WAYS TO START WRITING LOVE POEMS

Valentine’s Day will be here before you know it so consider writing a love poem.

You may want to start off by writing a short poem.  Certainly, Emily Dickinson’s poems are concise.

It’s All I have to bring today (26)

It’s all I have to bring today – 
This, and my heart beside – 
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell – 
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
— Emily Dickinson

For a subject, consider writing about when you first met, describing how you felt and where you were.  Or about one of your first dates.  Don’t forget to ground your poem with heartfelt messages.

One way to write a short love poem is to construct it along the lines of a cinquain – but, instead of counting syllables as in the traditional five-line cinquain, use words.  Jennifer Goode offers suggestions on how to write this short poem:

In line 1, use a noun (that also can be the poem’s title) – 1 word
line 2: a description – 2 words
line 3: an action – 3 words
line 4: a feeling (use a phrase) – 4 words
line 5: a noun (either repeat line 1 or use a synonym) – 1 word

Here’s what I wrote using Jennifer Goode’s exercise:

YOUR KISSES

Kisses,
tasty cocktails,
intoxicate with touching
tenderness.  I treasure each
embrace. 

Another mode to use is to write an acrostic poem in which every line starts with a letter of a word that is displayed vertically.  Jennifer Goode suggests using “I love you” in an acrostic poem:
I
L
O
V
E 
Y
O
U

Or you could use your sweetie’s name or the nickname you call her:

H
O
N
E
Y

Why not try a method used by Pablo Neruda?  In “Your Feet” he takes a less-often admired part of his beloved’s body and writes why he loves them:

YOUR FEET

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.

Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.

I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,
the double purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
—  Pablo Neruda

Perhaps in your poem you’ll say why you love her neck, her small wrist, earlobe, dimples or freckles.

For the adventurous among my readers, try your hand at composing a love sonnet.  To make it easier, here’s an idea that came from Jim Behrle on The Awl:
steal (excuse me: borrow) the end words of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and fill in the lines.

The end words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCVIII (“From you have I been absent in the spring” has easier end words than his sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”:
spring
trim
thing
him
smell
hue
tell
grew
white
rose
delight
those
away
play

With these end words, you have opportunities for comparisons and for sensory images.

And finally for the last-minute love-poem writer, there’s a website that let’s you fill in the blanks (Remember MadLibs?).

For a simple love poem:

Click here to start the fill-in-the-blanks love poem

Or a Neruda poem of your own:

Click here to generate a Neruda poem of your own

HOW TO BE A POET -- and how to be a sensitive poet

HOW TO BE A POET

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill ⎯ more of each
than you have ⎯ inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditional air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

⎯ Wendell Berry

Source: Poetry, January, 2011


And on a very different note...

THREE TUBAS

This is the way I’m starting the year — with an oompah-pah not a whimper.  For the first post of the new year, I present the large, the loud and the illustrious tuba.

The word tuba originally was the name of a straight-built Roman trumpet and was the medieval Latin word for trumpet.

The serpent, probably invented in 1590 by Edme Guillaume of Auxerre, a French canon, was made of wood in a serpentine curve with a 7- or 8- foot bore and six finger holes.  Originally, it accompanied plainchant (Gregorian chant) in churches but from the eighteenth century was the standard wind bass in military bands.

The invention of the bass tuba by a German instrument builder named Johann Gottfried Moritz in 1835 provided a more reliable and more even brass bass than its predecessors.  This was the bass tuba in F, with five valves.

Richard Wagner, also in the nineteenth century, had special tubas designed to create special effects for his opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.  The Wagner tubas formed a tone between a French horn and a tuba (described as a quieter tone color than both instruments).

Modern military and brass band tubas are of two sizes used together.  Orchestral tubas vary in different countries.  Great Britain and Germany use tubas in the original pitch of F while the US and parts of Europe use large instruments in the C pitch.

Enough of the history of the tuba (use the information three times and it’s yours for a lifetime).  Let’s go to the poems now.

INSTRUMENT OF CHOICE
by Robert Phillips

She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,

so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba.  Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,

its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
Its body pressed on hers.

Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.

