poetry prompt

Throw Myself in

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 12: Two in one–Write a happy poem, and then write sad>  I’ve wandered a little far afield with this one.  The idea for a Passion/Calm poem started to work on me this morning as I was headed to work, and I decided to follow that rather than the specific happy/sad prompt.

Now I realize that I must fling myself
into the center of my life
with a fierce intensity
and passionate joy
or risk dissipation.

And all while holding the center,
embodying the nature of the tree.
This, too, helps to hold it all together.

That still small place cannot exist for me
without the passion that feeds it.
Nor can I maintain the fire
without the quiet and glowing core.

Gratitude List:
1.  Venus.  At least I think that’s who it is, like a bright flower, these nights.
2. Warm hen eggs on cold fingers
3.  My sourdough starter fluffied up.  Tomorrow, sourdough bread.  Mean while, my mother’s amazing banana bread.  My brother is running a marathon on Sunday, so I am carb-loading for him.
4.  John Tavener.  May he be finding the deeply spiritual music he always sought.
5.  White sage and rehmannia root and lavender and hyssop.  Dandelion root and birch bark and whole dried chilis and lemon balm and St. John’s Wort.  Peppermint and elecampane root and dried elderberries and hawthorn berries and juniper berries.  Chamomile and jasmine and helichrysm blossoms.  I weighed and packaged herbs today at Radiance.  What a marvelous day.

Blessings on the blossom.  Blessings on the root.  Blessings on the leaf and stem.  Blessings on the fruit.

People in Trees

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

mikola_gnisuk_people_in_trees

<Prompt 11: Write an ekphrastic poem>  Ekphrastic poetry is based on another piece of art.  Brewer posted several evocative images on his blog, and I can’t get “People in Trees” by Mikola Gnisuk out of my head.   And also, today, I have been looking up photos and videos of murmurations of starlings.  Did you know that a flock of starlings is called a murmuration?  Here goes:

At the start of it we traveled through a fat mist,
a couple dozen of us in the thick soup,
and all was silent except for the light drip
all around from leaf to leaf,
and our footsteps on the ground,
and then the huff and shuffle of our breath
as we sped faster through the trees.

It was not fear that drove us on,
I know that now.  Nor just the thrill
of what we knew must come.  Still,
on we moved, and faster, through the birches.

And then the murmurs of the others,
the shift and scrape of feathers
and the whoosh of the wind,
and we were flying, a body of starlings,
twisting and whirling as one through the trees.
Like separate atoms of one single bird
we flew through the morning
and into the day.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Light rays through the clouds.  Yesterday, we watched a vulture sliding between those rays, like shifting between worlds.  When I was a teenager, I spent part of a summer in Venezuela.  One afternoon, we were riding in the back of a pick-up through the Caracas barrio, when the clouds opened up and let down glittering rays.  Our host, who was seated next to me, suddenly began singing, full voice.
2.  Even with his razor claws, this warm purring kitty on my lap.  Those poor arthritic paws can’t quite retract the sharp bits, and my shoulders are constantly scabbed.
3.  Setting up a puzzle in the living room.  The kids are finally old enough that it won’t be a total mess, and Farmer Jon is feeling free enough to sit and work on it!
4.  Hot tea
5.  That moment when I am making a doll or an animal when it becomes itself, when I can see the sort of character it will be.  I finally finished my horse today.
2013 November 067
Blessings on the Roots.

