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.

---

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 a poem together.

This month’s challenge was a collaborative effort. We wrote an exquisite corpse, where each of us contributed an original line plus a “clunker” drawn from Linda Mitchell, who has at least three posts full of “clunkers”—lines that she discarded, that didn’t work for her.

The poem was written with Tanita starting with her two lines, which she sent to Sara. Sara then wrote her line and picked a clunker, then sent her two lines (only) to Liz. Each of us saw only the two lines by the person who preceded us, and at the very end, I sent my two lines to Tanita, who contributed another line.

Here’s the original, which we only saw after we each typed our lines into our group chat:

Tanita: They say the mind is garden-like, with thoughts as sprouting seeds
CLUNKER: but I'm left holding cuttings I'm not sure where to plant
Sara: Weedy-thick, the prickly buds of odd logic bloom:
CLUNKER: You don't cry anymore, but you sing all the words.
Liz: Each line in a different language as the light shifts,
CLUNKER: trees turned so orange the road looked blue.
Mary Lee: Words tangle, colors muddy in the palette.
CLUNKER: I am no longer winsome to the sun.
CLUNKER: a whole sun’s rise to share
Tricia: there goes the one that got away
CLUNKER: found a bit of sunflower
Laura: and plucked every petal (by the way, he loves me)
Kelly: and then I remembered
CLUNKER: that’s what you wrote about the green beans
Tanita: Stockpile, then, that snap and sass to sweeten your September.

Wildly, it made sense, and sort of hung together. Mary Lee read it aloud to us, and it sounded like perfection. (Such is the beauty of Mary Lee’s delivery.)

Once we had the draft poem compiled, we each decided to edit it in our own ways. And y’all, I can’t wait to see how everyone else altered this text.

Here’s my final version:

If you, like me, would like to see how all six of us worked with a draft poem to create something final, then click the links below to read everyone’s poems:

Tanita

Sara

Liz

Mary Lee

Tricia

Laura

The Poetry Friday host this week is Linda Baie at Teacher Dance.

Poetry Sisters Write Recipe Poems

This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote recipe poems. Laura Purdie Salas is the queen of these, in my opinion, so for sure check out her post (below).

Next month, we are letting “box” inspire us. Does that mean a box-shaped poem? A poem about a box or boxing or being boxed in? Whatever it means to you, write a poem inspired by the idea/concept/word “box.”

Here’s my poem for this month:

You can check out the rest of our poems here:

Laura
Tanita

Sara

Liz

Tricia

Andi

Mary Lee

And you can find today’s Poetry Friday roundup at There Is No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town.

Poetry Sisters write definiti (definitos?)

This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote a form of poetry known as the definito. The form was invented by Heidi Mordhurst. The definito is a free verse poem written for an audience of middle-graders (aged 8-12). It consists of 8-12 lines, highlights wordplay, and demonstrates the meaning of a less common word. The word that the poem describes always ends the poem.

Here are my attempts. I found that I don’t really like writing in this form, so if nothing else, it was useful for teaching me something I don’t like (and/or am not good at).

You can find the poems of my poetry sisters by clicking the links below:

Andi

Laura

Liz

Mary Lee

Sara

Tanita

Tricia

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).

---

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.

---

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.

This month: a poetry Friday post

This month, our challenge was so much fun. Like, serious fun. We played with the concept of an “exquisite corpse,” a writing exercise where the story is passed around.

In our case, we did it by having one person write the first line and send it to the second. The second person then sent only their (second) line to the third, and so forth. In the end, the eight of us each wrote one line in what would become an eight-line poem.

When we met, we first read our lines aloud before typing them into a Google doc to share. Here’s what the first draft of our exquisite corpse poem looked like:

This month, odd one out, running short on days and sleep, (Liz)

This month, past meets pride, roots ripped from native soil still somehow grow. (Tanita)

The once-bright future dims. Shadows grow (Kelly)

But there, near canyon  rim, in  broken light (Sara)

the yearling hawk shrieked in futile fury (Andi)

and the steel-edged clouds looked away (Laura)

trees bow and bend on a blustery day (Tricia)

that rattles old oak leaves down the street. (Mary Lee)

And now? Each of us is editing the poem in different ways. I seriously cannot wait to see what everyone has done with it. As of Sunday, I had high hopes of writing additional drafts, but between my husband’s heart issue, outrage and sorrow at the news (Texas criminalizing trans youth and their families and healthcare providers as well as Ukraine), and my second boost shot for COVID, I had to let that notion go.

