
A poem for Monday!

A poem for Monday!
It’s another poem by Grammy Barnard. She was well into her seventies when I was born and lived to be over 100. She wrote a lot of poems about people being unfaithful. Poor Grammy.
Here you go!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
A poem
Happy Halloween!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
"Hairy Arms" for Sarah At McKelvie Middle School, my friend, complained about the dark hair on her arms, comparing her arms to mine and another friend's. We sat outside on the field in seventh grade, lined up, ready for our early man unit and she was almost crying. She hated her hairy arms, called them names. And when I told her how beautiful she was (easily the prettiest girl in our grade), she sighed and said, “You’ll never have to deal with arms like these.” And she was right. *** DNA is a messy thing and so are family histories. Mine is just as messy as everyone else’s. My hairless arms tell secrets about paternity my mom didn't want anyone to know. *** The poet is meant to create sense from life, resonance. Linkages. *** My poems are messy things. Black lines and swoops on white spaces. But maybe they can be beautiful like the hair on Sarah's arms.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
King Kong Trolls The self-appointed writer-guru on Substack with four- thousand devotees to his biweekly missives has decided there are no more geniuses, really, not any more. Someone needs to tell him that he just doesn’t know where to look. The geniuses aren’t banging their chests, King-Kong like in their glory despite being ground dwellers, telling the world, “Look at me! Look at me as I roar and pontificate.” They are the discarded, dreaming, creating, thinking outside the main streams of plagiarized discourse, unnoticed beneath the giant feet of oversized apes capturing all the attention as our culture dangles from their plump, hairy digits.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
There is an article over on Medium that annoyed Carrie, which to be fair, Medium articles by self-professed self-help gurus often do.
Cough.
It’s not because the guy has 250,000 followers, she swears. It’s just because he’s a bro-looking white guy regurgitating other people’s stuff.
And here’s the thing. To make impact, you don’t want to vomit up other people’s books or thoughts. You want to be your own person.
In New Hampshire literary circles of the 1970s and 1980s there was a dynamic poetry husband and wife duo of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. They were nothing alike in their poetry and Donald usually received a lot more kudos, but Jane? She made her moments.
I’ll always remember my Aunt Maxine introducing me to Jane when I was eight or something and saying, “She is a spectacular poet.” She pretty much gasped it all out because she was so enthralled.
I always wanted to be gasp worthy, honestly–in a good way, right?
So, there’s a piece in the National Book Review by Mike Pride that talks a bit about Jane (who died at just 47) where it talks about how her husband dealt with people being stupid about the difference between their poems and styles.
“Hall reacted when anyone suggested that he was a poet of big ideas while his wife wrote sweet and simple poems. “Yeah,” he’d say, “her style is a glass of water – a 100-proof glass of water.”
There is a tendency for us all to look away from the moments, the truths of our lives and existence and instead go for those superlative, larger than life moments, stories, celebrities, all that b.s.
But here’s the thing– even Captain America has to go poo. Even bigger-than-life people whose stories are cultivated for our consumption also have those smaller moments.
It’s not about the 250,000 followers. It’s about you making each moment, each interaction count.
And sometimes to do that you have to look and see how those moments have happened to you before.
Have you ever had a moment where your understanding of the world changed? An epiphany?
When was the last time you felt at the top of your game?
When was the last time you tried something new?
When was the last time you risked your reputation for your beliefs?
A lot of those moments have big emotions with them, right? And sometimes we get scared of those big emotions and when that happens? We can’t take risks because we’re afraid of the emotions and change that might come with those risks. Even when that change is positive, it’s something different, something new and that can be super scary for a lot of us.
But you’ve got to keep trying and dreaming and learning and being brave in order for cool things to happen.
Jane Kenyon wrote in “Afternoon at MacDowell,” when Donald Hall had cancer (she was the actual one to die of it first),
After music and poetry we walk to the car. I believe in the miracles of art, but what prodigy will keep you safe beside me, fumbling with the radio while you drive to find late innings of a Red Sox game?
A poet becomes a poet by investing the time to see the things in life, the moments and twists and epiphanies and connections, that the rest of us not always see, but more than that. They take the moment and let it resonate.
That’s what we all need to do. We need to become the poets of our lives, making our moments by choice and action.
https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-feb-3-2022/
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
The Lettuce Again this summer I’ve forgotten to harvest the lettuce that we planted when the ground was barely workable, warm enough to support the tenderness of seedlings, brown, pale, and white, barely opening to the world, the air, the sun. We are still human, he tells me, even though I think that we may be losing whatever it is that makes humans human? Humanity seems a fickle word now that pundits use it to talk about the unfurling of threats, bombs, lies. The lettuce, when you forget to harvest, shoots up like it’s trying to reach the sky, but it rots from the outside and in towards the core, slowly taking over the joy of green, crisp leaves. We are like this. Everything greens and grows and rots when we aren’t looking. Democracies, romaine, bibb, souls, humanities. How can I forget to harvest the lettuce? Why do we plant it at all?
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.