Nests

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
<Prompt 5: Write a poem about something concealed/write about something unconcealed.>
All through the verdant season
the nest-builders have concealed
within the thick cover of leaves
their great treasures, crafted
of vines and twigs, cobwebs, grasses:
their work of the season’s passing.
Then, mystery and secrecy–
the eggs, dappled and speckled,
and suddenly, ravenous nestlings.
But now, all is revealed.  The trees
have dropped their golden skirts
about their ankles, and the secret is spilled.
There, in the yellow maple,
a random twiggy pile of mockingbird nest.
A bedraggled clump of matted grass
at the furthest dangling limb of the poplar
is all that remains of oriole’s art.
In the tree at the top of Ducktown Road,
a gray orb, nest of a colony of paper wasps.
“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
In the sky, those rippled clouds,
ribs of the gods, and birds gathering,
riding the sky-road south for winter.
2013 November 001

Mockingbird’s secret

(Blank) Sheet, a Grouchy Little Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 4: (Blank) Sheet> I really did have this one finished yesterday, but I fell asleep in the recliner while I was waiting for my turn at the computer.  I am having a little more trouble trusting Mockingbird this year.  I want my poems to be just a little more polished before I post them.  I don’t want to go with first impulses, which feel flimsy and light.  Instead of trusting that writing will bring the inspiration, I am waiting around and pushing for it.  Then I get stuck.  So this poem turned into a complaint.  Here goes:

A sure-fire method to freeze the gears,
to gum up the fine workings of the Muse:

Tell the poet to write
about the Blank Sheet.

The Blank Sheet is the yawning chasm
we stare into, the poet’s dark
and treacherous Void.
It draws me in like a moth
to the challenge and the danger.

Tell me not to think about the elephant
and suddenly everywhere I see an elephant.

 

I need to keep reminding myself that the first time I did this, lots of days were duds.  The whole point is to keep the lines open, to keep fluid and hopeful, to begin to shape the inner work of the daily life into pieces of a poetic puzzle that fit together.  Even though something in me is cringing at my early attempts, this grouchy little poem is exactly what I needed today, even if it won’t make the chapbook.  Today’s prompt (I will try to be more prompt in execution) is a two-fer: Write a concealed poem.  Unconceal everything.

2013 November 008

Gratitude List:
1.  Pushing through
2.  Those leaves!  I feel as I if I died and went to Vermont.
3.  Rilke
4.  Elephants
5.  Endings and Beginnings: Today begins the last week of CSA shares for the 2014 season.  Now we gear up for December shares.

May we walk in Beauty.

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

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?

Seize Your Goat!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

(with thanks to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, 1982)

 

get (get)  [< akin to OE. -gietan (see BEGET, FORGET),
G. -gessen in vergessen, forget
< IE. base *ghend-, to seize, get hold of,
whence L. prehendere, to grasp, understand]

1. to come into the state of having; win, gain, obtain, acquire
[Don’t let her get your goat.]
2. to set up communication with, as by radio or telephone
[Ah yes, I see, she got your goat.]

3. to influence or persuade (a person) to do something
[You can get your goat to climb the stairs, but you’ll never get it down again.]
4. to reach; arrive at
[How did you get back downstairs with that goat?]

5. to go and bring
[Go get your goat back, Girl!]
6. to become afflicted with (a disease)
[Oh yes, I’ve gotten goats.  It’s no easy affliction, let me tell you.]

7. to cause to be
[I see you’ve got your goats in a row.]
8. to be sentenced to
[She got your goat.  Now what is she going to do with it?]

9. [Colloq.] to own; possess
[I have got my own goat, thank you.]
10. [Colloq.] to be or become the master of;
to overpower; to have complete control of
[Or has your goat got you?]

11. [Colloq.] to catch the meaning or import of; understand
[Relax.  She really gets your goat.]
12. [Slang] to cause an emotional response in;
irritate, please, thrill, etc.
[Your goat gets me every time.]

 

Saturday Prompt

I know, I’m supposed to be done and editing, but Tuesday is Brigit, Groundhog’s Day, Imbolc, Candlemas, the Feast of St. Brighid, a luminous day deserving of poetry.  Let’s skip a day and write a poem to honor the occasion on Saturday.  Join me?

