Poetry Prompts

Begin Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

(Poem-A-Day Prompt 3: “The Last Time I was Here)

Here we go again,
me and Mike Finnegan,
and some old Benedictine:
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

I thought I had evolved
past the brooding and the sulk,
past lack of will, lack of resolve.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

The last time I was here,
the emptiness was vaster,
I was drawn to the disaster.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

Today that distant light
seems brighter, closer, right
around the corner.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

Beginning November Poem-a-Day Challenge

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here goes.  I’m diving in to the Poem-a-Day challenge two days late.  These first two or three might be a little more slapdash than even Mockingbird would approve, but that’s the way it will have to be.  Please feel free to join me!  I’d be honored if you want to post your own poems here.  Or you can follow the prompts and post on Brewer’s blog itself.

Day One Prompt: Write an appearing poem.

Riddle: a tanka

Down halls of dream, through
tattered veils of old stories
no fury, no fear
only the question of where
the next riddle will appear.

Day Two Prompt:  Write a News of the Day poem.  This one is a found poem, right from the source.  I want to practice more found poetry, though in a hurry to finish a poetry quota is probably not the moment to do it.  Mockingbird says to stop apologizing and get on with it.

Bomb: a found poem
source

Chief said police
will continue to its investigation,
the fourth in the past two weeks.
Post-9/11, we cannot turn a blind eye.
Nothing was found.

Students were evacuated
after the threat was found
written in a bathroom at 8:21 a.m.

Students and staff were returning
to finish out the day.
Nothing was found.

The district has notified parents.
Check back for updates.

 

Moving right along, here is the one I will work on today, and hopefully post by this evening or tomorrow morning:  Day 3 Prompt.

2013 November 019

Gratitude List:
1.  Glittering autumn sunlight
2.  An extra hour of sleep
3.  Punctuation
4.  Challenging myself
5.  Community rituals of remembrance

May we walk in Beauty.

Back to Form

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 October 058

Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms.  This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  It is a French form called a lai.  It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.

It’s 9 lines.  The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B.  Here goes:

Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark.  Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.

Hmmm.  Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me.  Nah.  That was fun.  Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme.  And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think.  I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme.  Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme.  Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The artistic power of limits
2.  Colored pencils
3.  Warm rug for winter
4.  Cleaning the attic
5.  Civility

Beauty All Around Us.

Ducks in the Rain and a Dove with the Fire of the Sunset in Its Eyes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

It happened to me again this morning.  I woke up with the fragments of dream-world swirling through my brain, but as text, not as image.
“I place it into my bowl full of winter.”

And then there was more, several more surreal, semi-attached bits of cobweb-phrases.  But those I don’t remember.

Something about the key to my grandmother’s house.

I woke up and tried to write it as a poem.  All I could do was to write and re-write the phrase.  Again and again.  So this will be my next poetry prompt.  I’ll try again tomorrow.  Join me, if you like, or pull an image or phrase from your own dreaming to join to mine.  We’ll see what we come up with, eh?

In the meantime, here’s a photo of my goofy son and a blue egg.  And a gratitude list.

2013 April 055

Gratitude List:
1.  Funny Blue Cat: Winky sat on one of Ellis’s pastel drawings last night and now she is blue, providing lots of laughs today.
2.  White ducks in the rain on the green grass.  I’m not trying to channel WCW, but I love this pair of white farm ducks that seem to love sitting on the lawn of the Rutter’s right next to the road.  They could be under the forsythia bushes.  And I love the look of them in the rain.
3.  The lovely people who send me images.  My heart is so warmed and encouraged by the photos, the wonder, the story my cousin Don told me about seeing a white dove with the fire of the sunset in its eyes.
4.  Community-building.  Changing the system together.  I went to see the movie Fresh tonight.  Family First Health, a local medical practice offered the screening free at York Little Theater.  They’re pushing for real health, those folks, eating real food.  I love Joel Salatin and his “Chicken-ness of the chicken, pig-ness of the pig, tomato-ness of the tomato.”  He gets the deep archetypal import of it all.  And Don Ikerd.  I love Don Ikerd–he says we can change, we can wean ourselves from industrial ag and back to real actual food again.  Now, if only the small farmers can make a living in the meantime. . .
5.  Being who I want to be.  I feel like the chrysalis may soon be ready to crack open.

