Poetry Thursday: Why I Love Poetry (but cannot follow directions)

Why I Love Poetry (but cannot follow directions--this is more than 153 words)

Poetry is a voice, sometimes husky, sometimes operatic, always pure. It is the shadow next to you in the dim high school hallway, where you sit, hunch-legged, waiting for trigonometry class to start but longing to be outside, where sunlight spills like orange juice.

Poetry is snot, naughty children, and small dogs. It is a primer, full of bumbling and fierce and meek and graceful lessons. Poetry is the spoon digging into thick, homemade soup in the faculty lounge; it is admitting that first grade Brittany is eating peanut butter and jelly in the cafeteria next door, and that she probably won't be eating again until the peanut butter and jelly of tomorrow. It is tiny Megan wearing high heeled slippers and eye liner, along with a jacket donated from Goodwill, to her date with kindergarten. It is the frown-line teacher who must worry more about test scores and rubrics and rosters than about construction paper beetle bugs and Duck Duck Goose.

And here it is, that rhythm of poetry that becomes a song--test scores and rubrics and rosters, test scores and rubrics, and rosters--the rhythm that presses into you, to remind you of everything that is awkward or beautiful or painful or strange.

Because ultimately, to me, poetry is the voice that clears its throat and speaks up, refusing to be discounted, even when the crowds around it are too busy talking to notice. It bides its time on paper or in songs, knowing that one day, someone will stop and listen.

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To read why others love poetry, visit Poetry Thursday or click here.

"What Billy's Wife Has" at Pindeldyboz

I have a story appearing on the literary website, Pindeldyboz, right now. You can check it out here, if you're so inclined! Thanks.

My Kids' Poetry, Central Casting, and More

On the advice of the school, we played around with buttons and envelopes over the weekend, sorting and organizing and discussing similarities/differences. This, apparently, is the "new math," which I think is a crock (and I will be yanking my boy out of that school next year faster than you can say "backtothebasics," but that, my friends, is another story . . .).

Anyway, to make the activity our own (ooohhh, I sound like Simon Cowell, commenting on a singer), we moved onto typical speech and language tasks: "Put the big red button beside the envelope . . . now, where is the big red button?" Then, we decided to seal our favorite buttons up into the envelopes, and write poems about them.

Here's one:

Buttons feel good.
Buttons play on a map.
Buttons eat yarn,
then fall asleep in ketchup.
They take a bath in a coffee pot.

and number two:

Buttons are hard.
They are different.
The button says "boom,"
then he rolls away,
and gets stuck under
a tunnel.
And the button knocks
something down.
Glass falls.

Some dark undertones to the second, don't ya think?

After the 'dillas on Sunday, we trudged over to the library (a Washington Post reporter took a picture of us--made me feel a bit giddy and Lindsay Lohan-ish), where we picked up a bunch of poetry books, including Early Moon by Carl Sandburg, It's Hard to Read a Map with a Beagle on Your Lap by Marilyn Singer, and Here's What You Can Do When You Can't Find Your Shoe by Andrea Perry. The "Beagle" book is our favorite--there's a sharp little poem in there about a Mexican Hairless dog and knit underpants.

I started my certificate class at Johns Hopkins last night (this class marks the halfway point). I'm always nervous walking in but I'm crazy about a syllabus so once that was passed out, I settled down. It seems incredible to me that you can plunk a graduate class from one semester down on top of one from another (even eleven years later) and the cast of characters are virtually interchangeable. I think I'm the non-traditional, non-traditional student. In the movie version of my life, I'd be so bold as to pick Christina Ricci to play me.

Mark Wahlberg can play Lou.

A Little This, A Little That, A Little Snow

We are anticipating our first snow of the season. Our first official snow. Our first snow accumulation. First snow angels, snowballs, and snowmen. I know this because I have been studying the NOAA website with an intensity that could rival that of a fledgling meteorologist trying to make it at the local affiliate. I am constructing charts and predictions. I don't care if we only get a dusting--my boys will each be bundled up in hats, mittens, four pairs of sweatpants, two tee-shirts, six pairs of socks, and a jacket, and sent outside to play. That's the tradition. That's what you get when you have a mother who spent the majority of her childhood either waiting for the school bus during a blizzard, or tunneling out seven foot high, snowplow-created snowdrifts during recess. I swear to God, snowpants were the required uniform at my elementary school. I have built more functional igloos than I care to remember.

The other tradition? Family walk to local Mexican restaurant for chips, tortilla soup, and quesadillas (which, on occasion, I have intentionally pronounced as "kaysa-dill-ahs," in a nod to Napoleon Dynamite's grandma and to be sort of funny; people--like my dad--have actually corrected me on this, as if I didn't know better).

No writing lately, though my finger click clacked their way across this very keyboard earlier tonight, skewering premium rooms and rates for our family vacation in March. We are going to Baltimore, which is only a forty-five minute drive from our house, but we will be staying overnight and having breakfast with a shark, and watching dolphins leap and cavort and flit across a pool, so we are very excited.

I'm reading "Get Happy" by Gerald Clarke. He wrote "Capote," which I loved. "Get Happy" is the biography of Judy Garland, and I'm liking it a lot. Amazon order arrived on Friday . . . I am knee deep in an accumulation of books . . . now, all I need is the snow!

