Word Play poems with the Poetry Sisters

 

This month we are doing Word Play poems. 

Laura shared this form with us after she enjoyed it on Today's Little Ditty last spring. 

Check out Nikki Grimes' description here.   

 

The idea is to explore a word: what it sounds like, what it means to you, what it implies. 

This was a fun one for me once I started thinking about my kitchen.

 

 

 

Kitchen is a  Choppy Word

Kitchen is a choppy word.

Hard “K” to start us off eager and excited,

a voiceless stop consonant middle, then

no nonsense end, a closed syllable schwa blend.

My kitchen is all that -

a room enclosed in warmth,

bright with humming and dancing,

or hungry childish crying.

When the only phone hung

by the kitchen door

we scribbled phone numbers

in pencil on cheerful yellow walls.

My kitchen is full of ghosts I love.

It has wrung with curses, been

bright red with blood splatter, and often

smelt of burning bacon.

My kitchen is a small square space;

a triangle of hot, cold, and sharp. 

Gushing water, cracking ice, boiling pots,

flowing or frozen or forgotten.

Favorite coffee mugs mix and match with

tea cups bought in tourist shops.

Hope chest flatware shuffle with discount spoons;

mom’s china and thrift store plates.

There are rainbow prisms in the window,

dog dishes by the door,

tripping hazard cats curled up on the rag rug,

and a light left on all night.

                                    - Andromeda Jazmon

 

Visit my Poetry Sisters' blogs to read their poems:

 

Tricia

Liz

Laura

Sara

Tanita

Kelly

Mary Lee

 

And make sure to find time to visit the Friday Poetry Round up by Linda at TeacherDance. Enjoy!

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.

Tanka answers the Poetry Sisters

 It sounded fun when we first discussed it; find a poem published previously in one of our poetry challenges, and write a tanka in response. Tanka, you will remember, is a Japanese poetry form consisting of seven lines. In Japanese the syllable counts are in the pattern 5/7/5/7/7. It's like an extended haiku where the last two lines dig a little deeper or extend the emotional impact of the images contrasted in the first three lines. Amelia Fielden explains it well in her blog Tanka as Diary. Kelly has a great explanation of tanka on her blog here. I don't like the awkward constriction of forcing the images into those syllable counts, so I agree with her that it should really just be short/long/short/long/long, and keep it as brief as possible with really clear, crisp images that snap.

So, the Poetry Sister's poem, going back 13 years (REALLY. We've been writing together that long!) I spent some time relishing their blogs and admiring their gorgeous work.

Mary Lee joined us in our writing prompts this year, and has been sharing her delightful poems. She wrote this one about a day on the water, and it really struck me.

My kayak slides
skimming over the clouds
reflected on calm waters.
No answer for the loon
crying down the bay

Sara wrote about a beautiful tree with twisted limbs in this challenge. That tree has stayed with me.

Always seeking sun,
a tree's determined pursuit
twists toward light.
She bears vigorous pruning
having pushed aside old ghosts.

Kelly wrote a lovely triolet about the amber glow of sunlight in fall. My tanka:

Fall's first days still green -
sunlight emerald through the trees.
One brief chill shivers
and now autumn glow descends
making the cherry leaves gold.

Laura wrote brilliantly about Fall in the style of e. e. cummings. I grabbed her words because I love them so much, and twisted out a tanka.

Summer's abrupt end
drops golden from that blue sky -
a brittle scurry.
Our bright, waiting earth
pauses for snap and winter.

Liz wrote a pastoral poem in Fall of 2019, with sunflowers. That image captured me.

Fields of sunflowers
facing the way the sun shines;
a blaze of hope.
Even when the heads hang down
the seeds ripen, bent towards us.

Trisha wrote a tritina last year that was a revisiting of an older challenge. I was inspired by her words and the image she chose for it.

The plinth of Jackson
bears another; he's replaced
with empty air.
Hope rides a horse of blue breeze
and graffiti claims this space.

Tanita  wrote an etheree on the theme of her beloved California. I've only been there once, (I'm a Pennsylvania girl) and this is what I remember:

LA breakfasts were
a laugh; have a smoke or two
and Orange Juice picked
straight off your own tree,
but all the hills were burnt brown.

That was fun - responding to all my Poetry Sisters and looking back over their posts. Next month, for the last Friday Poetry in October we are going to meet the Challenge of writing Wordplay Poems, as invented by Nikki Grimes.Here is  a description she gives for the form, in an interview on Michelle Heidenrich Barnes’ lovely blog. (scroll down through the interview for the poem prompts). Give it a try, write your Wordplay Poem and post it on October 29th! Share it with #PoetryPals if you post to social media, too!

