Shelling Peas: 7 Ways of Looking (a Poetry Sisters post)

There’s a marvelous poem by Wallace Stevens called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, which you can read here. And so it came to pass (in January of this year), that my poetry sisters and I decided to write a poem with different ways of looking at a (noun of choice). Only thirteen is a lot of ways, so we went with seven.

Due to a recent eyeball issue (“an acute hemorrhagic posterior vitreous detachment”) which leaves me with a weird veil in the vision of my left eye, I AM CHEATING and sharing a poem I wrote years ago, which appears in my chapbook The Universe Comes Knocking (signed copies available here).

1

Shelling peas after a day at the farmer's market, I am transported

to one of three mismatched chairs at the formica dinette table

in my grandmother's postage-stamp kitchen,

trying to keep pace with her, my small efforts no match

for the experience in her old hands.

2

I pop the stem of a pea pod back,

pull the string down the outside curve,

unzipping a jacket, only to find

a row of fat green pearl buttons inside.

3

Pea pods are the oysters of the garden –

inside some pods, a string of perfect pearls

in others, disappointment.

4

Pulling a string along the inside curve of a pea pod,

I create Thumbelina's canoe.

5

On first opening the outside curve of a pod,

I spy one row – a steady green caterpillar;

opening further, the hinge unclasps:

every other pea held to opposite sides

of this green womb by a tiny umbilicus.

6

Unzipping pods to strip reveal their insides,

I think about Charles Darwin:

Here three are fat and one is left unformed;

there, seven peas crowd so tightly their sides are flat,

blocks in a row that do not wish to separate.

Opening the last one, peas burst out;

avoiding my bowl, my hands,

they scatter four feet away on the floor.

The cat lies in wait to strike them.

7

I feel that I should write thank-you note

To the compost-bound empty husks:

Dear mother pods,

You have given me your children.

I had to pry them loose from the slight green cords

that bound them to you, through which

you gave them life and nurtured them.

Your job now over, I consign you to the compost heap.

Please know that before you can decay,

I will have eaten your children

dressed only with butter, salt and some pepper.

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Read my sisters’ poems here:

Liz

Laura

Tanita

Tricia

Sara

Mary Lee

This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is hosted by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem.

Poetry Sisters write about string, thread, rope, or chains.

This month, my poetry sisters and I agreed to write a poem about string, thread, rope, or chains.

So I wrote an email thread for one of those chain emails. Because it seemed related enough, and/or doubly valid (depending on how you look at things).

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You have been selected to receive a blessing!

Add your wish below, then

forward it to seven people

for your wish to come true.

I wish I had seven people

who would read an email

if I sent it to them.

[send]

I wish the person

who sent this to me

knew that she mattered.

[send]

I wish people wouldn’t

send chain mail.

[send]

I wish I had a Twinkie.

[send]

I wish for an end:

to hunger

to violence

to racism.

[send]

I wish I could win the lottery.

[send]

I wish my mother

would stop calling,

but not because she

can’t call, because

that would also be bad.

Maybe I should

call my mother.

[send]

I wish that everyone else

would have their wishes

come true.

[send]

Add your wish below, then

forward it to seven people

for your wish to come true.

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Poetry Friday is being hosted by Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise. You can find the other poems by my Poetry Princess sisters using the links below, though Laura is just back from travels and Liz is off on a jaunt, so they will not be joining us this month.

Andi at a wrung sponge

Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading

Sara at Read Write Believe

Tanita at {fiction, instead of lies}

Tricia at Miss Rumphius

Next month, the Poetry Sisters will be writing Byr a Thoddaid poems. These are a Welsh form written as one or more quatrains. Each quatrain is composed of an eight-syllable couplet (rhymed aa), and a couplet containing 16 syllables, but split as 10 syllables in the first line followed by six in the second.

The 10/6 couplet has its own rules, where the end word of the six-syllable couplet is rhymed near the end of the 10-syllable line, and the word ending the 10-syllable line is linked by rhyme, alliteration, or other device to a word in the 6-syllable line.

If you write more than one quatrain, you can switch the order of the couplets (either 8/8/10/6 or 10/6/8/8).

Here’s a link to Robert Lee Brewer’s explanation at Writer’s Digest.

Clock is a tick-tock word—a Poetry Friday post

This month, my poetry sisters and I are taking on “wordplay” poems, which use the format “_____ is a word" as the start. Laura Purdie Salas has done many of these, and has written some how-to information that you might find helpful here. Where Laura delves deep into the interior of a word as part of her poem, even finding other words or meanings from letters, I prefer to do mine a bit more broadly.

