Category — Poetry

I should say what I actually found while on the Poetry Foundation’s web site. (See previous post.)

Go read “I’m Glad I’m Me” by Phil Bolsta. It’s from Kids Pick the Funniest Poems. It completely made my day!

I’ve felt pretty stuck the last few days. It’s been a big week of transitions with my wife’s work, our son’s preschool and therapies, and several changes in our normal routine. It’s disorienting, and all this and my normal work schedule has left me feeling low on creative energy.

We’re programmed to react to these perceived shortfalls in accomplishments in a given week by working harder to catch up. I clued in enough today to try something a little different. I took a few minutes and browsed through my writing-oriented bookmarks in my browser to see if I could find something to wake up my creative spirit.

The Poetry Foundation’s web site is the Grand Central Station of poetry. Poetry helps me relax and regroup. I love the immediacy of it. I love discovering new poets. I love reading something that makes me say “Yes!” I love reading poetry from writers who speak their own unfiltered truth.

The Poetry Foundation is to me about discovery. The ‘Poetry Tool’ (approximately the middle of the page) lets you look for poems for specific reasons or for no reason at all. It’s a perfect way to re-center yourself after a rough week.

Don’t forget to check out their wealth of articles, audio resources, and podcasts. Just remember to come up for air and do some writing of your own, too!

While just getting something published – even in a non-paying market – can be fun and rewarding, neither you nor I are going to turn down some cold, hard cash for our writing.

While something like Writer’s Market is an invaluable resource for breaking into paying markets, it’s also intimidating. There are plenty of smaller, friendlier-feeling, new-writer-welcoming markets out there far too numerous to make it into Writer’s Market. Keeping up with these opportunities requires a personal touch and a passion for helping all writers succeed.

That’s where C. Hope Clark’s FundsforWriters.com comes in. Every two weeks, Hope sends out a newsletter that lists grant opportunities and well-paying markets and contests only. At a ridiculously cheap $12/year, you can’t beat it.

I heard her in an interview a while back and love her spirit and commitment to her work and to writers everywhere. She has a ton of material on her site, so go have a look.

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded this day in 1986. In a few years, my son will probably have to come home and ask us where we were when certain historical events happened. He and the kids in his class will not believe that their parents could remember exactly what they were doing last week let alone years and years ago.

I was in 7th grade and we were out of school that day because of snow. I was watching “The Price is Right” and putting my dishes in the sink after having a late breakfast of pancakes when the CBS Special Report flashed on. I watched TV all day after that.

I also remember one other part of that day.

Tonight is The State of the Union Address, which will most likely be another laundry list of things that won’t come to pass and one that few will remember. It’s difficult to remember the last SotU speech that actually had something both memorable and positive in it.

I do remember Reagan’s speech that day 21 years ago and that still-famous line:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God.”

That speech was written by Peggy Noonan and certainly was a career-maker for her. As writers, we hope for even a single, inspired day like that. Regardless of what you think of Reagan, he knew how to deliver the words his speechwriters gave him.

The quoted pieces come from the poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. Magee died at the age of 19 in World War II. This is easily his most famous poem, though few outside the aviation world have ever heard of him.

Click the above link, scroll down, and read the entire poem. There’s a reason why it means something special to military aviators everywhere.

(Cross-posted at my other blog. Warning: May contain excessive amounts of language geekery.)

My wife and I were watching TV one night when a string of prescription drug ads filled the entire commercial break. I finally noticed something I should have seen before. The vast majority of drug names have three syllables, and many of those have an accent on the second one.

The obvious next question is, why?

It didn’t take me long to find this article, which provides some insight into how the whole process works and some of the linguistic science behind it.

The article doesn’t completely address my question, so here’s my guess for whatever it’s worth. As the article says, two or three syllables make it easier to remember. My theory about the accent on the middle syllable is that it creates an alternating ‘down-up-down’ pattern (for lack of a better term) that feels more poetic than the alternatives. It can stick in your head like a piece of song lyric.

Warning: serious geekery ahead. I just looked this up. This pattern of a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed ones is called an amphibrach. The real insight – it’s the primary pattern used in limericks. Makes sense now!

I was particularly fascinated by the article’s discussion of phonemes, which are basically the smallest pronounced units that make up any given word. (like c in car or f in far) I noticed the other day that an inordinate number of words that begin with sl (another example of a phoneme) have unpleasant connotations: slime, slink, slap, slam, slob, sloth, slum, etc.

From the above article:

“Research shows letters with a hard edge, like P, T or K, convey effectiveness. X seems scientific. L, R or S provide a calming or relaxing feel. Z means speed.”

Something to keep in mind next time you write something.

I didn’t do any research into this, but I think the name of a prescription drug has to be the most expensive word you’ll ever pay someone to write. A freelance magazine writer feels ecstatic to get $1/word. The name of a drug, however, goes for a couple million per word.

I’m in the wrong line of work.

I just finished reading Without, a collection of poems by Donald Hall, formerly the U.S. Poet Laureate. It’s easily the most powerful book of poems I’ve read in a long time.

In the first half of Without, Hall holds nothing back in his telling of the final weeks and months of his wife’s battle with leukemia. In the second half, Hall pours out one heart-wrenching line after another in a series of letters written as poems to her as he struggles to move on after her death.

The poems take an even deeper turn when you learn that Jane Kenyon, a well-known and excellent poet herself, was his wife. Having read some of her work in the past, I found exploring the literal and figurative marriage of their poetry brought out even more for me. After getting acquainted with them through some of their other poems and imagining the lives of these two soulful people together, the sense of the world crashing down in Without is all the more powerful.

When I imagined myself in his shoes with my wife in her place and let myself try to feel what was going through him, the book blew me away. Hall lays out a bare, pure truth in this work. We may be perfectly healthy now, but anticipating the possibility of such future grief is inescapable while reading this book. Hall brings us to understand that one cannot truly love without risking such terrible grief and loss, but that the alternative is a far worse fate.

To give you a sample, I found one of the poems from Without -
“Letter in Autumn” – on The Writer’s Almanac web site.

If you enjoy poetry at all, this book is a must read.