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Cassiopeia, Orion, Pleiades (and spell-check)
2.  Forgiveness
3.  A sun-splattered day and winds that meant it
4.  Did the boys pass an entire day without a single fight?  It’s a miracle.
5.  Editing

May we walk in beauty.

laughing goat
I found this randomly on the web and cannot discover who owns it.  I’ll credit it if someone tells me.

The Bookbinder’s Hands

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In memory of my Aunt Elizabeth Weaver, and in honor of the Bookbinder of Water Street, whom I have never met.

The bookbinder’s hands have always been there,
golden in the glow of the lamp light,
curved over the book’s curling skin,
over the cover of an ancient volume
of German poetry, or an Ausbund, perhaps.
Smoothing the pages of a treatise
on divine rights of liberty written
when this was still Penn’s Woods.

The bookbinder sees with fingertips
the miniscule tears, the frayed edge,
the embossment like landscapes,
fingers gently curling like Kwan Yin’s
in a sacred mudra, touching holiness
with tenderness, while the dust
of centuries twinkles in the lamp light
above the bookbinder’s careful hands.

 

Final Prompt of January

Friends, this has been for me a marvelous month.  Thank you for your kind words and responses and “likes.”  During February, I will weed and edit and cultivate this month’s crop of poems, and some others which I have been hoarding.  Yesterday, my friend Kelsey Myers sent me the link to this poem.  Thematically, it’s a challenging read–breezy on the surface and brutal at the heart.  I love it, and I want to do my own version of a definition poem for my last poem of the month.  Join me for one last romp through the word-meadows?  (Oh, there will be plenty more after I have had my little break.  Meanwhile, I will continue to create poem-fodder in the shape of Gratitude Lists, and write some little poems here and there.)

 

Gratitude List:

1.  I gave myself a gift–signed up for Flame in the Hand, John Terlazzo’s writer’s workshop.
2.  Serendipity
3.  Synchronicity–I woke up thinking of an Idea, and turned on FB to read a message by a friend asking me whether I had ever considered this Idea.
4.  Face cream and body oil and glasses of water and rain
5.  Muffins

May we walk in beauty.

Marvel and Wonder
Photo by Michelle Johnsen

Once I Was a Snake

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“Once I was a snake.  Once I was a weasel.”  –Joss Weaver-Kreider

Once I was a snake.
Once I was a weasel.
Once I was a spider
casting webs to catch
the fire of the sun.

At the dawning,
there were three trees:
walnut, poplar
and sycamore.
Generations of birds
nested in their branches.
Whole cities of small creatures
grew among their roots.
And black snakes carried news
along their highways,
from lofty breezy branches
to deep in the earth
where the the roots
sought underground streams.

Once I was a hawk.
Once I was an otter.
Once I was a grey owl
swooping from behind
the shadow of the moon.

As the first day began,
a small spring ran
from under a rock
off the flank of the ridge,
into a laughing stream
and down to a lazy river.
Families of crayfish
scuttled through the shallows.
Minnows twinkled in and out
of the sun-dappled pools.
A matriarch kingfisher
chortled and dove,
happy in her hunting.

Once I was a grouse.
Once I was a turkey.
Once I was a great elk
who sought my herd
in the valley of the stars.

 

Prompt for Wednesday

Two more days of January.  Then I take a break from poem-a-day to do some editing.  Let’s see.  What shall we write tomorrow?  I almost tried to fit an image from my morning into today’s poem, but couldn’t make it work.  How about making a poem about a powerful image of some sort?  Choose a painting, or a photo, or a memory with strong visuals.  Mine, I’ve written on my gratitude lists before, and I saw it again this morning: the lamp light shining on the hands of the bookbinder tenderly repairing an ancient book.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Jon happened to go outside this evening to discover that the chickens had escaped.  Everyone is safe inside the coop tonight.
2.  Finding lost things
3.  So many shades of green
4.  Chocolate and coffee
5.  Making it myself

May we walk in beauty.

2011 June 199
Veggie mandala–I am looking forward to summer!