(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site. Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)
Day One
I’m looking
as she’s reaching,
fingertips for the solitary
snowflake,
a floating apparition
in the early
Springtime sun,
but then it’s gone
before we even notice
what it is
we were watching
when we were watching
this
All month, I’ve been writing poems each morning to a theme via CLMOOC’s Poetry Port — a project designed to spread collaboration and support through various networks. Along with the daily writing, a number of us were writing poems for others — sometimes as unexpected gifts and sometimes for the recipient’s request. The Thinglink above is my curation of my own poems, some via audio and some via text.
Today, the last day, the daily poem theme was not Farewell, but instead, Welcome.
I had this idea of going back to a poem that I wrote, rather quickly, for the theme of Memories for CLMOOC’s month of poetry, and think a bit deeper on why I wrote what I wrote. To be honest, the comment annotations are small — you can get a closer look here, if you want.
My hope was to uncover some of my intentions with the small poem, to surface some of my moves. I would not call this poem anything extraordinary or special or even one of my best poems this month, but there are elements of personal story and intentional rhyming, as well as regrets about the ending, that made this poem worth a second look. For me, anyway.
First, above, is a small poem that is less me than Greg. I grabbed a few lines from a poem that Greg had posted yesterday on the daily theme of “simplicity,” and the only thing I added was a comma, after moments. In doing so, though, his lines became its own separate poem, a sort of koan.
Second, this poem is for Ron, whose work as an artist is always interesting to me. He makes picture books and does daily artwork and sketches, and is always up for another connected adventure.
Ron and I know each other through CLMOOC and DS106 and other adventures. His poem began in digital format, but then I wanted a more static version, too.
Finally, this poem is for Raymond.
Our paths crossed years ago in CLMOOC, and I bought his small book of poems, a book that inspired the poem. We still interact now and then, and although I think our political views are quite different, I enjoy understanding Raymond’s perspective and reading his poetry.
Not every day’s poem is a keeper, although I do have a site where I write the poems every morning, and I post them over at Mastodon and on Twitter, this month. Here are five recent poems that I think are worth a second look.
Theme: Negotiate
A writer
always negotiates
the correct word
the right phrase
the perfect order
of story, set into motion,
though such terms
never fully placates
the mind, which demands
devotion to craft,
an unending ocean
of revision and draft
Theme: Kindness
Sometimes
it is a bit like
flying blind;
this being kind
Theme: Love
For, despite
the commercial
value of such an
over-sold,
red-hearted,
designated day
of purchase power,
remember, too,
that
love becomes us
Long after
the shelves clear,
we’ll still be
holding hands
and whispering
secrets together
Theme: Friendship
The bracelet snaps
my attention; she points
and explains that she’s
the purple, and her companion,
the pink, the two of them
twined forever on her wrist,
twisted forever together
with fingers, in friendship;
all while she’s reminding me
of this in her quiet voice,
as if I had forgotten, but
I had not
Theme: Peace
Meet me where
the river releases
eddies, small clusters
of currents over
roots and rocks,
where we’ll race our
fingers over water
of mountain glacial melt
and time’s perpetual tears,
where we’ll glide our fingers
over the swirling surface,
until the tension becomes
calm; the circles, smooth;
the place where
we practice peace
I saw a post from my CLMOOC friend, Greg, about the writing of a poem for our month of writing poems. The poem is called Inertia of Art (Create) and in his reflection at his blog, he talks about his process of writing poetry — which is very different from mine. His process involves a lot of internal wrestling and frustration. Mine, just sort of flows. I can’t explain or understand it, most of the time. Often, I don’t even know what I have until I’m done (and it may be that what I have when I am done is badly-written poem).
As I was reading Greg’s reflection, and then his poem (somehow, I did this in revere), some of his phrases began to jump out at me, and I began a new poem – braided with the threads of his, so that his lines — now removed and isolated from his writing — began to inform my own new poem, braided within his. See the image above for how it turned out.
This morning, I thought about Greg’s regular recording of him, reading his poems in his voice, which he does for both accessibility of text and to connect with the poet’s voice. I decided that the poetic braid needed another dimension — audio — his voice and mine, reading this new poem together.
I had to go deep into the Source Code of Greg’s blog to find his embedded audio file. I then downloaded it and spliced his words apart in Soundtrap (but any audio editor would have sufficed), then recorded my lines, in-between his. The result is a two-speaker poem, braided together.
Through the course of the day yesterday, I wrote three different poems as gifts, inspired by our month-long Poetry Port adventure in the CLMOOC community, where folks are writing poems to daily themes, composing words as gifts to others, and requesting poems be written for them. (learn more)
The first poem, above, was written as a gift for the collective students in the Networked Narratives class, which I dip in and out of as an open participant. I went through and read a bunch of blog posts, in which they were examining Langston Hughe’s poem of Let America Be America Again, and thinking of its message in the modern day. The short poem is a reflection of what I read, and what I was thinking as I was reading, and leaving a trail of comments across the blogs.
