Leaf Poems

Oh my gosh these are so poems! My favorites are the Wireless Ginkgo tree and the Swiss-Army Knife tree. Thanks for Accidental Mysteries, again, for found poetry.

WITS, CPITS, and Ode to the Color Black

I was searching the web for poems to use as examples tomorrow while teaching my Regnart GATE students about odes. I found this great site, called WITS: Writers in the Schools. I love the site, so clean and easy to see all the poems, and great art and photos as well. I'm so happy I found this. There are also some great ode poems about things like turtles and the color black. I'm grateful to these teachers and to their students. I can't tell if they are a national organization, or Texas?? I also really like how the post photos from flickr and document that on the site. Wow, I just am in love with them today.

Here is my favorite poem from their site:

Ode to the Color Black

In darkness,
beauty ebony
rises,
envelops all. Cold,
warm nothing.
Infinite pools
holding
infinite thoughts, deep
and hidden. Blackness
is the only one
with the power to
hold memories, to
induce forgetfulness.

Every person
has
two caches of
blackness. They are
your eyes. You see
with black
holes, pools, wells
of meaning,
meaninglessness.
Black means
print on paper,
pupils,
emptiness,
nothing. But black
has turned bitter. The world
believes black
is a
horrible color.
Black hearts
are full of cruelty.
Black cats
bring bad luck.
But black
is beautiful. Black
is eternal.

by Maya, 7th grade

[painting by Mark Rothko]

(c) Writers in the Schools 2007-2010.

Welsh poet at Stanford: Small languages make a big difference

Welsh poet at Stanford: Small languages make a big difference

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And, here's one of her poems. I love this, love this. The recorded interview on YouTube has her reading her poems in Welsh, and the printed interview provides another poem in English. I'm in love. Makes me want to go home and write.

Happy New Year

I'm going to open up this blog to the public in this new year. Then I'm going swimming.

Tough Season

We have been overwhelmed by illness, moving, gas leaks, AT&T, and kitty wounds. At least, I have been overwhelmed. Today the kids put the tree up. I've been on FaceBook a bit. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I have no poems, except the one I tried to write in 140 characters per stanza for Michael's 65th birthday. Under the Alhambra. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow. Again. Such brave hopes.

In this picture you can see how I've used clothes pins to attach the stockings to the candelabra above the fire place. It's working for now. I need to find permanent places for the pictures, the clock.

This post really should be in the Ziegler Brown Remodel blog. Dang.

Almost 49 "if all else fails, sharks have a keen sense of hearing"

Yes, tomorrow is my birthday. I have elaborate plans, and several new empty notebooks, for getting my "50th year" off to a good start. Diet, exercise, vitamins. Water. Walking a little, swimming a lot. Keeping a daybook -- half diary, half journal, half sketch book, half PAD -- that's just like me, too many halves. I've been in a tiny email correspondence with Angela, who's raising money for flood victims in the Philippines, and I've started my thesis planning in earnest. Al is being very generous, and gently prodding, and I have to get going before I blow it. I even left a message for Laurie on her 50th birthday -- the actual day. My poetic life is up for grabs -- I plan to catch it myself.

I am happy to have found "What To Do About Sharks" by Vivian Shipley on the AAP website. What a great poem, and I hope to teach it to my 5th graders at Regnart this spring. They've asked me to come back, although I can't imagine where they are getting the money.

I'm intrigued to try to find and read something written by the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Herta Mueller (with an umlaut, not an 'e'). I like what the committee said about her: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" -- and I love the title of one of her books, at least the English translation, The Land of Green Plums. (Heart-animal is good too)

Herztier, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994. Published in an English translation by Michael Hofmann as The Land of Green Plums, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1996

I just finished reading Francine Prose's 2000 novel, Blue Angel, which I adored, and kept me good company yesterday while I was home sick -- a cold? swollen throat -- headache -- I think it's more likely Remodel Pneumonia.

Here's a little lovely poem from Heidy Steidlmayer, published in Poetry in 2007. I know, I should have read that issue a while ago, but I am slow. I love the sounds in this poem. And the form. I'm a sucker for sound and shape and poems that have body and not just mind.

Scree

I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.

Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other --
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.

A Pain in the Hip

So, I have early mild to moderate arthritis in my hips. Worse in the left. Probably. Still need x-ray confirmation. I need to take good care of my hips so I'll have them for a long long time. I'm looking for inspiration in poems (where else?) and found Lucille Clifton:

homage to my hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

— Lucille Clifton

audio clip
May 03, 1983
Guggenhiem Museum
From the Academy of American Poets Audio Archive

I'm going to keep looking for poems. But I'm not allowed to sit at the computer as much any more, so I guess I'll just have to be sporadic. Or, more sporadic.