“Instrument of Choice,” by Robert Phillips, appeared online on The Writer’s Almanac on May 5, 2007.

The second tuba poem is from Scrambled, by Trish Dugger (Garden Oak Press, 2012).  Trish’s book was featured on this blog last year.

RASH OF TUBA THEFTS IN SOUTHLAND HIGH SCHOOLS
LA Times, Dec. 12, 2011

I can’t get those tubas
out of my head.  I imagine
culprits in dark hoods
trying to hide humongous
tubas behind their backs,
bumping into lockers,
knocking over trash cans,
cracking windows.
I’ve never stolen anything
unless you count
Lucy Crane’s boyfriend,
Corky Taylor, and I never
knew a guy who played
the tuba, which I can’t
say I’m sorry about but,
Corky played a wicked
harmonica when we
weren’t making out
behind the bleachers.

    — Trish Dugger

This post’s final tuba poem is from me and appears in my new book, The ABCs of Memory.  (Okay, I’m starting off the new year also with a shameless plug for my book.)

RED SHIFT

A distant train trundles into the night,
    working hard, going somewhere else.
        It reminds her of the time he explained
how the Doppler Effect was confirmed
    by an Austrian mathematician
        who used a Dutch locomotive,
three separate observing stations
    along the track and fifteen musicians
        on the train playing trumpets.

She’d pictured the coming and going
    with its rising and falling to be more
like a herd of tuba players in a German
    oompah-pah band, exuberant men
in lederhosen and green felt hats,
    their cheeks puffing out, puckering in,
out and in, and all for the love of science.

He maintained they’d played trumpets.
    As the train went past the three stations,
the trumpeters all played the same note
    while musicians with absolute pitch,
posted on the platforms, attempted to catch
    changes in frequency.  In his most forceful
and sonorous tone, he tried to impress
    on her the simple seriousness of science.

As she coasts toward sleep, she considers
    the sad, single note testing and retesting
the returning.  Or was it the leaving?
    And an unsteady recollection he’s said
something or other about Edwin Hubble
    using what the trumpeters had proved
to validate the galaxies racing further

apart.  Red Shift, he’d called it,
    where light from distant stars downshifts
        toward the red end of the spectrum,
to lower frequencies and longer wavelengths.
    So much going somewhere else, a nocturne
        for all the worlds and loved ones leaving.

     — Lenny Lianne

SPLENDID SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF POETRY

You don’t need the Sugar Plum Fairy or even visions of sugar plums in your head to delight in listening to the splendid sounds of poetry.  There are many websites that offer audio recordings, podcasts and videos of a variety of poets and poetry readings. 

This holiday season (and all through the year) sit back, relax by the glow of the computer screen and treat yourself to the voice, rhythms and words of a poet you admire (or one who’s new to you).

Here are a few sites to visit:

The Poetry Foundation has a wide variety of both audio and video offerings.

www.poetry foundation.org

The Library of Congress has both their Poet Vision series

www.loc.gov/poetry/poetvision.html

and “The Poet and the Poem” radio program webcasts

www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html

Moving Poetry is “a compendium of video poetry from around the web with a new video every weekday.”

http://movingpoems.com

Lunch Poems is a very fine poetry series at the University of California – Berkeley under the direction of UC Berkeley professor and former Poet Laureate Robert Hass.  The series is broadcast on UCTV.

www.uctv.tv/lunchpoems

Enjoy.

THE ABCs OF MEMORY

DRUM ROLL PLEASE.

I’m delighted to announce the publication of my new book of poems, The ABCs of Memory.

Click here to see book at Amazon.com.

Click here to see book on publisher's site.

Unlike the way I organized each of the previous collections (around a narrative, told mainly through persona poems), in this new volume, I wanted to apply a wholly different structure (a simple, and familiar, framework used to catalogue various pleasures, ordeals and mixed blessings of American life).  

The ABCs of Memory contains two sections of poems titled alphabetically.  The first set of poems, called “An Alphabet From An Ample Nation,” probes the American psyche by examining such icons as Mr. Potato Head, Elvis, a Playboy centerfold, Mary Worth and Wonder Bread.  This grouping includes a prize-winning parody of Ginsberg’s “Howl”.  The second section, “An Alphabet of Modest Means,” explores little life moments of ordinary people and it’s the aggregate of these experiences that throws light on facets of American identity.