Take a look at what the Poetry Sisters have published on their blogs:

Trisha

Tanita

Sara

Liz

Laura

Kelly

Mary Lee

and enjoy all the Friday Poetry goodness at Laura's blog this weekend!

Zentangle Found Poem

This month the Poetry Sisters are messing around with found poems and Zentangle doodles. I discovered Zentangle after a workshop at my local nature center a couple years ago, and I am delighted to combine it with the fun of found poems, which in this style are sometimes called "blackout poems" or "erasure poems". Check out Kat Apel for her description of this combo of poem and Zentangle. 

For my poem today I took a page from an old reading primer and thought about light and shadow. 

Make sure you stop by the Poetry Sisters' blogs to see what they have done! (Liz is taking a break this month.) Also, several other poets have joined us this month and used the hashtag #PoetryPals. You can find them linked at the Friday Poetry roundup.

Tanita

Kelly

Laura

Sara

Trisha

Check out all the Friday Poetry at Linda Mitchell's blog A Word Edgewise. Enjoy! 

Poetry Friday: In the style of "Innocence..."

My Poetry Sisters and I are working on writing poems in the style of another poet whose work we love. It's a fun challenge to take a serious look at the structure and elements of something lovely to try and figure out what makes it so. We chose to look at and work from Linda Hogan's poem "Innocence', found here at the Poetry Foundation.

After studying it and talking it over, we noticed the three stanzas focus on discovery, wonder, and growth. The lines of each stanza are 10, 6, and 4. It's a nice progression, don't you think?

I chose to stay with nature, and since I have a pink geranium in my office soaking up the sun, I went back to an experience I had visiting a cemetery and finding geraniums in the trash pile.

Hope

There is nothing more hopeful
than the cast-off geraniums

tossed in the cemetery trash

whose dry roots hold on stubbornly

to the slimmest jolt

of living juice.

Could be the grounds keeper's job

is to keep things tidy by

solemnly sweeping up spent blooms.

Once I dragged out a partially green shoot

from the twisted, wilting pile and

surreptitiously stuck it in my jacket

as I was leaving a funeral,

wondering if one grief

carries over to another

or if one more chance

at life... any life at all

testifies to hope

enough to keep us going.

    - Andromeda Jazmon

Take a look at the poems my Poetry Sisters have written: (Kelly and Laura are taking a break)

Sara

Tanita

Liz

Trisha

and then stop by the Friday Poetry roundup at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme.

Enjoy!

Merriam Webster’s Time Traveler Poems

2021 and a fresh start to Friday Poetry with my Poetry Sisters! This year we are going to be doing monthly challenges and invite you to join in, if you would like. 

Here’s our plan for next month: To post on Feb 26 (and to share on Twitter as #PoetryPals): roll a set of metaphor dice and write a poem inspired by your metaphor. If you don’t have them, try the online one: https://perchance.org/ve4axzbkx4"

For January, we collected words at the Merriam Webster's Time Traveler site, where you can take a look at a list of the words first used in print during your birth year (or select any year!). I was thinking generational, since I've recently lost my mother and lost my oldest child three years ago. I wondered what progression in language I would parse from comparing our three birth years.

Merriam Webster's Tale of Three Generations

First Generation

Grandma was born

at the moment of truth.

She was no gal Friday.

She was a flat out,

filter tipped,

interfaith

supernova.

She passed on

the genetic markers

of wishful thinking.

She mixed culture shock 

with pablum

and a new deal,

tape recorded our boo boos

and pointed a zoom lens

at Silver Stars.

Second Generation

For instance,

it was happy hour

in the global village

when our virtual memory

reached the tipping point

and queen size

soul sisters

got zonked

on hard rock,

plain vanilla

amuse bouche

and open heart

munchies.

We were brown bagging

no load, nonself picholine

shrink wrapped in

soul music.

Next Generation

Welp.

The third generation

in this story

could be patient zero,

scripting language

and contact tracing

acid wash emoticons.

Their messenger bag

stuffed with off label

steampunk,

they take a deep dive 

into a thirtysomething

minitower.

The FAQ explains

how to gank

paintball GIFs

in virtual reality.

We are all ADHD now.

     - Andromeda Jazmon    2021

Welp, that was a hoot! Check out my Poetry Sister's poems:

Laura

Liz

Sara

Tanita

Tricia

Kelly

And please save some time this weekend to enjoy all the poetry at the round-up at Bookseedstudio!