There's always the weather.

This month I've been taking part in a River of Stones, an international writing project organised by Fiona and Kaspa, that encourages participants to write a small 'stone' every day. I know some of you have joined in too but if you haven't you can read more about it here.

The project may run again in July (it did last year) and I'll join in again. The discipline of stopping and looking around my world, the physical, intellectual and emotional ones, for a few moments and noticing what's there, what's really there, not what I think is there, is always a good one.

Today's writing prompt comes from one of my River posts which is why it doesn't have a title... yet.

Rain overnight and this morning
not a crackle of frost on the trees
or along the kerb around the yard
only a mist of grey above
and between the bare branches.

I miss the hills, the green roll
of them swallowed by cloud.
The day is too soft for clear thought.


Write about the weather, about yourself immersed in weather, or a rant against a particular kind of weather. Or a poem in praise of weather. About rain, or snow, or unexpected weather, or reliable weather. About the emotions the weather stimulates in us. About the memories it ignites.

Write well.
L
x

Celebrating one of our own

Many congratulations to Catherine (Foster) for winning 1st Prize in a competition run by First Time magazine with her powerful poem, The Prodigal Son. And thank-you, Catherine, for sharing it with AppleHouse:

The Prodigal Son

It’s the hogshit stink rising with the sun

that’s done for me.

My hands webbed, gloved with the stuff.

And the cornhusks: dry as old harlots I’ve had

when shekels ran low.

One shindig after another. Sex

like shooting stars. My belly a wineskin,

now scooped out, shrivelled as the last fig of summer.

Birds could perch on each rib.

A cowl of shame.

Dare I shadow my father’s house?

The utterance of my name- 

each letter an ulcer on his tongue?

Will I be but a mote of dust

shooed out by his hirelings?

I set off, sandals flap like dying fish.

Vultures fidget in my path.

My Father-     

arms outstretched in folds of the wind.

I stagger, kneel.

The forgiveness of a fatted calf,

purple robes to cover skin pleated over bones.

Words of silver to quench my thirst.

My son who was lost is now found.

And my brother?

He vomits envy.   

I thought it would be a good idea to set a poetry prompt in response to Catherine's poem. Choose a biblical character and write a poem in their voice. 'Persona' poems, as they're called can be written in a number of ways:

1. You stay true to that character's experience and re-tell their story.

2. You use that character as a mask to talk about your own concerns (e.g. using the voice of Eve to talk about feminist issues)

3. You update the character and their story and give it a contemporary 21st century spin.

There's no shortage of characters to choose from and given the season you might even like to choose one from the nativity story.

Looking forward to reading your work.

Write well.

Lynne

x

Oven cleaner, apples, open fires

Hello from Kent where I've spent more time inside the oven that I really wanted to and where the cardboard boxes are gradually diminishing. But not in my writing room. We left all our library shelving in the house in France so I'm waiting for new pine bookcases and a new pine desk which won't be here until after Christmas. It's not that I really need access to all my books but I do feel better when they are all facing me, the bright colours and words on their spines smiling at me as I pass, and not lying on their backs in the dark. But not long now.

Home means apples - there are 20 acres of apple trees just outside my door. It means log fires - we've kept the wood stove alight 24/7 since being home. An open fire in late autumn and winter is one thing I really missed in the house in France.

This week I've paired things that I haven't paired before: apples and sausage-meat (for a savoury supper), and big paintings and little paintings (to create a different effect on the walls in the lounge and kitchen:

Placing them next to each other like this made me think of haiku, of the phrase and fragment (or fragment and phrase) construction a lot of contemporary haiku take:

The haiku at the end of my last post was phrase/fragment:

fall, yet new leaves
on the plane trees:
we pack to go home

The longer part of the haiku, the phrase, extends over the first two lines and the fragment (a single image or comment) is confined to the third.