 Let me show you a poem from each section.  
First, from “An Alphabet From An Ample Nation”:

WONDER BREAD

What you do remember of the rapid years,
when you spent your days learning how
to hokey pokey and to read simple stories
about Dick and Jane and their dog Spot,

was how in the evening after dinner
your mother grabbed the familiar white bag
with red, yellow and blue balloons and 
pulled out two slices of simple Wonder Bread.

She placed one round portion of baloney 
between the pieces of white bread before 
she sliced the sandwich.  Always vertically
and never cutting off the crust.

On winter mornings when you could see
the wispy body of your breath as you rushed out
holding your metal Howdy Doody lunch box,
always anxious about being late,

you were confident you carried the bread
Buffalo Bob said builds strong bodies eight ways —
more crucial, you thought, than the handful
of carrot sticks or a snack box of raisins.

You can’t recall exactly when things changed.
Certainly it was after Clarabell finally spoke,
lips quivering as he whispered, Goodbye, kids,
and there was no more Buffalo Bob and Howdy.

Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Roy Rogers were gone.
Annette and the other Mouseketeers no longer
sang and danced in Roll Call each afternoon.
One day it was all different.

The earth mothers moved into kitchens
in cities and suburbs.  Their sleek hands
kneaded bread dough, punching out air.
The aroma of baking bread was everywhere.

Soon alfalfa sprouts appeared
with hummus on whole wheat
or spreadable Neufchatel with sunflower
seeds or bananas on multigrain bread.

Overnight metal lunch boxes with the faces 
of our favorite TV characters on the front
disappeared, gone with Wonder Bread,
while mothers mouthed Just as well.  Good riddance!

In its own way, whiter than God intended,
even enriched with minerals and vitamins,
bread became somehow tarnished and not good
enough for us who no longer trusted in wonders.

     from The ABCs of Memory, 2012, Lenny Lianne

                And from the second section:

NOTHING BUT TROUBLE

The pyracantha bush taps fingers 
against the window in a code
he doesn’t bother to comprehend.
Down the street one car horn
blasts twice in reprimand. 
Even the wind hurls its own slurs.

More and more, every noise annoys him,
especially his wife cracking an ice tray
over the spine of the sink, a cipher
that splits the air like an angry bird.
Up early, she is alone in the kitchen
making the same flavor Kool-aid
she’s made every day but puts
no smile on the pitcher anymore.

In the beginning he trusted familiar 
things he’d known all his life --
squirrels at the bird feeder,
husk of snake’s skin in the attic,
red and white soup cans on the far side
of the pantry -- all the household
gods of modest means.

But over the years he’s learned 
he travels, locked in place.
As the moon pales and plunges,
he is a bird bashing its head
against the empty picture window
while the waking world wishes him
nothing but trouble.

     from The ABCs of Memory, 2012, Lenny Lianne

SOUTH AFRICAN POETS II: LINDA ANN STRANG

I’m thrilled to feature poet Linda Ann Strang.

Linda lives in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where she’s been a university lecturer and academic writing consultant.  She writes poems and short stories, many published internationally.  In 2007, the editors of Poetry Kanto nominated her poems (“The Feathered Saxophonist” and “Where They Say: Don’t Touch”) for a Pushcart Prize.  Linda, together with artist Stephanie Liebetrau, curated an ekphrastic exhibition called “Transfiguration” in 2010.

[Read about ekphrastic poetry on the 7-11-12, 7-25-12 and 8-8-12     posts on this blog.]

Linda Ann Strang’s poetry book carries an intriguing and playful title: Wedding Underwear for Mermaids.  When asked to talk about her title, Linda answered “You’d have to be a woman wearing a sequined g-string to understand.” [Now this is an I-wish-I’d-said-that moment!]