Next, my CLMOOC friend Karen Young, who has been traveling, wrote that she had written a poem for CLMOOC the day before, but it had somehow never got posted on her travels, and the poem was now lost in transit. The poem was a gift for her.
Finally, as preparation for an upcoming inquiry group with the National Writing Project called Grapple, with a focus on algorithms and learning, we were asked to do some pre-reading and some pre-viewing, and this video about having “blind faith” in neutral technology struck a nerve with me on the conflicted concepts of clear human bias in computer code, so I wrote this small poem for the facilitators of the inquiry, with the screenshot as reference point.
Meanwhile, I continue writing poems each day, using the CLMOOC calendar themes to inspire me.
Yesterday, the theme was Peace:
Meet me where
the river releases
eddies, small clusters
of currents over
roots and rocks,
where we’ll race our
fingers over water
of mountain glacial melt
and time’s perpetual tears,
where we’ll glide our fingers
over the swirling surface,
until the tension becomes
calm; the circles, smooth;
the place where
we practice peace
Today, the theme is Friendship:
The bracelet snaps
my attention; she points
and explains that she’s
the purple, and her companion,
the pink, the two of them
twined forever on her wrist,
twisted forever together
with fingers, in friendship;
all while she’s reminding me
of this in her quiet voice,
as if I had forgotten, but
I had not
I’ve been writing poems each morning for CLMOOC’s Poetry Port project — in which there are daily poetry themes as well as an invitation to request a free poem to be written (see more). Yesterday, Greg shared both a poem and then his “behind the scenes” of the writing of the poem.
I figured I’d follow Greg’s lead this morning. (The above video was a screencast of me, in the act of writing the poem, via an Etherpad, which keeps a time-slider version of the writing, so you can follow the writing of a piece from the first word, on. I always liked that feature in Etherpad variants.)
Mostly, during the CLMOOC project this month, I’ve been not looking ahead to the daily themes, even though there is a calendar. I like to write poems each morning in a burst of creativity, letting the theme spark the start of something.
This morning, before reading the theme (which was “play”), I was outside, walking the dog, and found myself in a stunned stop at the view of the full moon — known as the Snow Moon — in the sky. It was so beautiful, this orb of light, and its magic hung with me as I sat down with a mug of coffee and the call for a poem.
Here’s the poem:
The child still within me
shoots the hoop
drops the puck
spins the coin
catches the ball
as the adult in me
slows the pace
stares in awe
thinks on love
writes a poem
of winter’s brilliant Snow Moon,
a heavenly body sitting
above barren bone-fingered trees,
its silver light shouting out delight
in another otherwise
quiet morn
The first line, about being a child, imagining the moon as a ball or puck on the field of play came naturally, which then led to small lines about each element. I was seeking a rhythm to the phrasing: verb, article, noun; verb, article, noun. You can almost hear the dribbling of the basketball, the swishing of skates, the whacking of the baseball.
In the second stanza, I knew I wanted to repeat that rhythm, but this time, on the shift to the adult, seeing the moon, not as a something to be played with, but something to be inspired by. It’s still verb, article, noun, but the nouns now are not concrete objects, but feelings. Something more internal.
After setting up those two pieces as mirrors to each other, I wanted to shift the poem into the present, of the moon in the sky, and how its silver light was in contrast to the leafless winter trees, and the sense that the Snow Moon was shouting for attention, even as the dog and I were the only beings in movement, to notice (and the dog didn’t pay attention). The last two lines, dangling nearly on their own, was intentional — a way to settle the reader into the moment.
I did some recursive editing, too, shifting and changing words as I was writing, “playing” the poem in my head, thinking (but not too much) about flow, the way syllables create or distract from the movement of the poem. One sound can throw the whole cadence off track at times. I’m reading as I’m writing — sometimes out loud but often, inside my head, that writer’s voice that only the writer can hear as words hit the page.
The poem’s not perfect, by any stretch, but I think it captures the wonder of the morning, and what more could I ask of a piece of writing?
(Note: this poem is for the CLMOOC February poetry writing. Today’s theme is collaboration. I had the first lines of this poem in my mind yesterday, and then later, I started a piece of music that I hope represents the idea of collaborative instrument voices, weaving together. The rest of the poem came from writing the song)
We’re setting sail on another excellent adventure with the CLMOOC collaborative, as we spend the month of February writing poems, gifting poems and sharing poems.
Inspired somewhat by both an article about a store-front location in England that distributes poems for mental health and the Typewriter Rodeo crew that types out poems on demand at public gatherings, we have tried to create an online version of these two ideas.
This is all experimental, so please do write with us in the form or submit ideas to us, and we’ll see which oceans we sail upon and which port we end up relaxing in, and which friends we shall toast together, sipping our poetry as the sun sets and rises.