Free verse poetry can play with similar constructions e.g. long lines alternating with short lines, or perhaps a poem made up from regular stanzas that closes with a single line set apart at the end. The poet's craft lies in knowing why we do this, the effects that changes in pace will have on the reader, on their breathing, how isolating lines will change their relationship to the words on the page.

Write a poem that changes its form at some point during its development. Think about:
long lines
short lines
changes in stanza structure
a poem of two halves
long sentences
short phrases

But choose your subject matter to suit this form change. Remember that form arises from subject matter, that it can be used to effectively reflect emotional tone.

Write well.
L
x

Changes



Hugging the Plane tree in the garden
when we first arrived

I'm moving from the South of France back to the UK at the end of October. I have mixed feelings about the move. We've achieved so much here but it hasn't always been easy (you can read a little bit more about it here).
I'm not at the point of having to say goodbye yet but it does seem that I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

The end of September.
All traces of our summer guests
have gone: sand rinsed from showers,
beach towels folded away.

Under the terrace
the deflated paddling pool
gathers leaves.

We will not be here
much longer: palm trees, the Mistral,
the smell of coconut oil
at the supermarket check-out,
things of the past.

Four years of our life.
We measure it in numbers:
additions, subtractions,
try and make sense
of what we gain, what we lose.

A language. The scent of bread
carried on a sea breeze. The company
of the sun. The people we love
far away at the end of a phone.

Let me imagine a year ahead:
my parents' will celebrate
their 60th year together.
The smell of apples in the cold store.
The cat will have captured
a foreign territory and accepted it
as home. Which is what

we all crave: home.

I find it relatively easy to feel 'at home'. I can adapt to circumstances and situations. Sometimes it's a temporary home, a writing retreat that's made more familiar with a bed-throw, a rearrangement of the room's furniture. Sometimes it's more permanent: learning a language to feel part of a community.

Write about changes. About home. About the year ahead. Or the one you're leaving behind.

Write well.
L x

Welcome back to AppleHouse

And welcome to September.

How is yours? I've had two September experiences so far. Both in one day. I left Kent, UK yesterday which was a surprisingly summery 20 degrees and a welcome comparison to the wet and cold August. The change in the weather made me want to stay longer but the flight was booked and we took off from London City Airport, flew east along the Thames and out over the southernmost part of the North Sea.

1 hour and 50 minutes later we landed at Nice and drove to Antibes where it was 32 degrees and sunny, but so humid. This morning I couldn't tell where the wet quilt cover ended and I began as I struggled to lift it over the washing line.

Coming back to France in September meant I missed most of our crop of figs. I took a bowl of them back to Kent and left instructions with my cat and house sitter to help herself to whatever ripened in my absence.

All that's left now are a few, small late ripeners. September is too late for them. I missed their best time.

Here's a poem called 'September' by Linda Pastan, a poet I've previously introduced on AppleHouse Poetry

September

it rained in my sleep
and in the morning the fields were wet

I dreamed of artillery
of the thunder of horses

in the morning the fields were strewn
with twigs and leaves

as if after a battle
or a sudden journey

I went to sleep in the summer
I dreamed of rain

in the morning the fields were wet
and it was autumn

from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998
W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

Buy from The Book Depository

September is our ninth month but takes its name from 'septem'/seven as it was the seventh month in the Roman calendar.

We tend to associate September with autumn but in the Southern hemisphere it's the beginning of spring.

September was always a mark of going back to school. More recently it reminds me of 9/11 and the attack on the Twin Towers.

Write about September, or the shift from one month to another. Or dreaming. Or waking up. But anchor your poem to a particular time of year.

Write well.
L
x

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

The Beautiful List

I've spoken about and shared list poems a couple of times before but I really don't think we can have too much of a good thing. List poems, done well, sing to us because of their deceptive simplicity: they wear the disguise of an ordinary everyday thing (shopping list, to do list etc) but the poet's choice of form and language lifts them up out of the ordinary and makes them extra-ordinary.

