Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
Carrie Does Poems
“You Aren’t Allowed To Write About Me”
If by aren’t allowed, you mean you forbid it, then who are you to forbid?
If by write, you mean think, tell stories, try to understand, to recreate you in a way that isn’t such a jackass,
I’m sorry, but you can only be improved,
and you’re missing out.
The you on the page is so much better than the you in life.
If by me you mean just you, I’m sorry,
but stories (even characters, even real-life
characters) are bigger than just one me,
just one you, just one.
None of us are just one.
Why don’t you try to imagine what it’s like
to not have a Lexus and enough money
to have your back shaved? Why don’t you try
to imagine what it’s like to listen to you asking someone
if they are ‘really an American,’ or telling them they look
like a pumpkin because they’re wearing an orange dress.
What it’s like to hold a given-to-you bouquet
and know that it will wilt because you don’t have
the water to let it survive, to go
in the shower and pray for warmth?
Why don’t you imagine what it’s like
to live bigger than who you are,
trying to push into who you are meant to be?
Imagine that’s more than a Lexus.
Why don’t you imagine?
I am not allowed to write about you.
I write about you constantly
even when you don’t realize.
You are the grit between my teeth.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. 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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
Mean People Suck
She is driving, in her car, with the sticker MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
Stuck on the bumper. She hasn’t yet peeled
The sticker off, though she promised herself
When her dad bought her the car, she would before the week was through.
Mean people suck.
But as she drives the car, at night, down the curves
Of the Mud Creek Road, she isn’t thinking of the elegant statement
Stuck to her little, gray automobile, she is thinking
Of the boy poet in her German class, the handsome one, with hair,
And how, only a half hour earlier,
He gave her the best compliment she’d ever heard:
If you lived in Nazi Germany
You would’ve been in the resistance. I am sure.
Ah. She sighs at such a compliment, better by far than a litany
Of her attributes, of the color of her eyes, the beauty of her words.
Not better than the boy poet’s hand on her thigh,
Or perhaps, his lips on her instep.
You can only ask for so much.
This is what she thinks as something darts in front of her car.
Headlights turn the fur orange.
A cat, she thinks as she swerves. A fox?
The thud is as bad as she imagines
And for five seconds she keeps driving,
Five seconds before she pulls to the side of the Mud Creek Road,
Five seconds before she tries to find the hazards.
She can’t. She can’t find them and while she looks, her body
Shakes and she tells herself:
Drive back.
Drive back.
Turn around.
She does, watching the body grow large and clear in headlight beams.
Not a fox. Not a cat. No crying little girls tomorrow
Searching for Muffin or Smokey,
No pictures of cuddly kittens posted on supermarket wall or telephone poles.
A raccoon.
Why did she think the fur was orange? Is she color blind?
Do you need glasses if you’re color blind, she wonders.
Parking parallel to the body in the middle of the Mud Creek Road, she looks.
God, he is beautiful, this raccoon, perfect mask and paws and fur.
Move him, she orders herself.
Move him.
She opens the door, but the animal stirs… a slow, graceful lift of his head.
His eyes meet hers. And she knows, knows she can’t move him,
Knows she can’t take off her jacket, wrap it around his soft, bruised body,
Can’t bring him to rest in dignity by the woods. And she knows she can’t
Get in the car and run him over and over again and again,
Forcing tires over his furry bulk until the pain is over.
In her own hips, a pain like sciatica spreads, needles sticking and
Spinning down her flanks.
She shuts the door, puts the car in reverse.
The raccoon stares.
The raccoon watches the lights retreat and despite the increasing distance, despite
The roar of other cars coming closer, the rush of blood,
Despite everything, this raccoon hears the girl yelling to herself:
Coward! Coward…
And he agrees.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. 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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support. 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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
While I was working a little, white kid on the sidewalk outside yelled, “I’m going to run you over. Right now!”
A little white girl hurried out of his way, skittering, almost tripping over her feet.
Their daycare provider then announced, looking at my house, “If that was my house, I’d tear down those trees.”
In less than ten seconds, I heard a threat, saw fear, and then judgement and an apparent disregard for our little baby ecosystem in the cedars.
