Rhythm jives to consonant percussion foot stomp to the letter keeping time staying in line with a heel toe, and something in the hips don’t forget to breathe
syncopated sur prises prying an extra beat, a kind of additive slipped in like a squeeze of lime in a cocktail when you need a
break
make it
if chance asks you for a dance take it
Part of the experience of participating in the 30/30 Project for Tupelo Press (which I will admit I didn’t know about beforehand) is Craft Talks, which are kind of like mini-workshops about poetry. We had one the other night where we talked about the line (in poetry). I took notes, and the next morning I wrote this poem.
Thank you for reading! And if you’ve been following along on the Tupelo Press website, thank you twice!
I am back again today to talk about the 30/30 project I’m participating in for Tupelo Press, and to offer incentives for your dear, wonderful, generous donations! The writing is going well so far – in the sense that I am happy with what I’m producing and *also* really enjoying reading the work of my fellow poets. You can check out the project here.
My goal is to raise $350. I won’t see a penny of this, FYI, but it will all go to support the Press. They are an independent literary publisher, and a non-profit, so you can imagine how important donations are to them. You can read more about them on their website.
Since it’s equally important to me that my fundraiser is successful, I would like to offer the following incentives:
Donations of $30 will receive a copy of a zine containing all the poems (and their corresponding photographs) at the end of the project. (Obviously I have to wait until the end of the project to make the zine, so bear with me please.)
Donations of $40 will receive a copy of my most recent poetry book, The Body Botanic (available at my Blurb store and pictured at the top of this post – but your copy will be free!)
Donations made for the wild amount of $100 will receive a copy of both AND I will gladly write you a poem on the topic of your choice.
I will need your mailing address to send you these rewards, so please if you do donate in any of those amounts send your details to me via email : amy@amywritespoetry.com
ANY donation you make, even if it’s just $1, makes you an automatic super star and comes with my heartfelt thanks for your generosity! If all you can do is read the poems each day, I appreciate that too!
Ok here ends my appeal for your hard earned money. Thank you so much for being here, and for reading this post. Thank you for your support of my writing by being here in the first place!
This summer, in advance of the road trips I went on, I made lists of focus words to help me with my writing. Two of the places I had been to before: Mueller State Park in Colorado and Abiquiu in New Mexico. Since they were familiar to me, I was able to generate a short list of things that I think about when I consider each location.
I started with Colorado, since I was going there first, and came up with:
Pine Mountain Cloud Mountain Cloud Sky Earth Rain Meadow
The list of words gave me something to start from rather than waiting to see if anything struck me, and it worked really well. Each morning I was able to sit and think about the words, while equally thinking about my surroundings and whatever I was experiencing in the moment.
Similarly, I used the words to help concentrate my photography a little, since again I had photographed that part of Colorado pretty extensively in previous years. I didn’t want to make the same pictures all over again – although who knows, maybe I still did that. In my head, I had a direction and goal and that was a nice feeling!
I waited until I was leaving Colorado to make a list about New Mexico, since I wanted to keep my head in the same space as my body rather than letting it wander further down the road. My words for Abiquiu were:
Sand / Soil Rock Rattlesnake Sage Heat Water / Mesa River Sky
I’m going to start sharing the poems I wrote on my Medium, so if you’re able to read me over there I hope to see you!
So, fellow writers and visual artists: what do you do? Have you tried working from a word list?
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! Hereis the link : my fundraiser page.
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 McAfeecame 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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The Poetry Patio 