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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
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.
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
"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.
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
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.
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?
Think about what you really really want to happen in your life?
Make sure that this is something that you morally feel cool about. Don’t want to be an assassin if you’re against killing.
Make sure what you want feels like it gives you purpose.
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.
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
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?
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:
My spoken voice
My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Everything Makes Us Scared
The professor and his wife argue about the party though they love
each other. Chairs are meant to be where exactly
on the porch? Burgers pre-made or created on site?
He’s a hippie from the Marines. Everywhere is danger,
possibilities of pain. He wasn’t in a lot of war, but it was enough,
enough to know that things can become out of control
if you don’t take care. She just wants people to talk, mingle, to eat
grilled vegetables and be happy, to have a moment away
from fears and worries of this year, this country, this culture.
He says he isn’t worried. He’s older. He’s seen worse. And when the first guests
come to the party, he knows no-one. They are the mommies, he says. The daycare people.
Her friends. He lumbers off to the side.
The charcoal doesn’t light. Of course. Everyone stares.
The grill’s gas is low. Their daughter, three, twirls in circles, studies
the people, twirls again, a perfect mix of caring too much, caring too little,
the joy of being alive and chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles and the worry
of so many faces in her backyard. The mom, she is decades younger;
she’s cleaned the forest of wood, picking it up in the days leading to
the party. So many potential weapons. A little boy
takes a ball, pummels another.
A man says scathing things to his wife,
cutting her down in warning.
So many threats. We watch it all. My back
goes up against the wall of the house,
spine hitting shingles. They talk about pandemics,
violence. So many threats. We murmur our agreement.
Everything. Everything makes us scared.
