It was a ripple a glimmer a golden ray shimmering just a moment shining on the twilit waves percolating like a cooling stream of water trickling down my soul just a whisper in the wilderness a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of an almost-remembered dream, and nearly as ethereal, yet almost tangible too a brewing of hope on the horizon
Gratitude List: 1. A moment of Hope 2. Remembering beauty and goodness 3. Chocolate-covered Holiday Star cookies 4. Music to calm the anxious spirit 5. Good stories May we walk in Beauty!
Saturday’s Falling and Getting Up Again: “Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ―Eleanor Roosevelt
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” ―Rachel Carson
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.” ―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath
“And don’t we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening—full of quiet darkness and stars, until we hear a syllable of God echoing in the core of our hearts?” —Macrina Wiederkehr
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” —Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
“The way that I understand it, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.” — Toko-pa Turner
I’ve had quite a few ideas about how I wanted to organize this year’s November Poem-a-Day. Try on a different persona every day? Do a month’s worth of epigraph poems? Do two days on each of the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary? Write a daily ekphrastic poem based on drawing a tarot card? Do a month’s worth of found poems? Make each a magic spell?
Today I hadn’t yet settled on an organizing motif, and I’d sketched out the beginnings of several ideas for today’s poem, when I picked up The Best American Poetry 2000 (edited by Rita Dove) to read during Library Period while my students were independently reading.
One of the poets described how his poem in the anthology had taken him three years to write. Three years!?! How does a poet sustain the energy and attention for a single poem over three years? My own process has become very tied to my poem-a-day cycles in April and November, a discipline that tends to place practice over craft, a way to ensure that even when I go through dry times, I’ll always come back to a writing practice twice a year.
Even as I wrote that last sentence, I began to quibble with myself, because the practice, messy as it is, has definitely honed and sharpened my craft, and I always come back, select the best of the month’s harvest, and subject them to more careful crafting. I’m not just a word-vomit poet. I take crafting seriously.
But this poet who took three years to craft a poem! Perhaps it’s my own squirrelly attention span, or the mediocrity of my poetic sensibility, but I have never been able to imagine the process when poets talk about lengthy poem-crafting, the aching strain of shaping an idea over such a span of time. What was the poem doing in those years? Was it like a painting waiting for the artist to dab a few dabs of paint a day? Or half-abandoned like one of my knitting projects that gets stuck in the bottom of a basket for months before I remember to work on it again? Was it working on the poet’s psyche every day?
Perhaps the poem that rushed from me as I considered this poet and his process, and my own slap dash throw-it-on-the-page method of writing, made me a little defensive. I don’t really intend the tone to be snarky–toward him or myself. I was invigorated by the rush of ideas, the whoosh and whisper as the words winged in.
Perhaps this is one I will return to more deliberately, to craft into a gem. It will not take me three years, and yet, despite that essential lie, I feel like I’ve found some gold inside today’s idea.
Three Years by Beth Weaver-Kreider
This poem has taken me three years to write. First, it was a simple spot of blood, blooming crimson on the white petal of the page, glowing slightly, touched with were-light. It hovered in that state for months, in stasis while I hammered out the form, the quiet exhalations of its line breaks, the humming tension of occasional enjambment heightening the tautness of the structure, driving the metrical processional to the first stanza’s end. That was the first year.
In the second year, I crawled about, blindly, in the dusty rooms of the poem, gathering shadows like cobwebs stuck to my knees, my hair, my teeth. Here and there I tugged transitions into place, opened blinds to let light in, took myself in hand and faced the demon labyrinth of the second stanza with every scrap of strength my soul could muster. Perhaps you can sense, Sensitive Reader, the longing that fed me forward to the exhausting conclusion of the second year?
The third year was filled with howling and wrangling, attempting to tame the wild creature of the poem without breaking its will, feeding it symbols and reasons, assonance, consonance, rhythms and patterns to live for, then recanting the dominion within me that sought to subject it, to coax and corral it under my will. I gave it some rein for its wildness, then set it free. And just today I heard it nickering on the hill behind the orchard, its gentle form slipping through the mists to return to me complete.
