Today I want to say something wonderful about...

My niece and her family have been staying with me for a week.
'This potato peeler is amazing,' she said as she was peeling carrots for her little boy. He is three and has a thing for raw carrots and cucumber, even for breakfast.

Last year, a friend over from Kent picked up the same potato peeler and exclaimed, 'Isn't it great?!' He had the same one at home.

It's reassuring to know that you're not completely alone in such extreme appreciation of a kitchen utensil. Although I'm the only one among us to have a written a poem in praise of it.

In Praise of Things

Today I want to say something wonderful
about my potato peeler –
the way the ergonomically designed handle
fits snugly in the curve of my palm as if
it was made for the valley of my right hand.

I want to tell you how it is soul-mate
to thick-skinned vegetables –
cloudy tangerine columns of carrot
knobbly orbs of King Edward
how it slides over them as if it might be
wrapping them not unwrapping them
as if it might be whispering
while secretly stealing their skin.

I love the way the steel head swivels
gently rocking from side to side
accommodating each slight
ridge, bump, lesion. Under the skin

everything glistens new born –
vulnerable, true colours rising.


Write your own celebration of a ‘small thing’. Choose something that is functional. It has to be ordinary, of no real value. It shouldn't have any built in emotional value. You might not even realise how much you appreciate this thing until you start looking around you.
 
Start with the same opening phrase. Tell me just how wonderful this thing is. Be specific about what it does and how it does it. It’s also an opportunity to have fun.
 
Don’t try too hard to get a secondary meaning in the poem. My last two lines emerged unexpectedly after writing about the physical aspects of the potato peeler for some time. 
 
If we work too hard at a ‘sub-text’, what’s going on between the lines if you like, the poem can sometimes come across as too didactic. Writing needs a lighter touch than that, unless you’re writing an instruction manual, in which case you can be as didactic as you want!
 
And the secondary meaning might just be that we should celebrate the small things in life.
 

It was only when I took some photos of the potato peeler for this blog entry that I realised it had a brand-name. I've been using it for years and have never noticed that word written on the underside of the handle. Perhaps because its function is its most important quality I've never even thought of examining it closely - there's never been a need. Perhaps I would have if it had ceased to work properly.
 
I imagine there are lots of things like this in my life, things I take for granted. There are probably praise poems waiting to be written all around me.
 
Write well.
L x

Praise and Celebration

During a poetry module at the University of Kent I used to set an exercise to write a string of curses and/or a string of praises about something/someone. Most people preferred the curses because they found that their praising tended to sound too sickly, cliched, overstated, or even ironic. Perhaps it is harder to be genuinely and overtly kind than to pick a fight : )

However the following poet has no problem with praise.

Beach Attitudes

Blessed is the beach, survivor of tides.

And blessed the litter of crown conchs and pen shells, the dead
blue crab in all its electric raiment.

Blessed the nunneries of skimmers,
scuttering and rising, wheeling and falling and settling, ruffling
their red and black-and-white habits.

And blessed be the pacemakers and the peacemakers,

the slow striders, the arthritic joggers, scarred and bent under
their histories, for they're here at last by the sunlit sea.

Blessed Peoria and Manhattan, Ottowa and Green Bay, Pittsburgh,
Dresden.

And blessed their children.

And blessed the lovers for they shall have one perfect day.

Blessed be the dolphin out beyond the furthest buoy,
slaughtering the bright leapers,
for they shall have full bellies.

Blessed, too, the cormorant and the osprey and the pelican
for they are the cherubim and seraphim and archangel.

And blessed be the gull, open throated, screeching, scolding
me to my face,

for he shall have his own place returned to him.
And the glossy lip of the long wave shall have the last kiss.

Robert Dana
from The Other © Anhinga Press, 2008


I like how everything is blessed, what we might naturally find beautiful and inspiring (dolphins), what we might normally dismiss (the dead blue crab), and what might normally irritate us (a screeching gull). I like the place-names that anchor the poem to a real world.

Some readers might find the personnification in the last line a little too sweet (the wave kissing the beach) but I don't mind it here. Perhaps because of the language - glossy lip, which, for me, is a fresh and vivid image for a wave. And perhaps because the poem has engaged me so fully that I'm happy for the poet to take a risk with an edge of sentiment at the end.

Can you write a praise poem about a particular aspect of the world? You can use Robert Dana's structure of 'Blessed be...' if you like, or find your own.

Try to let the reader experience your 'world' - let them see and smell and touch and taste and hear it. Let them celebrate it with you.

A maximum of 30 lines please, and I'll comment on up to 2 poems.

Write well.
L x