The following poem, by Tim Nolan, (which you can listen to HERE on The Writer's Almanac before you read it), slows our reading down with its short couplets. It asks us to pay the same amount of attention to the 'forgotten'. But this isn't just a poem about a literal change of season. The introduction of the human relationship in the middle of the poem - the flush of your face/ so much - asks me to reconsider the other imagery, the statements at the close of the poem, and the title as metaphor. Here it is and many thanks to Tim for giving his permission:


Long Winter

So much I've forgotten
the grass

the birds
the close insects

the shoot—the drip—
the spray of the sprinkler

freckles—strawberries—
the heat of the Sun

the impossible
humidity

the flush of your face
so much

the high noon
the high grass

the patio ice cubes
the barbeque

the buzz of them—
the insects

the weeds—the dear
weeds—that grow

like alien life forms—
all Dr. Suessy and odd—

here we go again—
we are turning around

again—this will all
happen over again—

and again—it will—

Tim Nolan

If you're in the UK or Europe
then check out the The Book Depository
for Tim's collection, The Sound of It.

What do you take from that penultimate couplet and the final line on its own? Inevitability, acceptance, understanding?

I take comfort from it; repetition in all its guises can be comforting. Although my comfort is tinged by inquietude. I'm not sure I want another long winter, I'm not sure that I want some things to happen over again. But I also know that my experience of life is deepened by living through change.

Poems that make us think, that shift us between different emotions, these are the ones to cherish.

I don't want to be prescriptive with a poetry prompt. Let this poem work on you through several readings then set out on a journey of your own.

Write well.
L
x

Hearts & Minds

Dali & Captain Moore

There's a story about Salvador Dali, told to me a few years ago by his long-time manager, Captain Peter Moore.

Peter called on Dali at his house and studio in Port Lligat to see how he was progressing with a commission and was alarmed to see that the painting was far from finished.
'No problem, el capitano,' said Dali, 'I have until end of October.'
'But it's already November,' said Peter.
'November!' exclaimed Dali. 'Someone has stolen my October!'

I feel a little like that about March! Although rather than stolen it was filled to the brim with exciting events for the launches of another country, haiku poetry from Wales (Gomer Press).

But I'm back home in France now, catching up with writing and AppleHouse, and I came across this poem, in my Poems on the Underground anthology, which I can't remember ever reading before:

from The Mind is an Ancient and Famous Capital

The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation's celebration...

Delmore Schwartz (1913 - 1966)

Lots of the metaphors make immediate sense to me, particularly the mind being full of monuments 'which no one/ Now remembers' and 'Catacombs', although I'm a little unsure about 'equestrian' statues. I suppose the horse and rider could symbolise war? But I still like the poem a lot.

A few years ago I wrote a poem entitled 'Your Heart' which was published on a poster for a Hospital project:

Write a poem about the mind or the heart. Use metaphor rather than direct explanation to suggest what the mind or heart is, or does.

Write well.
L
x

Your age... contented, accepting, resentful, indifferent, curious?

There's a saying... if you want to feel young, mix with younger people. If you want to look young, mix with with older people. Here on the Cote d'Azur, particularly outside of the holiday season, there are a lot of elderly people, and for the most part all pretty sprightly for their eighties, so at 52 I'm a bit of a teenager!

1960

2010

Apart from being alternately accepting and resentful of the usual signs and effects of age - aches, wrinkles, long-sightedness, unable to drink more than a half bottle of wine without getting a hangover - I really do like being in my fifties and wouldn't want to go back to a previous age or time.

How about you? And do you ever wonder what you'll be like in 20 or 30 years time? It's difficult enough to feel any real connection to the child, girl or young woman who stares out at me from old photos so to imagine what and who I might be in the future feels like an impossible task. Perhaps I should have a go at one of those 'ageing' apps you see on Facebook and on people's mobile phones!