Gratitude List: 1. Writing Practice 2. Writing Craft 3. How golden sunlight fills the bowl of woods, of hollow. 4. Weekend 5. No matter what happens, people will continue to work for good. May we walk in Beauty!
“I am passionate about everything in my life, first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” —bell hooks
“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” —Roald Dahl, The Witches
“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” —Anais Nin
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightning flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” —Layne Redmond
“Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” —Thomas Merton
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
Audre Lorde: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. . Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. . As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran
Marge Piercy: Forgive the dead year. Forgive yourself. What will be wants to push through your fingers. The light you seek hides in your belly. The light you crave longs to stream from your eyes. You are the moon that will wax in new goodness.
“Surrender is not passively resigning yourself to something. . .it is a conscious embracing of what is.” —Cynthia Bourgeault
I’ve written about this one before, but it really is a fascinating way to break out of a rut. It’s a common problem for me, at least, looking back through poems I have written and noticing that I use the same words, the same phrasing rhythms, the same ideas, over and over again. Part of this is Voice, and I want to keep honing and focusing my Voice in my poetry, but part of it is the worn place on the carpet where everyone walks, the dip in the marble step where centuries of feet have worn the stone away. Again, there is a certain character to the worn places, but there’s value, too, in forging the new path, finding the new word, creating a new bounce to the rhythm.
Take a poem you’ve written, or write one for the occasion.
Here’s mine, which I am going to write as soon as I finish this sentence:
First it was five deer two does and three fawns moving through the meadow and then five starlings in formation a W against the sky. And was it a pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or was it the Mother whispering, Follow this trail, seek this path and pattern?
Then, copy and paste it, go to Google translate, paste it in the box, and translate it into any of the listed languages. Then switch the boxes so the new poem–in Urdu or Tagalog or Malayalam–is in the Translate box. You can either simply translate it back into English, or choose another language. I like to go through eight or ten languages before I come back to English. Errors happen on the way, and often the errors actually enhance the poem, and usually they give me some insight into the way my mind works to create ideas. Sometimes I keep parts of what happens when I come back to English, and sometimes I mash up bits from the “translation” with bits of the original.
I tried it in ChatGPT, asking for specific languages, but that AI has gotten so good that, after translating it into Malayalam, then Swahili, then Spanish, then Japanese, then Urdu, then back to English, the only difference was that it had translated “pensive” to “contemplative.” That’s a lovely synonym, but I am looking for crunchier bits.
I copied the Urdu from the ChatGPT session into Google Translate to begin. I love the look of the Urdu script: سب سے پہلے پانچ ہرن تھے، دو مادائیں اور تین بچے، جو میدان میں حرکت کر رہے تھے۔ پھر پانچ ستارے تھے، جو آسمان پر ‘W’ کی شکل بنا رہے تھے۔ کیا یہ ایک سوچنے والا اور خوبصورت لمحہ تھا، جس کے بعد دوسرا لمحہ آیا؟ یا یہ ماں تھی جو سرگوشی کر رہی تھی، “اس راستے کی پیروی کرو، اس راستے اور نمونہ کو تلاش کرو؟”
Then Hawaiian, then Icelandic, then Assamese. Look at the Assamese script! আৰম্ভণিতে পাঁচটা হৰিণ, দুজনী মহিলা আৰু তিনিটা ল’ৰা-ছোৱালী, পথাৰত খোজ কাঢ়িছিল। তাৰ পিছত আকাশত “W” আকৃতিৰ পাঁচটা তৰা আছে। চিন্তাশীল নে সুন্দৰ মুহূৰ্ত, তাৰ পিছত আন এটা মুহূৰ্ত? নে এই মাতৃয়ে ফুচফুচাই কৈছে, “এই পথ অনুসৰণ কৰক, এই পথ আৰু এই উদ্দেশ্য বিচাৰি?” Then Samoan, Hmong, Swahili, Kazakh, Telugu. I am swooning at the Telugu script: మొదట్లో పొలంలో ఐదు జింకలు, ఇద్దరు మహిళలు, ముగ్గురు పిల్లలు నడుస్తున్నారు. అప్పుడు ఆకాశంలో ఐదు నక్షత్రాలు “W” ఉన్నాయి. లోతైన లేదా అందమైన అనుభూతి, మొదలైనవి? ఈ తల్లి “ఇటువైపు వెళ్ళు, ఈ ప్రయోజనం కోసం ఈ దారిని వెతుకు” అని గుసగుసలాడుతుందా? Takij, Krio, Ewe, Dogri (another incredible script), Xhosa, and finally back to English. Here is the fascinating result:
The first five deer, two females and three calves were roaming the wild. Then there are five stars “W” in the sky. Deep emotions or beauty etc? This mother is shouting “go over here, find this way to this goal”?
