnibus.

5. This day in jazz tells me it is the birthday of Billie Holliday so have two poems about her. The second one calls to mind the moment in ACD's "The Dying Detective" when Watson reads about the attack on Holmes in the newspaper.

---


Canary by Rita Dove
for Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

--

The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Happy Easter to all who celebrate it.

I didn't get any creativity in yesterday. I was cleaning and decluttering my closet and bedroom so I did a small collage this morning. I am using some rather nice (but tiny!) stickers which came with the PAAS egg dying kit. I am going to do a proper Easter collage with some more. This is done in my smaller 'art' notebook which I haven't used for a long time. Sticking with my rule that five textures make a frame.



And Poetry Foundation tells me today is the birthday of Maya Angelou. Here's their poem of the day.

Awaking in New York by Maya Angelou

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.

This is a short piece of it which my spiritual guru quoted in a talk I watched recently.

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 by William Wordsworth

...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

It's National Poetry Month in the US! Huzzah!

Since I often think of Wednesday as book day on this journal, I am going to mention four books I own about writing poetry with a bias toward metered verse, form, things that rhyme, ha, ha, etc.

What books (or other resources) have you found useful in writing and/or understanding poetry? Please drop recs in the comments.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms by Lewis Putnam Turco. This is a very useful dictionary for poetic forms. There's also a helpful section which lists poetic types by the number of lines.

Rules of the Dance: a Handbook for writing and reading metric verse by Mary Oliver. Easy to understand book which covers the basic elements of poetry sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion.

How to be a Poet by Jo Bell and Jane Commane. A collection of essays about the practicality of being a poet in today's world, including the importance of reading poetry, understanding the business of it, career paths, dealing with blocks, harsh realities, moving from an amateur to a professional mindset.

52: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. by Jo Bell. A set of weekly prompts for a year with examples. I started two years ago and stopped at 30. I hope to pick it back up one day.

The other book which is very good which I don't own is:

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by E. Boland and M. Strand. It goes into more depth about smaller subset of forms: villanelle, pantoum, sonnet, etc.

---

And to start us off how about some Dorothy Parker? I like this part: The sweet transparency of glass /
The tenderness of April grass.

A Fairly Sad Tale By Dorothy Parker

I think that I shall never know
Why I am thus, and I am so.
Around me, other girls inspire
In men the rush and roar of fire.
The sweet transparency of glass,
The tenderness of April grass,
The durability of granite;
But me—I don't know how to plan it.
The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock
Were—shall we say?—born out of wedlock.
They broke my heart, they stilled my song,
And said they had to run along,
Explaining, so to sop my tears,
First came their parents or careers.
But ever does experience
Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense!
Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope.
A heart in half is chaste, archaic;
But mine resembles a mosaic—
The thing's become ridiculous!
Why am I so? Why am I thus?

I feel rather...untethered. Unmoored. A little anxious. A little depressed. A little tired. A little bit hyper-fixated. A little bit distracted. I have been thinking about routines and their importance (and limitations). And about the nature of discipline, will power, and all of those things, habits. Mindfulness (or lack of it). I forgot to do some regular things I do (like Music Monday!) and it's spring break so the boys are home and I'm still down work hours. I've been eating a lot of raw cookie dough, which is a bad sign.

Word Count: 14,128

It's just two updates of my BTS soap opera. I haven't done any other writing this month. No fills for any comms. Sadness. April is National Poetry Month and I have a horrible feeling I will not be doing it justice this year. I can blame the state of the world but it isn't just that.

Reading: 7 books, which is not bad actually.

Crafting: Only one spread and four cards.

Health & Fitness: I did manage some of the workouts of my new program, but I can't seem to convince myself to do the calorie tracking. I got a year subscription to MyFitnessPal so I could do the barcode scanning. and make it easy on myself, but I am not using it at all. I did manage 16 days of Yoga with Adriene and 3 days of jogging a week. I feel like stretching needs to be a non-negotiable daily thing because when I don't do it, even for a day, I have a tendency to skin back into feeling like shit.

Personal: April is Minor's birthday which means...he's fifteen...which means...learner's permit (driving!!!) And he's going away on his first overnight school trip ever. Gosh. It's going to be a lot.