The danger of writing poems about getting older is that they might sound sentimental, even self-indulgent if we write about ourselves. How do we explore the personal and particular but make it universal, make it something that matters to other people? Philip Schultz talks about age in this poem:


76

My bones aren't what they used to be; my eyes ache,
as if I've been reading an ancient text by candlelight.
My back and knees creak. I'm happy if the car starts
and I can walk the dogs along the ocean which looks
a little less robust. It replenishes itself with stretching
and long cleansing breaths. The sun is another story.
It's beginning to show its age. Perhaps we've enjoyed
enough springs and everything is getting a little redundant.

Philip Schultz
from Living in the Past - Available via Amazon
Harcourt, Inc., 2004

Co-winner of the 2008
Pulitzer Prize

I like how he links ageing to the planet - what he notices about the sea, the sun. Do you think the last sentence is a little defeatist, or is it philosophical? Why should we expect our planet to last forever? And this is one of the thoughts I leave the poem with rather than just thinking about the narrator's own experience.

There's one phrase in the poem that makes me smile: I'm happy if the car starts/ Me too! Do we expect less as we get older? Or do we learn gratitude? Again, I'm prompted to reflect on particular ideas that are implicit in the poem but take me outside of it too.

Write your own age poem, using the above poem as a model, or stretching out in your own direction. But be careful, you don't want to put your back out : )

Write well
L
x

Consider this... a very un-Valentine writing prompt

Barbara Ann Kipfer
Random House 2007

I bought this book while on holiday in the US a couple of years ago. It's not the kind of book you read from cover to cover. You pick it up and glance through the 8 or 10 questions it has on each double page spread, and the occasional large print single pager, and see if one catches your eye. I've noticed that sometimes one does arrest me but I move on because I feel it's asking too much of me at that moment. Cowardly? Lazy? Probably a little of both. But I don't find it easy to think deeply spontaneously. It's is if I have to be shoe-horned into it, and for that reason dinner with good friends often has the right elements - comfortable companionship, good food and wine - to ease me slowly into a stage of, I hope, intelligent reflection. Of course a discussion of beliefs and opinions can become very energetic, even over-heated, particularly when there's a decent quantity of wine around, but if there are enough of you one person is generally able to lower the temperature and pull everyone back to a level of consideration. That's not always possible with family though... at least in my experience. Maybe yours is different?

My poetry prompt for today, and a very un-Valentine one it is too but I'm going on the assumption that there's plenty of Valentine stuff already out there, is to write a poem in response to the following question:

(p. 63) What will happen to the world when you die?

Here's my spontaneous response, raw and unedited but something to work on:

What happens to the world when I die

In the movie
of my life
there’s a moment
of stillness:
a street empty
of traffic;
a cashier’s hand
hovers over
the buttons on a till;
someone looks up
through the bare branches
of a Plane tree,

and then it’s over,
a car-horn blares,
a customer asks
if avocados
are on special,
a sudden gust
forces someone
to clap their hands
against the cold
then fast-dial home
to say they won’t
be long.

How carefully
I read the credits
looking
for myself.

Lynne Rees


I look forward to reading your poems.

Write well.
L
x

I believe...

I believe that the best poetry looks at the world from a slant point of view. If, as poets, we approach a subject straight on, talk directly about our ideas and feelings, we can risk being overly sentimental or didactic. And no one really enjoys reading things that either make us feel like a voyeur or someone on the receiving end of a finger wagging lesson.

Emily Dickinson sums up this idea up:


Emily Dickinson


Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

 
 
 
I like that line: The Truth must dazzle gradually.

And that's exactly how I feel about the following poem by Michael Blumenthal:


What I Believe

I believe there is no justice,

but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man,
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so gently

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.


Michael Blumenthal
from Days We Would Rather Know
Pleasure Boat Studio, 2005

Can you write a 'credo' poem, a list things you, or someone else, believes in, but make that poem speak to other people too? I think part of this poem's success is how it shifts between points of view, from I to you to we. What matters to the narrator becomes something that matters to the reader (the personal you), to the world in general (the universal you), and to all of us (we).