It made me think about my reaction to things and how important it is to not be a Judgy-Pants especially about other people’s property, but also to not always hurry out of the way when someone threatens you and wants to be where you are.
Usually on Be Brave Friday I share art that I’m working on, but I’m not working on any right now. This whole week I haven’t picked up a paint brush. But I have clacked away on my keyboard, so this is the best I have to offer you today.
It’s a random poem I wrote. If you know anything, you’ll know that poems are almost as hard for me to share as art.
I feel my tooth now that it’s gone,
A hole inside my mouth, stuck
Between the survivors, a gap and fuzzy pain
Reminding me of things.
I said I wouldn’t
Cry. Damn it all to hell.
I am not a person who sobs.
Not over a tooth.
I stared at the surgeon as he sewed me up.
I stared at the white light above him, thinking
About out-of-body experiences and how
The people who return always talk about
The white light. I can’t keep staring at it.
I try not to think about things.
I try to not remember how I’ve become the person I am.
“Don’t present as insecure,” other women tell me. “You’re strong
And talented.” And I just want to say, “Bitch, those are not mutually exclusive.”
I don’t care about followers.
I don’t care about how I present
I don’t care about well-natured advice telling me not to be me. I touch
The letters of my soul like they are traps, but they are magical, offerings of
Hazelnut charms, nine letters encircling themselves meant to be placed on a door
To keep the evil out. If only it were that simple, right?
I feel my tooth now that it’s gone.
December is the month of birthdays of the dead I knew.
Father. Brother. Jesus. Me.
Try not to skitter. Try not to threaten. Try not to judge. We can all share, okay? And leave the damn trees alone.
I was recently helping a poet/author who was worried about forced rhyme moments and then she realized she wasn’t absolutely sure what ‘forced rhyme’ even met.
So, here’s a bit of rundown on ways we can all force our rhymes.
Weird Phrasing.
The most common way picture book editors balk at forced rhymes is when the author rearranges the phrase or sentence so that the rhyme comes at the end but the whole thing sounds unnatural. Like this:
Whenever we go out for a run,
With you, I like the sun.
Look at me! I’m unnatural.
Normally, it would be in natural conversational U.S. English:
Whenever we go out for a run,
I like the sun.
The ‘with you’ wouldn’t even be there because of the ‘we.’ We just shove that on to make it rhyme, which is why we call it forced. J I love imagining all of us poet-people brandishing our mugs of tea and pens and screaming, “Rhyme, damn it! I force you!”
Random bits
The other big thing that happens in picture books is we stick random information into the story just to make a rhyme.
I like manatees. I think they’re great.
My aunt got sick from a tomato she ate.
This is pretty cute, actually.
So, if the rest of the book was about manatees, then that line about the aunt wouldn’t make sense, right? That’s another example of a forced rhyme.
Making a Big Long Line
I did this so much when I was young and I still have to hold my typing hands back because it’s what I ALWAYS WANT TO DO. I would make a really big line to get a rhyme in.
I was working over at the Dairy Joy,
Just minding my own business, scooping the scoops, when I finally scoped out this boy.
Most of my grade-school poems were about being in love with random imaginary humans
Anyway, if the rest of the couplets are short, then this looks silly and forced.
Almost But Not Quite
Another big thing people do is the almost but not quite there rhyme. They callthis a slant rhyme or a half rhyme. Poets actually use this on purpose all the time. Here’s an example that I pasted from the web. It’s a poem called “To My Wife” by George Wolff
If love is like a bridge or maybe like a grudge, and time is like a river that kills us with a shiver, then what have all these mornings meant but aging into love? What now is straight must have been bent; what now is whole must have been rent. My hand is now your glove.”
George Wolff
Wrenched rhymes
This happens when the words rhyme, but different syllables are stressed like here where the stress goes on the first syllable of laughing so on the laugh and not on the ing:
I was laughing
On the swing.
Random pretend poem
So, there you go. A tiny little lesson (Lesson? It sounds so formal!) about forced rhymes. Remember force is not cool. Talk to your poems, chill with them, let them decide to hang out with you.
