Tag: poems

Young Woman at the Cocktail Party

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Young Woman at the Cocktail Party
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A poem for Monday!

Messages From Ghosts

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
Messages From Ghosts
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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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

Truth by Grammy Barnard

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
Truth by Grammy Barnard
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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!

Grammy Barnard Poem. The original. It’s not blurry because of the focus. I think her typewriter was low on ink.

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.

Let’s Talk About Trolls

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
Let's Talk About Trolls
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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.

She Has A Poem

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
She Has A Poem
/

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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

best raw poem podcast
She Has A Poem

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.

The Enchanted

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
The Enchanted
/

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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

Hairy Arms

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
Hairy Arms
/

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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

King Kong Trolls

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
King Kong Trolls
/

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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

Making Life Changing Moments and Booby Free Day

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Making Life Changing Moments and Booby Free Day
/

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.

How do you do this?

  1. Think about what you really really want to happen in your life?
  2. Make sure that this is something that you morally feel cool about. Don’t want to be an assassin if you’re against killing.
  3. Make sure what you want feels like it gives you purpose.
  4. Put in the time. Decisions don’t mean crap if you don’t actually put the action steps and time into that choice. Authors make our characters all the time. It isn’t enough for Captain America to go save the world. He has to take a super serum, learn how to fight and throw a shield, locate the bad guy. That goes for us, too.

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/

SHOUT OUT!

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!

The Lettuce

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
The Lettuce
/

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:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

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.

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