The Poetry Patio

Kittens

iphone photo by author (meet Moby and Beans!)

The day begins with energy renewed
when rising sun peeps between the curtains
a lively cycle has already bloomed

In half-light dawn with some yawning, subdued,
the dozy moment won’t last, that’s certain
since overnight their energy renewed

As soon as those bright eyelids are unglued
recharged by sleep, ready again for fun
the lively cycle re-bursts into bloom

Nooks and crannies are where playtime is brewed
a house full of toys ready for action
each day with joy finds energy renewed

So full of beans, sunny young through and through
springing round life like two happy beacons
they play and rest with vigor in full bloom

A brother sister furry motley crew
bounding from bed like shots from a canon
the day begins with energy renewed
and life’s sweet cycle ready to rebloom

I shared this on my instagram as well, but once again I wanted to say more about it so y’all are getting it as a blog post too. We have two kittens in the house and I’ve been having a hard time concentrating in preparation for next month’s 30/30 project. This morning I managed to read a few villanelles, and I wrote the above as a warmup. I also broke in the book I’ll be using (which I discovered, appropriately, when one of the kittens crawled into a space I’d been stashing things and forgetting about.)

Obviously I ordered this intending it to be a journal or something. The pressure of deciding how to personalize an item is challenging for me! I’m a little concerned the page size isn’t big enough, so for future villanelles I’m planning to have them span facing pages.

I need ROOOOOM for my messy handwriting, for crossing out and revising! I don’t like to erase, because I want to see all the words I considered in case I want to go back and use them. . . . although I prefer to write in pencil since I still have the option of erasing. Picking, picky, picky.

Thanks for stopping by and reading! Please remember that my 30/30 project is a fundraiser benefitting Tupelo Press, which is a non-profit. If you have a couple of extra dollars, please consider donating! Here is the link : my fundraiser page.

Can you hear the tales mountains tell?

Listen!
In that smoky breath
there are a host of stories
written in spirit letters
that masquerade as cloud
old stories like old ghosts
drawn up from the root of the world

The tales are seeds now
tossed up with creative energy
from moldy fern on weathered floor
to the wind that still blows as it
blew long ago when these rounded
furry hills were lofty peaks and crags

Listen: time is speaking

I shared this poem on my instagram today, but I wanted to share it here as a blog post as well for a couple of reasons. One of them is that my friend Kimberly McAfee came up with the prompt (the title of the poem is the prompt) and shared them on her instagram. The full list of her prompts for July is below:

If you choose to write for any / all of these, please reach out to Kim and let her know! She has recently published a book, too; here’s a link where you can read more about her

The second reason I wanted to share this poem here as a blog post is because the source of inspiration that compelled me to respond to the prompt is a place I recently went to in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Without going into detail I will just share photos I made from the plaque at the place instead:

Readers, thank you!

A Poetry Marathon!

Friends, I have exciting news! For the month of August, I am taking part in a 30/30 project for Tupelo Press, a non-profit, independent publisher.

What does that mean? I’ll be writing, and publishing, a poem-a-day for the entire month, and, in return for the gracious support of the Press, I will be doing my best to raise money for them. It’s a terrific challenge for me, plus I am excited to be helping out a non-profit, and I’m thrilled for the opportunity to have some new eyes on my work.

My “plan” is for this to be an ekphrastic endeavor, using instant film photographs from my summer travels. I am thinking I would like to write all villanelles, since the cyclical rhythm of them appeals to me and I feel like it would lend an echo to the feelings I have in relation to the whole project. . . . but once I get going goodness knows how everything will evolve!

To give you another hint of what I might manage to produce: this summer I have been on two two-week trips. One took me to Colorado and New Mexico, all camping, all in the truck. The second involved a plane ride in addition to truck time, and took me to Nantucket, Cape Cod, North Carolina (lots of it), Tennessee, and Arkansas. I am barely back home but I’m already working on the photographs in preparation for writing 30 new poems!

I would LOVE for you to follow me through this adventure! And I would be grateful if you could throw in for the fundraising, which you can do at THIS LINK.

Please keep an eye on my Instagram for updates.

. . . .Readers, thank you! And hey fellow writers, why not think about applying for a 30/30 project of your own??