Oh my heart! Some bits are funny, and others really move me. The final three lines, although the question mark survived, are no longer a question, and the Mother–THIS mother–is no longer whispering, but shouting. Hmmm. Maybe shouting is better. I tend to see the moment of visionary and intuitive awareness as a Holy Whisper, but maybe it is actually a Divine Shout? I’m going to try keeping the new sentence structure of the first lines–it takes it into a mythological sort of place rather than simply sounding like my retelling of the moment.
I ran “pensive and beautiful” through several layers of translation and ended with “retired and handsome,” which is no closer to the specific adjectives I want, so I’ll leave that part as is for now. Here’s a mashup.
The first five deer, two does and three fawns, were roaming the wild. Then there were five starlings, a “W” in the sky. A pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or the Mother shouting, Follow this trail, go over here, whispering, seek this path and pattern?
I like how the translator eliminated some of my little introductory bits to my sentences and phrases. I can certainly afford to simplify. I think I like having the Mother both shouting and whispering, but I’m not sure. I might tinker with that some more. I think it has taken my moment from the contemplative and pensive to the mystical and mythical, which is what I am seeking to do with my poetry in this season.
Gratitude List: 1. Such bountiful and beautiful communities that hold and support. 2. Hope and Joy. Finally. Hope and Joy! 3. School begins next week! And In-service starts this Friday! I am intensely eager to get back to it! 4. Holy shouts and whispers from The Mother. 5. Thermal delight after weeks of thermal discomfort. May we walk in Beauty all around!
“Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.” ―Nayyirah Waheed
“This beautiful word “mother” is so sweet and kind in itself that it cannot be attributed to anyone but God.”—Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. ―Raymond Carver
Powerful words from Rob Brezsny: “The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words,” said Terence McKenna in “Alien Dreamtime,” “and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
Here’s my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your use of language.
Do you want to move and breathe amidst infertile chaos where nothing makes sense and no one really loves anyone? Then speak with unconscious carelessness, expressing yourself lazily. Constantly materialize and entertain angry thoughts in the privacy of your own imagination, beaming silent curses out into eternity.
Or would you prefer to live in a realm that’s rich with fluid epiphanies and intriguing coincidences and mysterious harmonies? Then be discerning and inventive in how you speak, primed to name the unexpected codes that are always being born right in front of your eyes. Turn your imagination into an ebullient laboratory where the somethings you create out of nothings are tinctured with the secret light you see in your dreams of invisible fire.
“The power of love is stronger than the power to destroy.” ―Vandana Shiva
“And then– and then your eyes will open as if waking from a dream or waking into a dream and the dew-drenched grasses will sparkle before you like gold in the morning and you will know.