Supplies

Whenever I am on the edge of something creative, I sabotage myself by deciding to go shopping for supplies.

A new notebook.
Pretty paper to decorate my new notebook.
Yarn and ribbon to wind through the spirals of my new notebook.
Fresh flair tip pens.
New rugs for the kitchen (so I have a nice view while I write)
Bubble bath.
Good razors (cause I'm out).
5 new songs for my Ipod.
A horsie (just because).
Poets and Writers magazine (for industry news).
The New Yorker (the sophisticated reader's choice).
"The Paris Review Interviews" (for inspiration).
A large, funky, new handbag (to carry Poets and Writers magazine, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review Interviews).
An outfit (to match the largefunkynew handbag).
Lipstick (to match the outfit).
Pho soup (to nourish my creative soul).
A coconut donut (to nourish my five year old soul).

I'm out of control.

The good thing about writing is that you don't need much--a scrap of paper and a pen. Some of my best writing has been tattooed onto the back of a Target receipt with a dying ballpoint pen.

Supplies are good . . .

but writing is even better.

Sunday Scribblings: Ideas

There is no lightbulb, no mega-watt epiphany.

It is a stick poked into a fire, embers like electric yellow jackets zigzagging through the air, untouchable. It is a gruff caveman, turning a gray rock as he inspects it, but feeling confused, or a pinball machine, bleating from a short circuit. A quarter deposited again and again, refusing to register. A coin return that comes up empty, even after the machine is kicked.

But then . . .

a maeltrom: turbulent, tossing, and troubled. Flat soda; a runaway mom; un poco queso; a handprint on plexiglass; the lanky son of a farmer; a six year old poet, who opens the door to her apartment, inadvertently allowing a wayward mob of cockroaches spill out:

these are the shiny candywrappers that might make me some beautiful wrapping paper, if I take the time to arrange them just right.

And especially now, in a life as intense as a shot of expresso, I look back and am grateful for the long bus rides of my youth, cold windows and cracked green seats--an hour back and forth, a timeless pot in which ideas were made to percolate.
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For more Sunday Scribblings, click here.

Sunday Scribblings: Kisses

Kisses can be stolen, snatched up by someone who has no right to them, who ferrets them away away into a designer pocketbook just as a teenager sneaks a tube of mascara into a backpack.

Kisses can be stolen, y'know.

Kisses can be stolen with an air of entitlement. Petal lips brushing a stubbled cheek at Happy Hour.

How are you doing? It's sooo good to see you again.

And while the wife makes room at the table by moving her coat, folding it over the spine of her own chair, the husband remembers the kiss as he watches the woman who stole it sit down, crossing her long thin legs that end with strappy stiletto shoes. She laughes at a joke, her mouth open wide, and he remembers that kiss and remembers it again and again and again.

A kiss on the edge of a wine glass, leaving lipstick prints, like a sloppy thief who forgot to wear gloves.

And he remembers that kiss again and again.

The stolen kisses are the dangerous ones. Like grenades, they are poised to explode into something larger.

He is closer to the woman than he is to his wife, his pants kissing long thin legs with strappy stiletto shoes under the table.

And his wife gulps her margarita and feels a dull thump in her head and lists the things that can be stolen.

Bathrobes, soap, afternoons away from the office.

Kisses.
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To read other Sunday Scribblings, click here.

Magnetic and Other Kinds of Poetry

So, on Monday, Mac and I spread many magnetic poetry words across the carpet, then categorized them on a dry erase board. Nouns vs. verbs, like a smackdown semantic wrestling match.

Music, I say, squinting at a miniature word. Is that a person, place, or thing, or something that you can do?

Something that you can do, Mac insists.

I shake my head. I explain to him that you can play music, sing it, or listen to it, but that you can't really do it. Mac crosses his little Charlie Brown arms. I examine the letters and I think about how I feel when cocooning myself in a coat of music. I think about that day, last week, when Iranawayfromhome, and how music carried me through rush hour traffic to the Rio Center, where the soundtrack of my life and my heels on the sidewalk were inseparable.

Then, I say to Mac, Well, whaddya know? Maybe mom's wrong. If you think that music is something that you can do, I'm not going to tell you that you can't.

When we are finished, I toss in a few conjunctions, adjectives, and prepositions. Then, we scramble the words into a dry omelet. It sticks a little, far from perfect yet satisfying.

I read our poem slowly. Mac and I look at each other and laugh. I decide that my favorite line is "love food . . . yes." I can feel the pause and the satisfied "yes." The "yes" that sounds like a balloon leaking air. Yessssssss.

Mac's favorite line is "cheese music." We decide that maybe this kind of music is bold, like parmesan cheese, shaved off of a block. Or it's like music with holes. Music that is velvety but rough--as if Sinatra were cheese, dressed in a suit.

I've been appreciating poetry again. In my purse, I have Naomi Shibab Nye's book, "Words Under the Words." In my head, I have Frances Chung's "Page 22/oh lucky me." In my Amazon shopping cart, I have Frances Chung's "Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung," and I am hoping that by the end of the week, that book will be in my mailcarrier's hands.

My mail carrier needs a poem. He wears a pith helmet and smokes as he walks from house to house and hasn't used a vacation day in months. If he wants, he can read my Frances Chung book before he gives it to me.

As long as it doesn't take him too long, and as long as he is willing to tell me which poem was his favorite.