May we walk in beauty.  So much, so much love.

Poetry Prompt: Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I used to write Morning Pages.  Religiously.  I think I wrote for an hour every morning, fast and without pondering.  Julia Cameron said it would help me learn to know my inner artist, and so I did it.  That was about fifteen years ago, and I was writing many poems during that year and finding richness in the writing.  Ask me why I stopped and I can fire off a dozen excuses, some of them actually sort of reasonable.

Just a few weeks ago, at a writers’ retreat in York, John Terlazzo asked us do a similar process in response to several writing prompts, and then encouraged us to pick it up as a daily practice.  And so I have taken up the practice again.

Yesterday, this came out on the page as I was writing: “The idea is that I am trying to break up the sentence, to pull back that veil of sense that covers my brain.  To let myself go.”  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to string apparently unrelated images together, collage-style, until a unified and profound whole emerges.  I have been wanting to take this process a step further and string words and sounds together in a similar way.  I’m not quite ready for my shoo-be-do-be-doo poem.  And I found that even breaking the sentence was challenging for me.  I’m still stringing images together.  But I’m getting there.  And I want to take it further.

Then this lovely quotation visited my Facebook Feed yesterday.  I agree with many of the people who responded when I posted it (find that conversation here) that many scientists and mathematicians value poetic language to describe the world they explore.  But the basic idea, of the poet approaching truth through paradox–that grabs me:

“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.

“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.

“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.”

—Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”

This will be my homework for myself in the next few days, for Monday’s poem:

Poetry Prompt:
To write without stopping for half an hour each day for the next three days, ignoring sentence sense, trying to bring myself into a patter-spatter of images and words.  To break the sentence, to step behind the veil of sense.  Then, sometime on Monday, to glean a poem from among those writings.  Will you join me?

 

Groundhog skull an Goddess Potato:2013 March 098

Noticing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I just noticed that there is a face in the shadow of the tree on the barn at the top of my blog page.  Just a little to the left of center.  Hmm.  Don’t forget–tomorrow’s poem is a list poem–perhaps a gratitude?

Gratitude List:
1.  Opportunities to practice the work I have committed to, even when it’s hard.
2.  Good music.
3.  Abundance.   Lavish love, overflowing hope.  Yes, even when I sit near or in the shadows.
4.  Children’s literature
5.  Process.  Step by Step.  Just because I/we want to be There at sometime in the future doesn’t mean we have to jump there today.
May we walk in beauty.

Make a List

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I almost forgot that I was going to post a prompt on March Fridays for a Monday poem.  How about a List poem this time?  The gratitude lists that I have made part of my daily practice are often as much a poetic exercise as a spiritual/emotional one.  Join me?  Mine will likely be a gratitude list, but any list counts.  Due Monday.  Read Naomi Shihab Nye’s Prayer in My Boot for some good inspiration.

Gratitude List for Friday:
1.  Working together with other farmers.  Good hard physical labor.  It doesn’t matter that some of the others could grab two fifty-pound bags of potatoes off the truck while I struggled to wrangle one at a time.  It felt good.
2.  That I am no longer carrying one of those fifty-pound bags around as personal weight, like I was 12 years ago.  My knees are grateful.
3.  Moose Tracks
4.  Library Book Sale!  I can indulge my addiction to my satisfaction and the money goes to a good cause.  (Now to find room on the shelves. . .)
5.  Growth
May we walk in beauty.
2013 March 032

11 Borrowed Words: Poetry Prompt for Monday

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I love to pull order out of seeming randomness.  It harnesses the magical energy of word-work.  Last year, I was given the prompt to write a poem using five random song titles.  I went to my CD shelves, closed my eyes and chose 5 CDs.  Then I stacked them up, chose the first song from the first CD, the second from the second, and so on.  The randomness of the resulting poem pulled me out of my tendency to sermonize and dogmatize.