Hey! Welcome to a bonus interview episode of Dogs are Smarter Than People, the usually quirky podcast that gives writing tips and life tips. I’m Carrie Jones and with me today is
Fiona Cameron Mackintosh is a poet from Toronto and manages Elderwood Coaching who doesn’t believe in tame language for wild things, which is possibly the best thing I’ve ever heard.
What do we talk about? You’ll want to listen but here’s a heads-up:
Poetry. Why do you think people are so scared of it?
What was the first poem that you remember that rocked your world?
Is it okay to misquote poetry?
How do you become a poet?
Fiona is absolutely amazing. You’ll definitely want to listen.
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH is almost here so I am totally going to theme out this April.
Why?
Because poetry changed my life in second grade. Seriously.
I was this kid who talked like a Muppet. Everyone made fun of me so I didn’t talk at all in first grade. I was known as THE QUIET KID WHO GIVES HER SNACKS AWAY – SO DO NOT BEAT HER UP.
The teachers couldn’t figure me out. I never said anything. Teachers tend to like kids who raise their hand and talk.
Then, I wrote a haiku in September of second grade. I had all the syllables right. It wasn’t about Tonka trucks. It was about nature so the teacher, Mrs. Snierson, posted it in big letters on the wall and decided I was gifted. Whew. Did I fool her.
The poem was:
Spring is fun you see Because flowers grow with rain And robins come home.
This is how I learned that teachers are important to writers’ egos.That one poem got me into gifted programs.
That one poem got me noticed.
That one poem put my life on a trajectory that didn’t have to do with silence.
So, yeah, I like poems.
Poems are how I stopped being silent.
So, I’m going to write poems and talk about poems sometimes in April. I hope you’ll join me!
They are words fading, written in bright blue pen. Ball point.
They are words scrawling across the page, the closer in time they are to me, the messier they become.
They are words about being new, about birds flying across the Ontario sky, the pain and guilt of losing a cat to winter and the streets of Staten Island.
They are words singing upside down and across the paper.
My father keeps them in his roll top desk and hands them to me in the kitchen where her china sat in shelves on the wall. His hands shake as he passes another journal of words over. I take their case, brown, cracked leather. I open the binding and peer inside at their mystery.
There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!
You can preorder this bad boy, which might make it have a sequel. The sequel would be amazing. Believe me, I know. It features caves and monsters and love. Because doesn’t every story?
You can get exclusive content, early podcasts, videos, art and listen (or read) never-to-be-officially published writings of Carrie on her Patreon. Levels go from $1 to $100 (That one includes writing coaching and editing for you wealthy peeps).
A lot of you might be new to Patreon and not get how it works. That’s totally cool. New things can be scary, but there’s a cool primer HERE that explains how it works. The short of it is this: You give Patreon your paypal or credit card # and they charge you whatever you level you choose at the end of each month. That money supports me sharing my writing and art and podcasts and weirdness with you.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
I only hated two professors in college. One because he was misogynist buttface who only liked guys and was openly derisive about women being incapable of creating art because we were busy “focusing on making babies.” I walked out of his class after yelling at him for a good three minutes.
Most people think I am mellow. I am not mellow. Sometimes, I have no chill. This was one of those times.
I was the only woman in that class. My boyfriend was in that class. Two other guys were in that class. Nobody else walked out. Just me.
The other professor taught poetry and liked to tell students that they weren’t real enough or raw enough. She wanted pain. She wanted authenticity. She wanted confessional poetry and most of us just sort of wanted to write about white baseball caps, rainbows, and dolphins.
In retrospect, I sort of feel badly for her because I probably would have gotten frustrated about all those poems about white baseball caps, rainbows, and dolphins, too.
But still. It was what we were right then, a lot of us – baseball caps, rainbows, dolphins.
And the rest of the professors? They were amazing. I had really great professors in theater and poetry even though I was a political science major.
Here’s a letter I wrote to one of them recently when he retired from teaching. I was thinking about this a lot after I reposted my Seamus Heaney blog.
Dear Professor Farnsworth,
I don’t think you will remember me, but I will always remember you because you, your class, and poetry helped save me in a time of my life when salvation seemed highly unlikely.