You will know what it is you have come for.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible, that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.” ―Fatema Mernissi
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ―Robin Williams as Mr. John Keating in Dead Poets Society
“Well, I don’t only think that the biosphere is in trouble, I know it is. I just have to look around in the environment, in which I live. In my own part of the part of the world, I keep telling people, let us not cut trees irresponsibly. Let us not destroy especially the forested mountains. Because if you destroy the forests on these mountains, the rivers will stop flowing and the rains will become irregular and the crops will fail and you will die of hunger and starvation. Now the problem is, people don’t make those linkages.” —Wangari Maathai
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” —Robin Williams
“All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“I saw three ways to look at the Motherhood of God. The first is that she created our human nature. The second is that she took our human nature upon herself, which is where the motherhood of grace begins. And the third is motherhood in action, in which she spreads herself throughout all that is, penetrating everything with grace, extending to the fullest length and breadth, height and depth. All One Love.” —Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Here’s a common poetry prompt, taught in workshops and classes. It’s commonly called a copy-change. You simply take a few lines of poetry that move or inspire you, and use the structure of that poem like a template into which you insert your own words, kind of like a Mad Lib. And in this form of poetry, you must always give credit to the original poet. It’s called copy-change because you are copying the style or structure or voice of a poet, and changing it into your own piece.
George Ella Lyon made it a favorite of US English Language teachers after she published her poem “Where I’m From” and realized that teachers were using her format as a template for teaching the writing of poetry as a form of self-exploration. She created a template of her poem with missing words, encouraging students and writers to insert words that described their own lives. Or, if they want, they can just use her poem as inspiration and write whatever they want. Click this link to go to her page.
The Astrologer Rob Brezsny has created a similar exercise using a stanza from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, which encourages his social media followers to explore symbols of their inner life. He suggests using the second stanza of this poem:
Widening Circles by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
Here’s my copy-change of stanza 2, formatted as I would format the poem in order to be sure that I am giving credit for the original. I used Rilke’s first stanza verbatim, so I italicized it, to add another signal that this part is not mine:
Deepening Spirals by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider after by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. (Rilke)
I spiral into the Goddess, toward the center of Earth. I’ve been descending for a thousand lifetimes and I still don’t understand: am I a snake, a labyrinth, or a wild dance?
This exercise has various benefits for the beginning or blooming or stuck poet: It gets you past the freeze that sometimes happens with the blank page. It’s a super low-stakes poem–because it’s “just an exercise,” you don’t have to perform on the page, and so you can break more rules and boundaries, and let go of the control of your brain for a little while. I especially love that it’s a Voice experiment–you get to try on different poets’ voices, see how they fit, feel the way someone else’s words and phrases inform yours. And as a reader, it gets you into the poet’s head and helps you to make sense of their diction and lyricism.
Here is your challenge: Visit Lyon’s page to write a “Where I’m From” poem, or use Brezsny’s Rilke prompt. Or go seeking a short piece of poetry that inspires you and create your own copy-change poem. Don’t forget to credit both yourself and the author. Share it with someone!
Gratitude List: 1. My wise and tender and compassionate friends. I often wonder how I got so lucky. 2. Daily grounding and centering. And other rhythms of grounding–the yearly reunion with my college friends is an incredibly powerful reset and re-centering for me. 3. The nibling-weddings! Because family celebrations! 4. The several delightful years we got to spend with our marvelous vampire cat, Erebus. 5. My school community. May we walk in Beauty!
“Be wary of any influence in your environment which dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, we would become anaesthetised to life itself. Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone. Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit expressing itself through us and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished. The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek enthousiasmos meaning ‘possessed by god.’ Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” —Ray Bradbury
“How do you think you’ll ever see the fairy underneath the flowers, if you never stop to notice the flowers themselves?” —Marie Winger, storyteller
“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your Being.” —Hafiz
“We do not become healers. We came as healers. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are. We do not become storytellers. We came as carriers of the stories we and our ancestors actually lived. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become writers, dancers, musicians, helpers, peacemakers. We came as such. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not learn to love in this sense. We came as Love. We are Love. Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are.” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” —Desmond Tutu
“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” —Dalai Lama
“You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.” —Isadora Duncan
“If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.” —Meister Eckhart
“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.” —Barry Lopez
If you don’t follow Heather Cox Richardson on Substack or Facebook, or get her daily email, I urge you to do so. At least read today’s letter about democracy (click link).