Here, however, is my edit of the poem draft:

This month

Odd one out, running short on days and sleep. 

Past meets pride. Roots ripped from native soil 

still somehow grow. The once-bright future dims.

Trees bend and bow—a blustery day. 

Old oak leaves rattle down the street. 

Shadows grow. There, near canyon rim, 

in broken light, the yearling hawk shrieks 

in futile fury as the steel-edged clouds look away.

Next month, we are writing dodoitsu (a Japanese form) based on ekphrastic prompts. You are invited to join us! Pick an image or photo and write a dodoitsu to share on the last Friday of March!

Here are the links to everyone else’s edits:

Andi

Laura

Liz

Mary Lee

Sara

Tanita

Tricia

The Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by Tricia at Miss Rumphius Effect. Here’s the link.

Bells are ringing — a Poetry Friday post

This month, my poetry sisters and I are writing poems about bells, whatever that means to each of us. I’m pretty sure that if you click through to read everyone else’s poems, you will see that we all scattered in different directions, using “bells” as a jumping-off point.

I considered writing one about bells in Christmas carols, then remembered that I’d already done that in a poem entitled A Head Full of Bells, which I share below:

Despite four pages of notes and false starts and various ideas, I kept coming back to the idea of swapping a bell for something else in the scene with the three witches (or “weird/weyward sisters”) in Macbeth. Which is how it came to pass that I wrote a very short poem indeed.

You can find the poems by my poetry sisters on their sites by clicking their names, below.

Andi Sibley

Laura Purdie Salas

Liz Garton Scanlon

Mary Lee Hahn

Sara Lewis Holmes

Tanita Davis

Tricia Stohr-Hunt

If you’d like to write to our theme for next month, we are going with “poetry inspired by something overheard.” Our friend Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti has done several of these as a form of “found poem,” and it seemed like a fun challenge. Here's a link to one of Susan’s poems.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Carol at Carol’s Corner.

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

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.

New poems, and a new painting

This being the last Friday of the month, I have written poetry with my lovely poetry sisters. They are Liz Garton Scanlon, Sara Lewis Holmes, Tanita Davis, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, Andi Sibley, and Laura Purdie Salas. It’s been my pleasure and privilege to know them and write with them for the past 15 years or so. (Seriously? Seriously!)

This month, we were writing ekphrastic poems. An ekphrastic poem is one that is based on a piece of art—a painting, a photograph, a statue.

We mostly settled on two photographs of sculptures: the first is Sara’s photograph of a piece called “Spider Dress and Serpent” by Isamu Noguchi. The second is Tanita’s photograph of a piece called “El Hombre Grande” by Roy De Forest.

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I decided to write to both images, and did so using a new-to-me form called the 4x4, which was invented by Denise Krebs. The rules of the form are as follows:

• 4 syllables in each line

• 4 lines in each stanza

• 4 stanzas

• 4 times repeating a refrain line–line 1 in the first stanza, line 2 in the second stanza, line 3 in the third stanza, and line 4 in the fourth stanza.

• Bonus: 4 syllables in the title

• No restrictions on subject, rhyme, or meter.

Here are the two poems I wrote for the “Spider Dress and Serpent” piece, which is not just a sculpture, but was meant to be worn—and to be danced in. Noguchi created it for a performance of the story of Medea (the woman from myth, not Madea from Tyler Perry’s movies). You can see snippets from the ballet at around the 40 minute mark in this presentation at the Library of Congress.

“Dance in the Cage”

“Poor Medea”

The next poem is based on El Hombre Grande, a seven-foot tall sculpture made up of all sorts of things. I loved the colors and shapes, but also the way his one arm expanded to hold up so many things.

“To be a man”

You can find my sisters’ posts by clicking on their names below. (Not all of us wrote this month.)

Sara Lewis Holmes

Tanita Davis

Laura Purdie Salas

Tricia Stohr-Hunt

Liz Garton Scanlon

New painting! 11:11

OH! And I have a BRAND NEW PAINTING that is completed and I have to list her for sale. She is on a 24” x 36” gallery-wrapped canvas that is 1-5/8” deep, and this one is called 11:11. She’s all about angel time, and has lots of delicious energy to her. She isn’t yet certain which way she wants to be hung, but likes both of these aspects quite a bit. Will be going into the Paintings portion of the website shortly at $750 plus shipping. If she really calls you, let me know—for the next few days, she will be available for $650, including US shipping.

