a poem by Neruda speaks to my heart

S read this poem to me earlier this evening and it gave me a fluttery feeling. I don’t get to see the ocean much, so when I do it’s a special time. Most recently, the ocean means writing and creativity to me, because of Port Townsend, Washington, and my Goddard residencies. I [...]

Read Full Post »

Kali

Book: May Sarton’s collection of poetry A Grain of Mustard Seed. I mentioned this poem, the Invocation to Kali, before, back when I first bought the book. Well, I liked it so much that I ended up writing a whole annotation on it. And my enthusiasm seems to have come through in the [...]

Read Full Post »

capital letters

I love poetry that gives me a push. Here’s an annotation that I wrote about Lucille Clifton’s poetry. She’s a new and exciting delight to me, and I know I should have been reading her work a long time before I actually did.

Read Full Post »

litany, litany, litany

A litany is a form of poetry that repeats and repeats, repeats and circles. I’ve been trying to make friends with it lately, both through reading and writing. Here’s a little annotation essay of mine on some of Joy Harjo’s litanies:

Read Full Post »

The California Poem (and The Vermont Poem?)

I’ve put this photo I took of a covered bridge here because I’m posting (after the jump) an annotation I wrote about Eleni Sikelianos’s book, The California Poem, and since I’ve never been to California, I did some thinking about what her book would be like translated into Vermont language. Vermont is my home [...]

Read Full Post »

a litany. just so you know where I’m coming from.

sometimes I feel that I have no right to speak, having never been silenced
I have never been beaten with a shaft of metal.
I have never been raped.
I have never had my skin torn open with an explosion of rusted nails.
I have never been splattered by another person’s blood.
I have never pumped my blood into another’s [...]

Read Full Post »

back into the swing of lines and stanzas

My next semester of school starts soon, and I haven’t been thinking about poetry much over the past month or two. It’s always there in my mind in the form of little ideas and scraps of language, but I haven’t read any poetry in a while, I’ve only written fragments, and I haven’t thought [...]

Read Full Post »

crow hill

Where do ideas for poems come from?  For me, it’s almost always something very small.  An image, a phrase, a brief moment in a conversation–I call them seeds.  It’s when I feel an opening inside my head, a fascination, a connection, the potential for growth.  Then I try to save that feeling, to sort of incubate [...]

Read Full Post »

How to playfully engage in conversation with a stereotype

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been travelling and I’m on a break from school at the moment, but I have this one last annotation that I wrote for this past semester that I hadn’t posted yet, so here it is!  It’s on Carol Guess’s book The Femme’s Dictionary.  This book, according to [...]

Read Full Post »

I will someday be an old woman

This photo is of an oddly-shaped carrot that I bought at the farmer’s market.  Not only was it interesting to look at, it was also very crisp and tasty!  But I’m not posting it here right now because of its flavor.  I decided to use this photo for this blog post because a lot of [...]

Read Full Post »