Summer, Part I

Greetings friends! It’s been a wild summer already, and it isn’t even halfway finished yet. I am recently back from the first of two trips: the first one was a road trip that went through the DFW area, up to Wichita Falls, into the Panhandle via Caprock Canyon and Palo Duro, then on to Colorado and New Mexico. It was a doozie, just about two weeks, with 8 nights of camping in 3 locations plus a couple nights with friends and a couple nights in motels. I’ve been mostly hunkered down trying to regroup before the next one since we got home.

If anything can augment the joy of travel and exploration, for me it’s returning with a treasure trove of new work. I did my best to keep my mind in the moment, so that my writing and photography could reflect the experiences at hand. What you see in the above photo is the combo of writing materials I brought along. It took me several days to realize how color coordinated it was; that wasn’t planned, but it made me even happier.

To that end, although it pained me I wouldn’t let myself read more than a page or two of the wonderful poetry book I found at a shop near Palo Duro Canyon. It’s by an Amarillo writer and it’s INCREDIBLE so you definitely need to pick yourself up a copy. The words are so evocative that I couldn’t read them in the mountains: they picked me up like a tornado and carried me straight back to the panhandle (and I needed to be in the mountains). I’m relishing the book now that I’m home again.

Check out this link for more info on the author. Also here’s his Instagram.

We had a LOT OF RAIN in Colorado. An astonishing amount. And slushy hail / sleet that coated the mountain and temporarily collapsed our kitchen tent. We bought the last two pieces of adult-sized rain gear that Walmart had in stock. And thanks to that rain gear, the weather didn’t stop us. Here’s me looking 9 months along with a camera bag protected under the size XL rain jacket.

In Ft Worth, I found a nice copy of Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems, and I somehow managed to get it home without getting damaged in the chaos of the truck cab. I’ve started perusing it in the last couple of days and it’s amazing to me how it’s the perfect thing for me to read to get my creative mind in gear for the next adventure (which will spend some time, synchronicity-like, in North Carolina where he apparently had a home you can visit now). I’m very much appreciating how he seems to have taken up Whitman’s torch. Y’all might have noticed I love me some Whitman.

While I was away, I ran a whole series of poems on my Medium account. I wrote them (to the tune of a ton of research) in 2020 and I was very pleased with them; I put a ton of effort into making cyanotypes to accompany them and get them all formatted and scheduled to run while I was out of town. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at how they all fell pretty much flat and were received barely even blandly: isn’t it so typical for the things we love most as artists to be most passed over with hardly a glance by the world? Well, I stand by them. And if you want to take a look at my Astronomical Mythological series, I would be grateful for your input.

One last photo of some of the herd at Caprock Canyon before I go:

It’s a little wonky but it’s tough getting my phone to make a decent “scan” of polaroids.

Happy summer to you all! I hope it’s been fruitful for you so far, and full of joy.

New Project

For National Poetry Month, I labored fiercely over a self-imposed project of writing “letters” to poets using a specific form that I concocted by piecing together a couple of different odes. It was nothing short of a brain buster! I’ll admit I’m glad I finished it, that it’s over, and I can move on to letting myself operate in a different way.

Challenges like that are good, in my opinion: I feel like it’s healthy to make myself create within a restricted framework every so often.

BUT NOW woooooo much to my delight I am doing what I had originally planned to do during the month of April, which is work from the book that you see in the photo above. A friend of mine recently taught a workshop and this is one of the texts she used. The truth is I couldn’t justify spending the money on the workshop, although I sorely wanted to, so I got a copy of the book instead and am carrying out the exercises on my own.

The “journal” is divided into lots of smaller sections that are focused on specific aspects of poem writing. Each section is prefaced with a short list of poetry by known authors; they are all available online but I have been printing them out because 1. I don’t like to read things on a screen and 2. I want to be able to write on the paper.

So far, I have only worked through one and a bit sections, but oh my: I don’t know if my brain was just ripe for this work, the stars are aligned correctly, the wind is blowing the right way, or the Lord is endorsing this path (possibly all of them at once) but I am writing some things as a result that I am really proud of. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you!