I like how concrete images are set against abstract ideas: justice/cottongrass and bunchberry, clocks break/time goes on. I like the swings between opposites: weaker/stronger, sea/land. And I like how the rhythm of the poem changes with the enjambement (the read on lines) between the last two stanzas, how it gently extends our reading, and thus our understanding.

There's a quiet voice behind the poem, but it has authority too. The use of the first person, the I, often has that effect.

I suggest a poem of no more than 40 lines that draws on some of the craft choices in this poem: juxtaposition of image and idea, shifts between opposites, and a deliberate choice of point/s of view.

Write well.
L x

Above us, Below us, Behind us, Ahead of us

I recently read this poem by Ted Kooser:

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

I'm astonished at his comparison of a dying galaxy with a snowflake falling on water. That juxtaposition of something so huge with something so small wouldn't have occurred to me, but it works so well, doesn't it? And the image acts as a vehicle for so many ideas too: how small we are, how everything is connected, how even 'death' can be beautiful. I'm sure there are more.

My poetry prompt is to write a poem, not using the 'Above/Below' structure that Kooser uses, but 'Behind/Ahead' instead. So, you can talk about the past/future, or something more concrete like the sea and the mountains, or something closer to you like the kitchen and the bedroom. It's up to you.

BUT your poem can only be 8 lines long, the same length as Kooser's, and it should compare, or juxtapose, two things that we might not expect to see connected.

Write well.
L

x

Poetry Prompt: Treasures

Not the pirate and island kind we usually associate with the word. But the things you would grab from your 'hypothetically' burning home before you ran out of the door. They can only be what you can carry in two hands, or in your pockets; things that won't slow you down or hinder your escape. Things that will comfort you when you realise you have lost everything else.

Let's not include people or pets; let's take it as a given that everyone you love is safe.

So, you have less that two minutes before you have to be out of that door. What calls to you?

They can be real things, or they can be invented or imaginary. They can be concrete or abstract. What matters is not factual accuracy but emotional truth. We must make our readers FEEL that it IS true.

Write well.

L x

The Hungry Writer

I've started a new writing project based around food - you can take a look at the most recent blog posts here. Although, as Molly Wizenberg says, Food is never just food. It's also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.  If you'd like to keep in touch with my weekly memoirs, you can become a Hungry Reader and follow the blog.

So, I wondered if you'd like to join me for a bite to eat, or something to drink, for this prompt?

Free write around the idea of food. Think of the food of your childhood, your likes and dislikes now, about the first ever restaurant meal you ate. What are the colours of food that attract you? Do you remember the first time you got drunk? Have you ever been in a situation where someone has fed you, or provided you with food because you were unable to do it for yourself? Have you ever grown your own food? Can you describe the first sip of cold beer, or champagne, or hot tea? Let your mind have a free rein - allow it to take you wherever it wants to go.

I never expected to write the following poem. I don't know where it came from... I definitely don't know a man like this! But the images arose during a free writing session. It's good to surprise ourselves sometimes.

Fat

Skinny women order his fish
fried in low-cholesterol oil,
batter as crisp and sheer as glass.
He teases them about goose-fat,
the slip of it, how it dimples
under fingertips, at the right point
of tenderness how it gives
to the tip of a tongue.

He dreams of women
whose flesh parts for him
like lard – their overlap, the spill
and pleat of them, his hands skating
over their suety gleam, their excess
rejoicing under his palms.

from Learning How to Fall

Write well.
L x

Startled by the visible



© Image by Caroline Forbes

Dannie Abse, born in 1923, is a poet, playwright and novelist whose literary career spans half a century, the first of his fourteen collections of poetry, After Every Green Thing, being published in 1948, his latest selected appearing in 2009. In between Abse has established himself as one of Britain's leading and most popular poets. Brought up in Cardiff, Abse draws on both his Welsh roots and Jewish inheritance but is above all famous for combining the twin careers of author and doctor. The influence of the latter on the former is considerable and has helped develop his unique identity in British poetry.