Which is how it is that I ended up with the following poem:

Clock is a tick-tock word,

a way of holding time in its hands.

A handy word,

one that can slip by unnoticed.

Clock can be tall

as a grandfather, or

alarmingly small.

A punctual word,

lacking second syllables.

A simple word,

missing minute details.

Clock is a word that stands

the test of time.

---

To read the “wordplay” poems by my poetry sisters, you can follow the links below:

Andi

Laura

Liz

Mary Lee

Sara

Tanita

Tricia

This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is with Linda at TeacherDance.

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Poetry Peeps! You're invited to join our challenge for the month of November! Here's the scoop: We're writing an Ode to Autumn. An ode is a lyrical poem, and like the ancient Greeks, modern humans also enjoy marking an occasion with a song. Whether you choose an irregular ode with no set pattern or rhyme, or the ten-line, three-to-five stanza famed by Homer himself, we hope you'll join us in singing in the season of leaf-fall and pie. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on November 26th (the Friday after Thanksgiving, so plan ahead) in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.

Cocooned—an original tanka

This month, the challenge that my poetry sisters and I came up with was to choose a poem by one of our sister Poetry Princesses and then “ write a tanka in response or inspired by or in conversation with.”

Friends, I had such high hopes. Because I freaking love tankas, which I have on occasion called “a haiku pulling a trailer”. In the US, a tanka is usually formulated as a haiku plus two lines of seven syllables. So it’s 5/7/5/7/7. Where a haiku is often a snapshot of what is, and should include a kigo or seasonal word, a tanka is allowed to delve into simile or metaphor and explore things a bit more deeply. Which is one of the reasons I love them so.

I was going to meet with my sisters last Sunday to get started. I was going to write a whole mess of tankas—one for each of my poetry sisters. I was going to write a long, thoughtful blog post and have it up for yesterday’s Poetry Friday.

NONE of that happened.

I missed our Sunday meet-up. I didn’t get started in time. There are lots of reasons, but none of them makes me less disappointed about it.

So here I am, on SATURDAY, with ONE TANKA. And I am letting that be enough.

Mine is based on one of Laura Purdie Salas’s “Haiku Classified/Craigslist Ads”.

Here’s Laura’s poem:

WANTED: Wrecking ball

for chrysalis destruction

Reward: butterfly

Here is my tanka in response:

Cocooned from all storms

Autumn winds cannot reach here

Cozy blanket fort

There’s time enough for flying.

Why hurry to meet the world?

I am hoping to write one per day next week, and will post them as I go, tagging the authors of the original poems as I get to them.

For next month, we will be writing Wordplay poems, as invented by Nikki Grimes. If you want to write with us in October, you can check out Nikki’s description on Michelle Heidenrich Barnes’s blog.

To read the poems by my other poetry sisters:

Laura Purdie Salas

Liz Garton Scanlon

Andi Sibley

Tanita Davis

Tricia Stohr-Hunt

Mary Lee Hahn

Sara Lewis Holmes

All about the tanka

Once upon a time, in the glory days of Live Journal, when online community was a joy, I had another blog. It’s still out there, a relic that I cannot bring myself to torch yet. And it contains SO MUCH GOODNESS that it’s little wonder I don’t want to set it on fire.

This post is constructed from five different blog posts, part of a series on what I call “mathematical forms” in poetry, included the haiku (5-7-5), the cinquain, and more. I’ve edited it lightly, but it does give really good info on what a tanka is, and on the history of the form, including its feminist roots.

Today, a brief introduction to the tanka, which I have in the past referred to as a haiku pulling a trailer.

The tanka (a word which means "short poem") is five lines long - it's essentially a haiku followed by two more longer lines. In Japanese syllable count, which is a bit different from what we do in English, it's 5-7-5-7-7. It's most often written in English using those syllable counts as well.

The opening three lines are similar to a haiku or senryu, using concrete imagery to set the scene or establish the subject of the tanka. The final two lines elaborate on the subject by delving deeper into the emotional heart of the poem. The use of metaphor or simile is encouraged in the tanka, particularly in the closing two lines.

Here's one in translation from a poet called Okura, from the late 7th or early 8th century:

What are they to me,
silver, or gold, or jewels?
How could they ever
equal the greater treasure
that is a child? They can not.

---

a tanka is a short poem, usually rendered in English in 5 lines of varying syllable lengths, often 5-7-5-7-7.