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When Fishing Fails by Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan is one of my very favorite poets. And Mary Lee Hahn is one of my favorite bloggers, teachers, and poetry appreciators in the world. And she has recently retired from teaching, though I doubt she will ever stop being an educator.

I know Mary Lee is looking forward to getting some fly fishing in, but I am sure that she will always have poetry to fall back upon when fishing fails.

"Your husband is very lucky," observed Smithers,
"to have ornithology to fall back upon when fishing fails."
— Cyril Hare, Death Is No Sportsman

When fishing fails, when no bait avails,
and nothing speaks in liquid hints
of where the fishes went for weeks,
and dimpled ponds and silver creeks
go flat and tarnish, it's nice if
you can finish up your sandwich,
pack your thermos, and ford
this small hiatus towards
a second mild and absorbing purpose.

Enjoy your next phase of life, ML!

Time marches on—an original dizain

Poetry Friday is here, and so is my latest poem that I wrote with my poetry sisters.

This month, we wrote dizains. It is a ten-line form that comes originally from the French,, with a fairly simple rhyme scheme: ABABBCCDCD. Each line is 10 syllables (or, some sources say, 8-10 syllables) in length. I chose to write mine in iambic pentameter (that’s five iambs—stress pattern ta-DUM—per line).

To read the dizains written by my dear friends, head here:

Laura

Liz

Tanita

Sara

Tricia

Poetry Friday is being hosted by Susan Bruck at Soul Blossom Living.

Asher yatzar: a Poetry Friday post

This month, my poetry sisters and I met up via Zoom.

During our conversation, Laura tossed her metaphor dice: an actual set of 9-12 cubes with words or phrases on them. They came up with things like “Home is a well-worn zoo” and “Love is a broken wonder.”

The metaphor generated for me was “Your body is an impossible blessing.” Why, thank you, Laura. And also, amen to that.

I immediately decided to write a poem about poop.

Hear me out: It was all because of the words body and blessing in close proximity. And because, as a menopausal woman, there are almost no times anymore when my body is “regular,” in any sense. Size, shape, function . . .

Sometimes a few days go by and things are slow or stalled, and when they start again, I’m always grateful. (Does it matter if I’m talking about poop, or about something else? Probably not.) When things start again—the flow of ideas, if you will, or whatever else has been stopped up, I am always grateful.

At those times, I think hallelujah.

Read the poems by my poetry sisters here:

Sara Lewis Holmes

Laura Purdie Salas

Tanita Davis

Tricia Stohr-Hunt

Andi Sibley

Liz Garton Scanlon

Poetry Friday is being hosted by Karen Edmisten this week.

Petrichor: a Poetry Friday post

This month, my poetry sisters and I met on Zoom (where else?) to write poems together. Our prompt was to select one or more words from the list of words that first appeared in the year of our birth.

Some candidates for 1964 included barf bag, gender identity, homophobia, mack daddy, and sucker punch.

As it turns out, being born in April of 1964, I am almost as old as dirt.

Or rather, as old as the word used to describe the scent that rises from dirt as the rain begins to fall. That word—one of my favorite words and scents, as it turns out—is petrichor.

“Petrichor: a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period and that arises from a combination of volatile plant oils and geosmin released from the soil into the air and by ozone carried by downdrafts ”

— Merriam Webster Dictionary

Petrichor entered the English language in March of 1964, less than a month before my birth, when Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas published an article,“Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” in the journal Nature.

If you want to see exactly how a raindrop on warm, dry rock or soil creates aerosols that rise and distribute the scent we now call petrichor into the air, I highly recommend this link, which includes research from MIT.

I of course fell down a research rabbit hole on this, and have learned that one of the key components of petrichor is a sesquiterpene called geosmin, which is an essential oil that contributes to the earthy flavor of beetroot, and the earthy scent of petrichor.

The word petrichor was coined by research Richard Thomas, composed from petra (rock) or petros (stone) and ichor (the fluid that ran through the veins of Greek gods). Basically, it is “the blood of stones”, so don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t get blood from a stone.

My poem

Links to poems by my poetry sisters

Laura Purdie Salas

Liz Garton Scanlon

Sara Lewis Holmes

Tanita Davis

Tricia Stohr-Hunt