Read her letter to the end: Joe Biden didn’t pass the torch to Kamala Harris. He passed it to us. It’s no longer about whether you are a Democrat or a Republican: It’s about whether you are seeking to continue this democratic experiment or whether you want to go back to autocratic rule. Me, I’m with the We-Won’t-Go-Back crowd.
I keep reminding myself that Democracy is an ideal, that we’re always on a trajectory to create an ever-more-perfect democracy. We still don’t have a true democracy that offers equal opportunities for jobs and power and voice for everyone. We’re at a tipping point where we can choose to keep trying, or give up. I’m going to throw my hat in with the Keep-Trying folx.
Gratitude List: 1. Wise and calm voices 2. The ideal of democracy for which we strive 3. A couple more weeks to get my act together before school starts 4. The deer people of Skunk Holler 5. There truly is magic everywhere around us if we know how to look May we walk in Beauty!
I think I may have made up that title: Wordpool Poem. But the practice of this playful prompt for starting a poem has been around a long time. Early in the days when I was beginning to call myself a poet, I read an exercise by Gwendolyn Brooks in which she gave six words and said to set a timer (was it for five minutes? Eight?) and write a poem using her wordpool.
Here is the edited and refined result of that exercise, as it appears in my 2013 book, The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird:
Chasing Chickens by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I’ve counted my chickens. A dozen times or more they’ve dashed— Dashed, I tell you— Into blackberry canes, Wings whirring. White clouds of dust engulf me. Their voices chuckle from the cliff’s edge. Don’t tell me about chickens. I’m green, baby. Green. And I don’t know how I’m getting home from here.
I love how the imperative of fitting those random words into a poem set me off-kilter enough to write something that felt new and fresh, and held the angst and anxiety of my life at the time in a layer beneath the surreal “story.”
Here is my take on the Wordpool poem game: Scrolling for Words–
Open up one of your social media pages. If you aren’t on social media, find a book or magazine. Set a timer for one minute. Your goal is to harvest 8-10 at least mildly interesting words in one minute. Turn the timer on, and scroll (or skim, if you’re using printed text), copying down words that catch your eye. Pace yourself. You don’t want to end up with 30 words, and if you end up with fewer than 8, you might want to start over.
Once you have your wordpool (at least 8-10!), reset your timer for 8 minutes. Your challenge is: In that 8-minute time period, write a poem using your words. (You may change forms and parts of speech as you go.) Take a deep breath, unhitch the horse of your brain to go racing through the meadow, and GO!
Write, write, write, don’t think!
What a ride! What a rush! Can’t stop, can’t ponder, can’t let the brain take over! But now here’s the grace. Take whatever time you need to edit and revise. Shift line lengths. Listen for sounds that you can enhance or repeat, rhythms you can lean into. Just try to keep your wordpool words there in some form.
Here is my revised and tweaked poem, with the wordpool words in bold:
Chasing the Vision by Beth Weaver-Kreider, July 2024
I believe in the fire of that vision, in the possibilities you created when the other world trickled through, its light sifting into the collection you’d made of saints’ icons in glass canning jars, the blue of that other place shining in your eyes.
I believe in the small angel who crawled through your doorway, sank into the feral dreams of your four-poster bed, in the way you harbored those ghosts in your head, how you’ve been feeding the schemes of the trickster and learning a new way to exist in the between.
Behold! today you will see a new thing (no false vision this), never seen by human eyes: a wing on a fawn, or a cryptical creature of moss and fur, fangs, and scales, and dream. Make the most of the message before it dissipates like mist over the River on those impossible mornings in fall.