For Monday’s poem, I think I’ll base my Randomness Rules on the date.  I’ll choose a book at hand, open to the 13th page (for the year).  For March, I’ll scan down to the 3rd line, and for the day, I’ll choose 11 words, in order beginning somewhere on that line.  (I do offer myself the grace to try a different book, if the first one is unpromising).  Somewhere in my poem I’ll use those 11 words, either as a phrase, or a chant, or even randomly placed–separately–throughout the poem.  I’ll make sure to credit the author of the words I steal.

I’ll post it here on Monday.

Join me?

Monday Mornings in March

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I have had my February off from writing poetry.  January’s poems were more challenging for me to write than the November batch, and they all came out more roughly cut, more in need of attention.  In the next few days, I hope to have the chapbook “Holding the Bowl of the Heart” off to Finishing Line Press for the Emerging Women’s Voices contest.  But meanwhile, I feel in need of a little discipline to keep me writing.

To that end, I am going to do a Monday poem each week in March.  I’ll try to post a prompt or discuss an idea a few days before, in case anyone wants to write with me.

For Monday, I am working on a poem about dreams.  I know I’ve done this before, but I have one in the kettle, cooking up, and I need a deadline to get it onto paper.  Where do dreams come from?  Or what connection do dreams have to our everyday landscapes?  I am working with images of trees and spiderwebs.

Join me?  Dreams, webs, trees, something like that. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  The bald eagle that flapped around the hollow this afternoon.  I had been looking out the dining room window when I saw a large buffy shape in the woods that put me in mind of a large bird, though I could tell it was just place where a branch had broken off a tree.  I sort of fell into a reverie, thinking about giant mythical birds, and what it would be like to see a really large bird like a roc out in the woods.  Suddenly, from the trees off to the left, by the pond, a bald eagle flapped outward and upward.  It sort of twisted around and looked like it was going to rest in the poplar tree before it took off.  I felt like I had recognized its energy signature before I even saw it, like I intuited its presence.
2.  Crocus and honeybees (I have seen both this spring, though not together.  The photo of the bumble below is from another spring.)
3.  The courage of the women of this article.
4.  The warm time is coming.
5.  Planting onions in the greenhouse today.  Getting my hands dirty.  Worm poop.

May we walk in beauty.

Coming soon to a yard near you. . .

2010 March 160

Song for Poets: A Poem for Brighid’s Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today we look for that jolly rodent, and also we commemorate Brighid, triple goddess and patroness of Ireland, Saint of Kildare.  Smithcraft, poetry, and healing arts are her realms.  Sacred wells, undying flame.

We forge our words on your anvil,
listening for the sweet ping
of hammer on metal,
watching the sparks fly outward,
shaping and crafting.

We seek them like wild herbs
found only on the side of a mountain
for a short season each year.
We search under bracken,
through briar and thorn,
stepping through bogs,
listening for the birdsong
that tells us we have arrived
at the proper place.

We give ourselves to words,
not waiting for inspiration,
but chasing it like skuthers of fog
over the misty hills.
Seeking the solace and healing
that words offer,
and turning our minds
to do that healing work.
Crafting our words
into tools and enticements.

A year and a day
the old ones would pledge
to your service.
So may it be.
One year of poetry,
making it, reading it.

Oh Lady, give us poetry.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Another day of no fighting.  This is like a miracle.  Really.
2.  Ground beef rolls with cheese roux like Odongo used to make.  With kale.
3.  Choosing my own path.
4.  Mary Oliver and synchronicity and magic.
5.  Stars.

May we walk in beauty.

2013 February 024
Red Russian kale in the snow.  Before I ate it.