Critic Grady Harp, an Amazon Hall of Fame and Top 50 Reviewer, calls Wedding Underwear for Mermaids “as rich a collection of meaningful and dazzling poetry as has been placed before the public in a long time.”  Alan Botsford, editor of Poetry Kanto, in his review in Carillon, explains: “Cinematic in quality, if not in form, her poems jump-cut from scene to scene, with cultural allusions layering elliptical narrative arcs through multicultural distances and multi-ethnic relations, sometimes at warp speed.  High-voltage sensuality is delivered via visual collage in an everyday performance not only where Africa and the West meet, but also where colors and textures rich and sensuous translate into a cohesive choice of words, born out of the poet’s command of the senses.”

Wedding Underwear for Mermaids is available in print and Kindle versions.

Click here to see Linda's book (paperback edition) on Amazon.

Click here for the Kindle edition on Amazon.

Click here to go to Honest Publishing for Linda's book.

I’m pleased to present to our readers two of Linda Ann Strang’s poems, both with African themes.

The Snapdragon Peace Accord

South Africa, 1974

The lemon trees have bumpy leaves.
My grandmother brushes

unbaked scones with milk,
her hands all flour and age spots.

Sweet peas scale the chicken wire.
Grandmother Ivy bottles ginger beer

and draws a hand across her forehead.
Sharpeville revs its cutting engine.

There are violets around the birdbath.
Ivy, Edwardian, unties the knot

only of her homemade apron.
Cancer is the upstart in her uterus.

We are little girls.  We sing “Ring O’ Rosies,”
fall down in the garden laughing.

Later we push immature fingers
into the mouths of snapdragons,

who say aah without breathing fire.
Our stethoscopes are anemones.

Each mind a handful of sand,
let us go at the funeral.

Skinning our knees, dresses riding up,
we climb the wooden fence –

it has compound fractures
and it pickets the end of the world.

[Note: "Sharpeville revs its cutting engines": Sharpeville refers to the 1960 massacre of black South Africans peacefully protesting state-imposed passbooks and, in this poem, is a symbol of political conflict in South Africa.  In 1974, that political conflict revved up again, when the government declared that it would implement the instruction of Afrikaans in black schools -- which eventually resulted in the riots and bloodshed in Soweto in 1976.]

(a shorter version was published in So To Speak, summer, 2011)

Here is Linda Ann Strang’s villanelle:

Song of the Émigré

We want to eat but there’s blood in the bread.
The rioting crowd finds a fence to trample.
The phoenix is anemic; the rivers are red.

Fashion dictates: dress yourself in lead.
Crows bestow unction in the pale temple.
We want to eat but there’s blood in the bread.

Lights fall.  Andromeda burns a hole in our bed.
A jazz song lacerates the night like bramble.
The Phoenix is anemic; the rivers are red.

Sirens are the food with which terror is fed:
our thoughts in a knot that we can’t untangle.
We want to eat but there’s blood in the bread.

A man with a knife finds a woman to wed,
her broderie body a pattern of shrapnel.
The phoenix is anemic; the rivers are red.

There’s a curse on our country where every tread
takes you closer to death – that stale angel.
We want to eat but there’s blood in the bread.
The phoenix is anemic; the rivers are red. 

[Note: The word “broderie” refers to broderie anglaise, a form of needlework on fabric which features embroidery, cutwork and needle lace and is characterized by round and oval holes, or eyelets, grouped in a pattern.  In the poem, it is used to indicate the “body” is full of holes.]


Recently, Linda was the coordinator of Women’ Scream International Poetry Festival 2012 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  Women’ Scream is an international coalition founded in 2009 in the Dominican Republic.  Its mission is to honor women poets, and artists, and to create a conscious outcry against violence toward women, through art and poetry during the whole month of March.  This year 90 scheduled events in 30 countries (on five continents) were part of Women’ Scream 2012.

Linda explains, in a piece she wrote for So to Speak online, why this is important to her:
“I live in a country where, as a woman, you have to be crazy to be a feminist and crazy not to be one.  Feminism is frowned upon by many people, including females, so admitting to being a feminist draws a lot of hostility and ridicule, as I know from experience.  That’s why it’s crazy to be a feminist in South Africa.