Amazingly, somehow–despite the fact that my brain was unhitched and frantically seeking to just get all the words in–this poem feels like an accurate and holy weaving of several conversations I have had in the past week about magic and mystical and cryptical experiences. I’ll come back to it another day to see if it is finished, if it needs more work.
As I tell my students: Break the Rules. The rules are there to give you a specific field in which to play, but you can discard or change the rules I’ve made up at any point that you feel life they’re holding you captive.
Variations: 1. Use a random word generator online. Ask it to give you a set of random words. 2. Eavesdrop. Collect a batch of words throughout your day to use as a wordpool. 3. Try using the same wordpool for two different poems. 4. Generate a wordpool with a friend, and write your own poems using the same pool. 5. For a little harder challenge, begin each line with one of the words in the wordpool.
Gratitude List: 1. My amazing kids, who figured out what was wrong when the water stopped, and fixed the pump. 2. Mystical encounter with a fawn (mine did not have visible wings like the one in the poem) 3. A lovely group of folks in my magical doll-making class yesterday. Meeting online friends in person. Making new connections. 4. People who respond to crises with kindness, by unleashing more goodness into the world. 5. It’s okra season! And even if our heirloom tomatoes aren’t ready, Flinchbaugh’s sells them! May we walk in Beauty!
“Before anxiety, breathe.” Found redacted poem (that’s a prompt for another day) by one of my ninth graders. I ran it through a filter for some color.I love how she got to that last word and decided she needed to manipulate the word to suit her purposes.
Here’s a little refresh for the page: Poetry Prompts!
A few days ago, I re-tolled a fun prompt I sometimes use to get myself out of a rut, using predictive text to break me out of my overused words and rhythms. Wordplay and found poetry help me to find new ways to breathe into a poem, and sometimes offer profoundly new ways of expression. “Let go of the reins of the horse of your brain, and let it wander where it wants to for a while,” I sometimes tell my students. I find that the beautiful balance of letting go, and being ready to step in and actively create (as my student did in the image above) not only informs my poetic process, but my living as well.
So here are some initial ideas for using predictive text to restart your poetic mojo. If you don’t think of yourself as a poet (I disagree, btw–if you put words together in your own way, you are a poet), you can use these exercises to play and explore language. I’ll call the prompts Games, just to make it clear that we’re starting playing here.
One note before we begin: Each Game has rules. Try to follow them, to give the game a little structure and challenge. But be ready to break them if the Poem Gnome taps you on the shoulder and suggests you try something different.
Game 1: You’re going to write a six- or eight-line poem. You are in charge of the word or short phrase that begins each line. Then let predictive text finish the lines for you. Here’s an example, with my words in bold. Of course, I have stolen the words for this one, for the sake of play: Roses are the only thing I need. Violets are the only thing I have. Sugar and honey roasted figs with you And now I’m waiting for the bus. So are you. So it will be.
Game 2: Let’s try the same thing, only alternating words with the predictive text. I find this one creates more tension as I try to direct the predictive text. I actually fought it a little and changed the predictive text generator’s (PTG’s) “look” to “looked.” And I actually let the PTG suggest “whenever” instead of the “when” I was considering. Wafting to the bottom of Pandora’s pool, my little feather was almost ready for you. Dreams of her own box of possibilities flew out of the grove in the rain, and now she has forgotten about her last lover, how the clouds looked whenever he was leaving.
NOTES: 1. You might notice, like I do, that you find yourself backtracking and choosing different words in order to force the PTG to offer you better choices. Feels like chess with the computer. 2. Maybe what you came up with, like mine, is laughable trash. But maybe it gives you an idea for something to do next with your own line breaks and cadences. Steal that and run with it! 3. Likely the poem itself it not a publishable gem. But perhaps there’s a line in there that sings? Take it an spin it into another poem of your own! 4. I love that the PTG gave me “Pandora’s,” but I didn’t want to let it force me into using “box.” But my work in the poem quickly became about telling Pandora’s story. I think I should change the “my” to “her.”