Side note: The tanka is sometimes known as a waka, or an uta (short form of yamato-uta), which are terms historically meaning "Japanese poetry" (meaning poetry written in Japanese, as opposed to Chinese), but which now is often used interchangeably with the word tanka to mean a poem written in the 5-7-5-7-7 Japanese format. I mention it in case you have seen the word "waka" before (outside the Fozzy Bear context of "wokka") and thought this all sounded a bit familiar. But I digress.

Just as haiku and senryū can have lines that are shorter than 5-7-5, a tanka's lines can vary as well in English, and are more like short-longer-short-longer-longer, basically with 31 syllables as an outside total.

A tanka may have, but does not require, a kigo, or seasonal word.

It is perfectly fine to use the 5-7-5-7-7 construction in every tanka. What you essentially have is a haiku followed by two more lines that expand or expound on the topic of the opening haiku,.

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The first three lines are usually as concise and evocative as a haiku, and tend to set the scene through physical description (although there are exceptions, of course). These opening lines do not usually involve metaphor or simile (or, if you prefer, any sense of comparison).

The last two lines expand, comment, and/or delve more deeply into the emotional heart of the poem. This is where thoughts and feelings enter the tanka (usually), and the use of metaphor or simile is highly encouraged here. The goal of a tanka isn't just to present the reader with an image, but to deliberately evoke a feeling or emotion, whether it's pathos or humor or something else.

Here is an example from Carl Brennan, a New York poet who won grand prize in a tanka contest with this one, which many writers can relate to:

She comes at night,
wrapped in convulsive perfumes
and scarred by longings,
lavishing the wrong names on me
at the worst moments: my muse

The first three lines describe a woman in interesting imagery, and we get the sense that this woman is tortured (and possibly spreads that torture around). The last two take the situation - this woman - and makes it personal: she affects ME and is so inconvenient, before identifying that she isn't necessarily a real being at all, but is instead the urge to write. Love it.

Next, a look at Ono no Komachi, a historical figure and one of the most famous female Japanese poets and a complete master of the tanka.

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Some of the most famous tanka were written by women who lived centuries ago in Japan during the Heian era (during the 9th century C.E.). One of these was Ono no Komachi, who was likely born between 820 and 830 and lived until perhaps 900. The facts of her life are lost to history (isn't that always the way when a woman is involved?), apart from her romantic relationships with several powerful men, to and for (and with) whom she wrote her remarkable poetry.

It is believed she may have been a courtesan in the service of the Emperor, and that she entered into relationships with other men after the Emperor died, although that is, of course, speculation. What is notspeculative is the exquisite quality of her poetry, which throbs with life and longing, and is quite complicated, given that it can be interpreted in several ways (both by readers in the original Japanese, since her words and images are subject to multiple meanings, and in translation).


Here is one of her most famous tanka, first in the Japanese, and then in translation three ways:

花の色は
うつりにけりな
いたづらに
わが身世にふる
ながめせしまに

A life in vain.
My looks, talents faded
like these cherry blossoms
paling in the endless rains
that I gaze out upon, alone. (Peter McMillan)

The flowers withered
Their color faded away
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in the world
And the long rains were falling (Donald Keene)

While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers. (Jane Hirschfield and Mariko Aritani)

Here is a list that includes other possible translations of this same poem.

No matter how you read these translations, it's clear that the opening lines deal with a nature-based image (fading blossoms), while the remaining lines deal with her own fading beauty and passion during the "long rains". The metaphor is clear, and is a good example of how metaphor in tanka can and should work.

I love how startlingly fresh much of her language seems (depending, of course, on the translation involved) despite the passage of more than 1200 years. Others of her poems exhibit longing and loneliness in heart-aching, swoons-good language.

Ono no Komachi was not the only female among the foremost creators of tanka; she was followed in the 10th century by Izumi Shizibu, who is known to have been married twice, and to have been involved with two princes. Her work, like Komachi's, is worth seeking out. Shizibu's work manages to meld Buddhist sensibilities and eroticism.

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I will start today with what appears to be a tanka. I say "appears to be" because as a finished product, it qualifies. It was, however, composed in separate parts by two people (or groups of people), and it qualifies as a maekuzuke, a type of humorous verse in which the last two lines are written first, then another writer (or writers) try to top the ending with a three-one set-up. In the time after Basho's death, maekuzukecompetitions were all the rage.

Here's today's tanka, which is overall quite funny, in part because if it were true, it would be 100% pathos.

Catching the thief
And looking at him, --
It was my own son!

I want to kill him,
And I don't want to kill him.

