Breathe Here

·         Up Home Again is the story of a woman who examines her haunting childhood in a beautiful place when she returns to Maine to resolve ongoing personal dilemmas. The book I started in 2006, and finished in 2022, will make its debut as a real book in January 2023. Writing a memoir isn't easy; for me it became excruciating. Parts I and II have been done for a long time, but for the last bit, Part III, I had to pull myself together in order to do the same for my book.  In 2004 I returned to Maine, my life eroded after cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, and then cancer again. In 2006, living alone and painfully lonely, I started this book in a memoir class at the Belfast (Maine) Senior College. For years I've said I'm writing a memoir. I tried lots of ways to finish it. New notebooks and pens, changing the way my desk faced, writing retreats, and writing other things including poetry - a lot of poetry. When my poetry manuscript started the process of publication, ...

Would you sign on for a year at sea? At seventeen? What if you were sent there, to get rid of you for a while? That’s what happened to Elizabeth Garber when their father sent her and her younger brother off to a year at sea aboard the four-masted square-rigger called the Antarna. It was a school called the Oceanics, and there was lots of learning that took place, but it wasn’t as much an academic experience as it was multiple life experiences including working to get the run-down vessel ready to sail. Garber was unsettled and tells us in her memoir Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring  Year, “ But as I calmed down, I was still glad that I’d come. I couldn’t wait to write about it.” We’re glad she did. Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year releases in September 2022, but to get started you can enjoy her previous memoir Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter to gain insight to the year she faced in 1971-197...

  As a Swan Unlike the heron, landing quietly, slipping into the weeds, setting the example of minding our own business, swans can sound like gunfire when they come in for a landing, can take a real man’s arm off, but, once landed, flow into view as if their graceful swimming weren’t akin to strutting, as if something so lovely couldn’t be so mean. They mate for life, swans do, although I wonder is it her choice or is she stuck with the partner that (apparently) protects her?   Nothing wrong with being an ugly duckling, if that duck is free from a man behaving as a swan — lovely to look at but also loud and dangerous, only seemingly protective.    This poem and picture were recently included in the wArts: Merrimac Mike Anthology VII. 

And now it comes to this . . .  We are at the final day of National Poetry Month 2022. Thank you to all who stuck with me -- writing poems, trying to write poems, reading the blog posts, and especially those who read at our monthly poetry reading on Zoom. New Jersey, New York. and New England were all represented. Going forward from the end of the month to the beginning of new writing, the next challenge is to make your own poetry, including your own poetic forms. You can actually invent a form or tweak a form. I was once teaching a weekend workshop at a retreat center and there wasn’t a lot of time to write so I came up with the “villanellie”. It’s a shorter version of the villanelle and kind of named after myself, but that part is just coincidence. The villanellie is a villanelle with three tercets instead of five. That gave the participants the opportunity to have a completed work in less time. A mentor once assigned a prompt that was something like “write a poem in twelve...

As we come to the end of the month we have reached our final Fun Friday for this project. Previously we looked at the clerihew and the limerick, but today we are doing light verse overall. It’s a varied and rich side of poetry. Yesterday I said when writing an ode, to keep it lofty. Today I’m saying come down from that. Go forth and write; keep it light. Even stuffy ol’ me has a few poems that are at least almost funny. Here’s one: High Minded Shoes The goddess within me rose up.                               The feminine came forward to say, “Go forth. Buy yourself something to demonstrate your strength, your versatility. Adorn yourself as the practical, competent woman you are. My wise woman archetype blossomed. My crone aspect made it possible and now — I have new Crocs. There is even a contest for light verse. It’s free to enter and t...

The ode is a poem, if not a song, of praise. It’s usually not in a form such as a sestina or villanelle, but will often be blank verse with iambic pentameter and end rhymes. The Greek poet Pindar is credited with writing the first odes, according to Padgett in the Handbook of Poetic Forms . Although Pindar's were intricate, like so many things, the form has “lightened up” over the centuries until now when the most important point is praise. While the ode does remain a poem of praise, that praise can be delivered in many ways. Odes often have a lofty air about them such as the early English odes written by Ben Johnson including “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison”. Although this mimics the early Pindar structure, it is also an update of the form. It is written in praise of a life well lived, even if brief. Here is some commentary on this ode followed by the poem itself. Ben Jonson – “The Ode on Cary and Morison” – Reading T...