You can listen to him reading some of his poems here.

The following poem appeared in Poems on the Underground 10.


Mysteries


At night, I do not know who I am
when I dream, when I am sleeping.

Awakened, I hold my breath and listen:
a thumbnail scratches the other side of the wall.

At midday, I enter a sunlit room
to observe the lamplight on for no reason.

I should know by now that few octaves can be heard,
that a vision dies from being too long stared at;

that the whole of recorded history even
is but a little gossip in a great silence;

that a magnesium flash cannot illumine,
for one single moment, the invisible.

I do not complain. I start with the visible
and am startled by the visible.

Dannie Abse


Read the poem several times over the course of the next couple of days. Don't write anything down at first. After a fourth or fifth reading, make free notes of your responses: direct comments about the poem, what the poem made you think about, what it made you feel. Anything at all that comes into your head, but try and include at least one memory the poem made you think about

Put these notes away for a further couple of days before reading back over them and beginning to draft your own poem.

Write well.
L x

What's in a name?

Who gave you your name?
Do you know what it means?
Do you like it?
If your name was a shape, what shape would it be?
Would you prefer to have a different name? Why?
Have you ever been called by another name, or names?
Do different people have different names for you?
If your name was the title of a novel what kind of novel would it be? What would the main character be like?
Have you ever had any nick-names?

Free write around your name for about 15 minutes, responding to these questions and anything else that enters your mind.

Let the writing sit for a couple of days, without reading back over it, though continue to think and make notes about any other ideas that come to you.

When you're ready, read back over all your notes to see if you have the material for a poem.

You'll see a poem of mine below, written some years ago when I was alone in a small spanish village on a writing retreat.

Write well.
L x


How Are You?

After twelve anonymous days
I walk into the supermercado and someone says
my name and my heart
ignites with something that feels like heat, light.

No matter that rain is pushing its cold smoke
down the mountains,
that I can smell it coming,
the damp evening air sticking to my skin.

What more is there? My place in the world
confirmed, still hearing it in the street –
Lynne! Que tal? Like a blessing. And I am fine.
I am so fine.

Lynne Rees

A quickie - 10/10/10 becomes a poem

By way of haiku writers Nora Wood, Dennis Chibi, and Curtis Dunlap: Today is 10/10/10. Can you write a quick three line poem of 10 syllables each? Here's mine:

All day this odd malaise accompanied
by the first true autumn day - grey sky, wind.
A day for spiced tea, letters to old friends

L x

These are the women

Today's prompt was inspired by this beautiful poem by Eleanor Lerman that appeared on the Writers' Almanac on 8th September 2010 and which she has generously allowed us to reproduce here:

Small Talk

It is a mild day in the suburbs
Windy, a little gray. If there is
sunlight, it enters through the
kitchen window and spreads
itself, thin as a napkin, beside
the coffee cup, pie on a plate

What am I describing?
I am describing a dream
in which nobody has died

These are our mothers:
your mother and mine
It is an empty day; everyone
else is gone. Our mothers
are sitting in red chairs
that look like metal hearts
and they are smoking
Your mother is wearing
sandals and a skirt. My
mother is thinking about
dinner. The bread, the meat

Later, there will be
no reason to remember
this, so remember it
now: a safe day. Time
passes into dim history.

And we are their babies
sleeping in the folds of
the wind. Whatever our
chances, these are the
women. Such small talk
before life begins.

from The Sensual World Re-Emerges (2010)
available from Sarabande Books
and Amazon UK

I love how the detail in this poem recreates both scene and character, how the poet invites us (our mothers, we are their babies) to share this moment of reflection, a time before loss, a time before whatever is going to happen, happens.

I like how the poem expores how life is made up of 'small talk', or ordinary things: a kitchen window, pie on a plate, a cigarette, even decisions about what to make for dinner, yet this attention applied to them helps us recognize their worth, how they are the building blocks of our lives.