The sharing, however, will start another day, and will probably happen mostly on Medium, but I wanted to put this book out there to all of you who might be looking for a new writing companion. I would highly recommend it!

Hello, Again!

HI there! I have been absent for quite a while, and here’s the reason: I was planning on phasing this website out. Having gone back to writing on Medium (and enjoying it! I missed my peeps), I didn’t think it made sense to have this online presence as well – not from a time or a financial perspective. I decided not to renew the domain and I let the subscription pass. . . . .

AND THEN things started to happen that I wasn’t expecting: the kinds of things that made me realize that this website is probably a good idea after all, maybe even a necessity.

So, I’m back. Hi!

Medium has been very kind to me lately, boosting a couple of my poems which in turn has really picked things up for me on that site in terms of readership and interaction. For National Poetry Month I made a project of writing “letters to poets” – which weren’t letters at all, but poems, odes, written in a very specific way.

HERE <——– you can read about it

It was a lot more challenging than I expected it to be at the outset, but hurrah I finished it and one of the poems (this one) got a boost. So I would consider that project a success!

A couple of days ago, when I hastily decided I ought to revive this website, I also received the good news that I will be taking part in a month long poetry challenge over at Tupelo Press. That’s not until August, however, so I don’t have more to say about that just yet and of course there’s plenty more writing that will happen between now and then!

Next up: I’ll share news and thoughts on my new project, which I haven’t been able to get very far with but am hopeful that in the next couple of weeks I will have the time to get it rolling for realz.

Thanks for reading!

Prophecy

iPhone photo by author (Hipstamatic app)

Foretold
I told you before
you remember that time
we did that thing
well, this is like that

No, this is not like that at all

Forewarned
you were told before
so where are your arms?
bare in the winter wind,
unguarded
defenses down for the count

The news is disarming anyway

Remember cracking open
the fortune cookie
and reading something telling
on the slip inside:
“the best prophet of the future is the past”

it was the present, then
it is the future, now
it is the present, now

the past is always in sight

Another in my series of Advent poems from my Medium page. Thank you for reading!

Prophet

Prophetic nature
sending signals of a change
it’s our choice to see
free will lets us stay asleep
free will lets us take notice

At the door: a knock
an announcement of a change
waiting for our ears
if we choose, we can listen
if we choose, we can open

Further to yesterday’s post, here I am sharing the Advent poems I’ve put on Medium this year. Thanks for reading!

John

Rio Grande | Big Bend National Park | Polaroid photo by author

The wisest ones are always called crazy
ratty and preoccupied
pockets full of proclamations
muttering their way through the crowd
with bits of wilderness stuck behind their ears

Possibly he could carry on
in that fashion forever
if people didn’t start to listen,
gathering with hesitation
that turns to alarm
and then conviction
around his street-corner sessions,
each day a new rambling
making more sense
answering the questions
they had forgotten they needed answers for,
lulled as they are into sheeplike acceptance
of the status quo

But once a flock grows,
the state takes notice,
grows its own alarm,
makes its own convictions
to reinstate the order it prefers,
brings its fist down to scatter the people
again, driving with their ruler
to compel them apart
again, reinstating complicit silence

nipping wisdom’s voice in the bud
cutting hope off at the head

So I’m writing on Medium again, but as many of you (most? of you) aren’t members there, and I want everybody who would like to read what I write to have access to it, I’ve decided to share those poems here too. Right now it’s all Advent all the time!

The Waiting

On the cusp of Advent
with the fires lit
but the bells still stowed away
in closets, cabinets, boxes, and shelves
all decoration trembling
like tinsel in a soft breeze
waiting for the starting whistle

the blessed season stirs in its slumber
subtle movements behind the eyelids
show signs of awakening

the dawn holds its breath in anticipation
heralding that midnight long ago
when the stillness ripped open
with rapture to the sound
of angel voices

the halls begin to rouse
in humble preparation
to be decked out like a bride
pine-scented for the birth
of her long-awaited groom

I’m a little late posting this, since Advent started on Sunday. I wrote it beforehand, however, sitting around impatiently waiting to celebrate Thanksgiving so I could start decorating the house! I have been extra impatient for this season to start this year. . . . Thank you for reading!