I spent most of my time at college sick with seizures caused by an Epstein Barr virus that had attacked my brain. I spent most of my time wondering who I was, how I could fit in, and what my voice could possibly be when my broken brain was no longer my own.
You helped me reclaim my voice, but more than that? You helped me expand it.
I was not much of a poet.
I am still not much of a poet.
And you?
You had such a voice.
Resonant, understanding, persistent, encouraging.
You read my poems, all our poems – even the ones about vampires, and taught us that even if we didn’t know our voice right then, our voice would find us if we gave it space and attention.
Space and attention.
Space and attention and intention.
Those very same things that you gave to us.
You are one of the best teachers we could ever know.
You taught us to build up ourselves and our poems, to construct our stories and our voice, piece by piece, word by word, symbol by beautiful symbol. You taught us to craft our poems and our lives with patience and love and strength.
Patience.
Love.
Strength.
Add insight? And that is what you, Robert Farnsworth, represent to me. Patience. Love. Strength. Insight.
Your legacy?
Your legacy is huge and important and ripples into so many other lives? So many lives…
You have helped us to become.
Thank you. May your next stanza of becoming be as beautiful as this one has been.
DO GOOD WEDNESDAY
Write a letter to someone who made a difference in your life. Send it.
WRITING NEWS
I am super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August. And honestly, if you want to help me feel less stressed about failure and the writing world, leaving a review for the books and buying them? That is the best thing you can do for me.
Anyway…
This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.
An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” – School Library Journal
“Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” – BCCB
“Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” – Booklist
CARRIE’S BOOKS
For a complete round-up of my 16-or-so books, check out my website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.
OUR PODCAST DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE.
The podcast of awesome
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips.
When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less. My family had been kind of poor after my step-father died. My nana would stand in line to get us big orange blocks of commodity cheese for the week to supplement our $30 grocery budget Every week my mom would yell at her that we didn’t need that. She always took it.
My mom didn’t answer the phone because she was so afraid of credit card companies calling. She’d make me do it and lie that she wasn’t there.
I still hate answering the phone, even the cell phone, even when it has caller ID.
Anyway, when I went to college I wanted to forget all that. I wanted to be an intellectual like everyone else. I wanted to have gone to private school in Manhattan or Conneticut, have a summer home in the Hamptons and clothes that weren’t from K-Mart, which was sort of the WalMart equivalent back then, but worse.
I got over all that because I knew it was pretty shallow. What I had a harder time getting over was class issues that had less to do with materialism and more to do with hatred and intellectual history.
In one of my directing classes, one of the sexier straight guys actually announced about Beckett, “People who are not wealthy don’t care about this. A truck driver doesn’t watch public television or listen to NPR. They don’t care, they’re too busy humping and eating and drinking.”
My dad was a truck driver. He watched public television. He listened to NPR. I didn’t want to think about him humping. He ate food. He didn’t drink. His parents had been prohibitionists.
In one of my playwrighting classes the professor announced, “The working people of this country don’t give a shit about nuclear power. They don’t give a shit about a man of color.”
When I was in elementary school my dad would bring him with him to protest the same nuclear power plant that my step dad was helping to build. He helped me try to get New Hampshire to recognize Martin Luther King Day and do a hundred other civil rights things. He cared.
And one of my college friends would love to say, “Carrie is too poor to be pro intellectual.”
He’s a minister now. That still doesn’t make what he said right.
And one of my female poetry teachers told me over and over again, her voice trilling up with her patrician accent, “Carrie, you have the potential to be a poet, but your voice is too raw, not refined, not artistic enough.”
My voice was poor. My cadence was public school. I was not from rich. Every sentence I spoke showed that.
They still do.
Those are just four of the incidents that made me both angry and intimidated and focused, but in the back of my head it just inflamed my self doubt. I could never be a poet because I wasn’t wealthy, private-school educated, my parents weren’t intellectuals. I could never move people with words because my words were too stark and my sentences too short. I would never fit in because I didn’t have the background that most of the other students had.
And then two things happened. I read Sherman Alexie, a not-wealthy Spokane and Coeur d’Alene who despite his issues with women, impacted me positively. Maybe because I never met him.