I am also incredibly moved by the insight in:

......... Whatever our
chances, these are the
women.

There's an acceptance in these lines I find both comforting and liberating to read. These are our mothers. Whatever comes later does not change that moment.

I look forward to reading your 'mother' poems. Here's one of mine, a haibun (a blend of prose and haiku poetry) that I didn't intend to be about my mother until I came to the end. And that surprised me.

Fast Train

When the 17.22 heads out of Victoria and begins to pick up speed I start thinking about seatbelts, or the absence of seatbelts, and how in an emergency I might be thrown onto the woman opposite, cracking my head against hers, or puncturing my face on a corner of her open hardback book. But then I notice her breasts which are packed beneath a bib of pink frills, her tiered paisley skirt rumpling in waves over plump knees, her curly hair the colour of hazelnuts, her milky skin, which takes me back to her breasts which are pendulous, generous. And I’ve forgotten about seatbelts, as I shift my knees to one side to get a view of her feet, the shoes she’s wearing which I know will make all the difference to whether she’ll scream and push me away as I fall, or cradle my face away from her book, those wonderful breasts receiving me like a tumbled duvet.

not knowing
how to hold her
my mother at eighty

First published in Frogpond Volume XXX Number 3
And in dust of summers (Red Moon Press 2008)

I'm away at the Ghent Haiku Festival in Belgium for the next 10 days so, write well, and I'll speak to you when I get back.

It's that time of year... for plums

...and also when the French start to wind down, kick back, and close up : ))

July and August tend to be the months when you don't try and get anything done. And here on the Cote d'Azur your life is definitely more stress free if you can stay off the roads as much as possible.

Last year AppleHouse Poetry closed up for two months too, but my spell in Wales in June ate up so much time that I'd rather keep going for at least part of July. I hope you'll keep going with me.

Recently, I've been reading William Carlos Williams' poem, 'This Is Just to Say'. It's a poem I know well, but each time I've re-read it, it's felt as enigmatic, and as inviting, as the first time.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Maybe I've become re-enchanted by this poem because we have a wild and very old plum tree in our garden here. The fruit is small, but incredibly juicy. You can not bite into them without an explosion!

Let's use the Williams' poem as a model, and let's 'talk back' to it.

1. Keep the same title: This is just to say...
2. Write three stanzas of 4 lines
3. The first two stanzas state something that has happened
4. The third stanza offers a response of some kind.

What do you think? I hope you'll join in. I'm already thinking of something I want to write.

Looking forward to reading your poems.
L x

Where Home Is

Well, I'm back in France where my house is, where I currently live, where I love and am loved, so this is home. But Wales is home too, at least the concrete aspects of it: the pebble-dash house where I was born, the sea, my dad's vegetable garden, my mam's walnut wardrobes and dressing table that she's had since she was married in 1952. My family. The way people in South Wales use the word 'bad' for 'ill', as in 'she's been bad since last week'. It is so nurturing to feel connected to people and place.

But it is possible to lose our sense of connection even if the people and places in our lives remain unchanged. Perhaps we change. The way we feel. The way we think. Perhaps our view of our world becomes warped. Sometimes that sense of disconnection is temporary. Other times it represents the need for a fundamental change in our life.

Can you write about not being 'at home', either in a literal or metaphorical sense?

Here's a poem I wrote a few years ago.

Where Home Is

A woman stands at the side of the road
staring up at the night sky. Questions
about desire have made her stop her car:

how it’s born, how to tend it, how it dies.
She has read of people killing for it.
She knows a woman who almost disappeared

under its weight. Places return to her –
Belleville, Sweetwater: beauty, something
to quench the heat of her tongue.

It is June, the nights are warm.
One star shines too close to the moon.
She is still so far away from home.

Runner-up,Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition 2006
Published in Equinox July 2007


Thank you for waiting for my return.
Write well.
L x