Gratitude List: 1. The wild creatures of Goldfinch Farm. 2. Although there is a lot to accomplish in my summer days, I like how I can choose and plot the course with my own intentions. 3. This lavender-filled collar that I put in the freezer and then wear about my neck when the heat feels overwhelming. 4. These teenagers. I love their company, quiet and reserved as it is. Comfortably being together in the house. 5. The creative urge. Making stuff. May we walk in Beauty!
I’m flying a little by the seat of my pants these days, trying to maintain all my daily rhythms, and still not get stressed by all the little things to keep up with. SO last night, I just didn’t do my daily April poem-a-day post here. Sometimes I beat myself up a bit for not being the energy powerhouse that so many of my friends seem to be. I need to protect my energy, gather and store.
Gratitude List: 1. The Dawn Chorus these days. Oh, the birdsong! 2. All the different smells 3. Friends and beloveds who invest time and heart in each other 4. How the beauty just explodes all of a sudden here in the spring. One minute you notice the leaves of the bleeding hearts appearing, and then SUDDENLY they’ve bloomed! 5. Movements for peace and justice. The people who are doing the work, whatever their piece of the work may be. May we walk in Beauty!
“I love to write to you – it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.” Emily Dickinson
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” —Rumi
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!” “Leave me alone. I’m sick.” “I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” —Rumi
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha ****” Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have been changed from what I was before; and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air, Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel
Rob Brezsny: Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.” Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.” But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein. For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.
Gratitude List: 1. Makin’ little ‘zines–so satisfying 2. Our History teacher is having her tenth-graders make a Hooverville as they study the Great Depression. They’ve actually made a little box town outside where they’ll be having class for the next few days. They have signs with the boxes, and they’ve written paragraphs about them, and now she’s given all the Middle Division teachers a note-sheet with reflection questions so we can take our classes out to experience it, basically turning it into a whole school lesson. So inspiring. Brilliant pedagogy. 3. Roasted cauliflower. Our school has a healthy living committee which challenged us to strive for five a day (veggies and fruits) in the month of March. We are definitely eating more fruits and veg in the WK household. 4. Track and field coaches–I’m grateful for all the time and heart they invest in our kid and his classmates 5. Yellow. I had a fascinating conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about tetrachromatism, the condition where the eyes have more rods or cones or something, causing them to actually see more colors than other people, and how people with tetrachromatism often don’t really like the color yellow. I think I probably don’t have it. Yellow makes me jubilant. May we walk in Beauty!
“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung
Listen by Shel Silverstein
Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child, Listen to the DON’TS Listen to the SHOULDN’TS, the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS Listen to the NEVER HAVES, Then listen close to me- Anything can happen, child, Anything can be.
If you are a dreamer by Shel Silverstein
If you are a dreamer, come in, If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer… If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!
“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.” —Mary Oliver
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela
Twelve Things I Have Learned So Far: (1) You do not always have to be right. (2) People can change. (3) Loss comes to us all, but so does grace. (4) We can disagree and still be together. (5) Kindness is the greatest treasure I have to give away. (6) We are all healed even if it does not happen on our timeline. (7) Imagination is a form of prayer. (8) I own nothing. (9) Life is full of sacred signs if only we look to see them. (10) The ancestors are real. (11) Not all of my friends and mentors are human. (12) Now is eternal and it is my home. —Steven Charleston
Gratitude List: 1. Cosmic Events 2. The community of people all enjoying the same thing 3. Mac ‘n’ Cheese 4. Sheri S. Tepper’s world-building 5. We went owl-watching today! May we walk in Beauty!
“You have to really hug the [one] you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms.. breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he or she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into [them] and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.“ —William Blake
We, unaccustomed to courage, exiled from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.“ —Maya Angelou
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein
“We are all the leaves of one tree. We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton
Rilke: God speaks to each of us as [s]he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?” —Martin Shaw
Mockingbird Chronicles 