For me, the takeaway from this poem is not based in its content, but on the way it was constructed: the last part first. It's a fun way to turn the process around, and also a way of coming up with the emotional takeaway of your tanka first, then finding the "setting" for it later.

What do I know?

This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote poems based on the question “What does ___ know?” We were inspired by poems written by Jane Yolen and Joyce Sidman, among others.

After not managing to come up with anything to share for the past two months, I am making up for it by sharing THREE of these poems.

These poems were wonderful to write, and I am super in love with the form/format. Also, I am super in love with the group of women with whom I get to talk about poetry and share time and space to write together.

The other poetry princesses are: Liz Garton Scanlon, Sara Lewis Holmes, Tanita Davis, Andi Sibley, Laura Purdie Salas, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, and Mary Lee Hahn. If a name looks like a link, you can read their offering for this Friday on their blogs.

Next month, we will be writing tankas in response to another poet in our little group. You are invited to write along, if you’d like, and can write a tanka in response to pretty much any poem you like, whether it’s one of our or someone else’s entirely. I will be putting up a post on what a tanka is, the history of the form, and how to write one next week.

Poetry Friday

For the past many years, I have been part of a poetry group. Once a month, my poetry sisters and I write poems together. We pick a theme or a poetic form, and we all write our own take on things, then we share on the last Friday of the month.

Only for the past two years, I have barely written a poem, and even more rarely shared.

To quote Taylor Swift, “this is me trying.”

This month’s assignment is to write a wistful poem. Here’s my haiku:

almost time to sing

remember the forgotten

Auld lang syne

You can find the other wistful poems here:

Tanita Davis

Sara Lewis Holmes

Liz Garton Scanlon

Andi Sibley

Laura Purdie Salas

Tricia Stohr-Hunt

The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by Irene Latham this week.

Reading about creativity

The other day, I got an email from a woman who has been a friend and customer for years.

“Good morning,
What creativity books have you read and would recommend?
Cheers, J—”

Here’s how I answered her:

I highly recommend BIG MAGIC by Elizabeth Gilbert, and also Twyla Tharp's THE CREATIVE HABIT (it's definitely not just for dancers!). If you can find a copy, Neil Gaiman's MAKE GOOD ART comes in book form (several editions, I believe), but here's the speech on which it is based:

Ready to start something new

This was me in my studio the other day:

After cleaning my studio for the event I had here back on December 2nd, I was slow getting back to work in there. But! I did make one new piece of art. Kind of. If by “new” you count “took an existing background and stamped a motto onto it as inspiration for 2019”. And since I count it, then I will go with the idea that I made a new piece of art. Here it is:

My 2019 motto

I’m getting ready for the new year.

I posted this piece on Instagram last week and promptly sold two prints of it, plus received a request for permission to use my motto (seriously? GO FOR IT, if it speaks to you) and a request for a commissioned piece with the same motto and different colors. So now I know what my next thing is going to be. And today, the substrate for the piece arrived from Blick Art Supplies—it’s a 9”x12” basswood (aka linden) cradle board.

Is there anything as tantalizing as new art supplies?

Not only am I excited about the new cradle board, but I’m excited by some new papers I’ve collected and am ready to use as collage layers in the new piece. And I bought two 5”x7” cradle boards, thinking I might make some smaller motto pieces, so if you have one you want to commission, hit me up—otherwise, I’ll just roll with my own notions.

Kismet in the Cold

For many, many years, I've had a blog at the (now unfavored) LiveJournal, where I mostly kept my writing. Original poems, interviews, and book reviews, lengthy series about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and more. It is still in use, but I am considering winding it down, quite frankly. However, I have an ongoing poetry project with five (sometimes six) beloved poetry sisters, and we write new poems each month on agreed-upon topics or using agreed-on forms.

Kismet sleeping on my legs.

This month's assignment was to write a sonnet (on any topic we wanted). I chose to write about Kismet, my six-year old calico.

I watch small brown birds puffed fat against cold
peck gravel for small sustenance at best.
A finch, a wren, some dark-eyed juncoes wrest
the smallest bit of God-knows-what. I hold
the cat up to the window, where she tries
to follow hops and jumps, small bursts of flight.
We both pretend she’d catch them all, despite
us knowing that is all a flock of lies.
She’s lived inside a house since she was small,
found toddling by a highly trafficked street,
a tiny, bat-eared calico fuzzball
with pink toe-beans on all four small white feet.
    She asks to be put down, climbs in my lap,
    curls up, then dreams of birds during her nap.

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I am unsure whether the rest of the poems will move here or not, but as this is ART & WORDS, I thought I'd see how it goes.