And I met Seamus Heaney in real life.
Seamus Heaney came to our college at the invitation of Robert Farnsworth, who was an awesome poet and professor. He met with students, he gave a reading and we all got to hang out with him at a reception.
“I can’t go,” I told my boyfriend at the time.
He bit into his pizza. He was always eating pizza. “Why not?”
“Because it’s Seamus Heaney,” I answered staring at the little bits of sausage on the pizza before I plucked them off.
“So?”
“Seamus Heaney!”
“So?”
I didn’t know how to explain. Seamus Heaney was THE poet, the Nobel Prize winner. He was Irish for God’s sake. Those people were gifted with words. They had so many amazing poets… Heaney, Yeats, Wilde, Clarke, Moore. I was from New Hampshire. We had Robert Frost but pretty much every New England state tried to claim him.
Heaney wrote things like:
“A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.”
You will regret it if you don’t go,” my boyfriend said. “I’m going to just be playing Leisure Suit Larry anyway.”
So, I went, as anxious as if I was going on stage myself. Heaney transfixed me with his amazing baritone and bear-like presence. And his words… Of course his words… And when I met him afterwards, I was terrified until he grabbed my hand in his and said, “So you are a poet?”
And I said, “No.”
And all he did was nod and say, “Oh, yes you are.”
But in his eyes was this knowing, this connection, and maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe I just saw it because I wanted him to understand me, because I wanted someone to get who I was and who I wanted to be. Or maybe not?
I don’t know, but one second later my professor said, “Oh, yes she is. I told you about her. She is like you.”
And then one of them said something about growing up not wealthy and I can’t remember the exact words, but what I do remember is that I finally felt understood. Later, I looked up Seamus Heaney’s past, about how his dad was a farmer and neither of his parents were big on words really, not in the intellectual way that everyone in college seemed to be. I found out that he was like me a little bit not because he was a poet and I was trying so desperately hard to write just one decent poem, but because we were both human, that we both came from humble places, that we both looked in people’s eyes when we said hello.
And that was enough for me. That was enough for me to believe in myself.
Seamus Heaney performed a miracle when I met him. He made me believe that I could be whatever the hell I wanted to be and that it didn’t matter how hard I had to fight or work or not fit in. What mattered was that I wanted the miracle of being a writer, of metamorphosis from Carrie the poor neurotic kid from Bedford, New Hampshire into Carrie Jones, the neurotic best-selling author who lives on the coast of Maine.
He gave hope and miracles in his poems and in his person and I am so thankful for his existence and so sorry for the world’s loss.
“The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”
I wrote this post back in 2013 when Seamus Heaney died, but in one of my student packet’s this week, I referenced Heaney and then yesterday I saw this Liam Neeson video (randomly) where he was talking about Heaney, so… there you go. I’ve reposted it.
You can help with poetry and kids. These images are from Get Lit’s website and Get Lit is making a difference.
“Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of words and toured colleges with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in two high schools, Fairfax and Walt Whitman. When the semester ended… the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. The rest is history. Today, the curriculum has expanded to almost 100 schools, and the Get Lit Players are the most watched poets on the internet. Curriculum requests flow in from Mexico to New Zealand.”
Get Lit “uses poetry to increase literacy, empower youth, and inspire communities.”
Get Lit works – 98% of Get Lit Players go to college, and 70% get scholarships!
Carrie’s super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August.
This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.
An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” – School Library Journal
“Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” – BCCB
“Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” – Booklist
“A wild and fresh take on fantasy with an intriguing cast of characters. Dangerous and scary and fun all rolled into one. In the words of Eva the dwarf, I freaking loved it!” – Lisa McMann, New York Times bestselling author of The Unwanteds series
“Effervescent, funny, and genuine.” – Kirkus Reviews
It’s quirky. It’s awesome. It’s full of heart. You should go by the first two books now. 🙂
Time Stoppers
Time Stopper Series
Time Stoppers Front and Back Covers – US versions
CARRIE’S BOOKS
For a complete round-up of Carrie’s 16-or-so books, check out her website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.
OUR PODCAST
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can.
Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow.
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