This is why it’s crazy not to be one: South Africa has been called ‘the rape capital of the world’ (its main competitor for this ‘honour’ being the Democratic Republic of Congo).  It’s been said that a South African woman has a better chance of being raped than she has of completing secondary school; and this isn’t just some arbitrary information for me.  I’ve witnessed the suffering of my neighbours and friends.  One acquaintance was raped and strangled.  Another was raped and stabbed in the throat –  but she survived.  Yes, South African society is characterized by crime and violence.  But the women here identify vigorously with their aggressors – and, quite frankly, I do too most of the time.  So feminism for me is not so much about theories as it is about surviving another day and holding onto a bit of self-respect.”

One book review said, “One would think that with experiences such as these Strang would offer poetry that is heavily accented with loathing, but in reality the opposite occur.”

To read this review and 2 poems, click here.

SOUTH AFRICAN POETS I: GAIL DENDY

SOUTH AFRICAN POETS I: GAIL DENDY


LET’S GO GLOBAL!

When I was in South Africa in May, the Cape Town newspaper printed a brief review of Gail Dendy’s new book, Closer Than That (Johannesburg: Dye Hard Press).  Not only did the review declare, “Here is a poet who seems to not take herself that seriously, but who takes her craft very seriously indeed” but also identified Gail Dendy as a “master…of poems that tip the reader deliciously off balance with their startling, almost tangible, plays with images.”  I was intrigued.

Online I learned that Gail Dendy has published 7 collections of poetry.  She’s been short-listed for the EU/Sol Plaatje Poetry Prize 2011 and 2012 as well as the Thomas Pringle Award for Prose (Category: Short Story), 2010.

In a 2011 interview in litnet, Gail Dendy explained, “For me, writing is about being alive and open to the world and so I love the way in which poetry, in its relatively short-form format, is uniquely suited to exploring, distilling and crystallizing our life experience.”

Throughout the 1980s and early 90s Gail pioneered Contemporary Dance in South Africa and was nominated for the inaugural AA Vita Award for Best Performer.  Responding to how her dance experience has influenced her writing, she’s said, in the same interview in litnet, “Where my dance crosses over into my poetry is in that heightened sense of movement and musicality – that is, the rhythms and cadences of the language, the way that syllables, sentences and stanzas move and swirl and almost bump up against one another like boats bobbing on water.”

Gail Dendy’s poems, delicate observations about the human condition, are noted for their musicality that make them a delight to read.  Here she offers our readers her poem, “Anatomy” (short-listed for the EU/Sol Plaatje Poetry Prize):  

ANATOMY

Between my shoulder blades
the slim rope of my spine
curves downwards
towards my hips.

If I lie with you
on your wide bed,
my spine
will be regarded
as smiling,

smiling when I am asleep,
and pursed-lipped
when I am awake,

and it is a birch tree 
in the bare winter,
and a sapling
in the blue summer,

and it is the compass needle
of my days
and the bell-rope
of my nights,

and before I was born
it resembled a musical clef,
and afterwards
it will lie in the earth
as a broken string 
of pearls,

and they say
pearls are for tears,
but if I were you,

and you my beloved,
I should not weep
for my spine,

for it is safe
between the arrowheads
of my shoulder blades,
pointing towards
the country
of my hips.
— Gail Dendy


Gail has another wonderful poem, “I Want,” which is reprinted here from Scrutiny 2” Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa (vol. 13, Issue 2, 2008)

I WANT

I want a poem that curls like a child

and falls asleep in my arms.  I want

a poem that breathes in and out at all the right

moments.  I want to pet it and cuddle it

and place it in a small, hand-made cradle

and sing to it when the sun can no longer

be seen.  I want the stars to pinpoint it

and the sun and the moon to shine on it.

Only, I don’t want the wind to come up

and blow all the bits of it away.  Rather, I want

the poem to become a woman, to smoothe out her dress

and step, like Marilyn, across the subway grate.

                                       — Gail Dendy

Gail’s worked as a university academic, copywriter and radio news writer.  Currently, she is the Information Specialist for an international corporate-law firm.  Gail is passionate about environmental- and animal-rights issues.  She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, together with her husband, pets, a law library and a huge collection of Rock ‘n Roll.

Click here for the Dye Hard Press interview with Gail Dendy

Click here for email address to Dye Hard Press for details about obtaining Gail's new book