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While I take care of my mom’s last business, I won’t be posting for a while, but I will honor my commitments to Crystal Collier on 11/21. So until then The Write Game goes dark. Thanks for understanding.
Young Adult and Middle Grade Author
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While I take care of my mom’s last business, I won’t be posting for a while, but I will honor my commitments to Crystal Collier on 11/21. So until then The Write Game goes dark. Thanks for understanding.
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Jay Hilgert
And now your turn. Some poetry to express yourself?
I think we should have an Insecure Writer Poetry Contest
with prizes, of course.
Your thoughts? Gemme some words before they fly away.
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Flit past my brain like agile birds,
Whew! I’m going to make Monday Miscellany on Monday this week and all thanks to a blue jay. I was gone yesterday doing that Easter egg hunt thing. When I got home, my front door was open. It’s a little cranky these days and I guess I didn’t pull it shut tight when I left. Very, very early this morning this loud, squawky bird swooped down from a beam in my bedroom to let me know he wanted out and right then. So I’ve been up since dawn, chasing a bird around the house until it found the open door again and flapped its way to freedom. Great start to the week: early rising, early exercise!
As to the poetry, I still think that poets have so much to show us writers of prose about putting words together, so they sound beautiful and create fresh and exciting images as well as convey meaning to the reader.
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Poetry and Prose/Apples and Apple Pie |
Who wrote this–a poet, a novelist, someone who is both? Do you recognize these words?
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students. Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still, there are definite moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too. Births and deaths, for instance and marriages. And wars.
Let’s see we should have a prize or something for the one who first identifies this writer. I’ve got an ARC of The Chaos that I can offer. It’s a gritty futuristic novel by Rachel Ward.
I’m working on reaching my ROW80 goal, so here’s my poetry-prose connected piece that I promised myself I’d write. Draft #1
My goals for this week (my strategy is small steps until the end of this challenge round) is to put up one more poetry post to wind up my tribute to Poetry Month and how novelists can use poetry to create beautiful prose.
Then I will print out my WIP and edit it. I’m at 35,000 words and stuck, so I need to go back and unstick myself to finish. For me that means I have to find where I
I’ll add 2,000 more words by Friday. Whew! Guess I’d better get cracking because I’ve already scheduled three other things for the same week. My family will be eating pizza a lot. Good thing they love pizza.
Check back on Monday for goal 1–Poetry.
April poetry is a luxurious feast of perfectly ripened and juicy words. I haven’t taken the time to write or read poems for a long while, but after opening my dusty volumes and setting the poets’ music free again, I can’t imagine why I waited.
Here’s one that I read aloud and then memorized because it is exactly right for those nights when I’m fortunate enough to look up and find the moon shimmery in the night. It’s the pacing of the piece– punctuation’s job, but also the colorful imagery and the tangible nature of that dot perfectly placed. That’s what I want to capture in my prose–the pacing and the fresh imagery.
There was, in the dusky night,
On the yellowed steeple
The moon,
Like the dot of an i
Alfred de Musset
This is one of my favorite William Butler Yeats’ poems, He and She. Just part of it, the part I like best.
I love to read this one, especially the second line. It has a special cadence that is perfect to my ear.
She sings as the moon sings:
‘I am I, am I;
The greater grows my light
The further I fly.’
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry.
So after reading all of this masterful poetry, I had to read some of my compressed thoughts that I’d fitted into this demanding, tight form. I found this in one of my journals. Now how crazy is it for me to post my poems along with Yeats and Musset? A lot crazy, but it’s my blog, so I guess I can do what I want. Is there a blog reviewer out there that will complain? Let’s see.
I wrote this a few years ago when I was in England. You know you can’t walk the countryside of England without coming to an ancient cemetery. So there I was with my pad and paper sitting by a gravestone something like this, marking the beginning and the end of someone’s life. This is what I wrote. I was younger then, so cut me some slack when you critique this.
Well, it’s close to Monday. Seems like Monday came a little too soon for me to make my usual deadline, so I guess this is technically Tuesday Miscellany.
The most important news is that I’ll probably be doing more workshops in the near future. The people liked what happened in the last one and they are asking for more. I may even be doing one for foster care kids and that’s one I’m really thrilled about.
I visit Daisy Day Writer’s blog SunnyRoomStudio a lot because it’s so lovely and thought provoking. On one visit I posted about the synergy of art and the written word, and that made me remember E.E. Cummings who made some of his poetry into pictures. Here’s one of my favorites where the childlike attitude toward spring is capture not only in the words, but also in the way he lets those words skip onto the page.
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieanbill com
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and abettyandisbelcom dancing
from hop-scotch and jum-rope and
it’s spring
and
the
goat-footed
BaloonMan
far
and
wee
Feel like playing a bit? Try creating some poetry-pictures.
The word gradually expands and becomes complete, the sound of the word unfolding like a bit of magic.
Since this is POETRY MONTH I thought I’d post something about how we novelists can benefit from the poet’s labor of love. As I see it, POETRY is all about the pure pleasure of language, the way it can wash through you, bringing fresh images, giving sound and shape to thought.
When I read a poem I let the language have its way with me, but I often return to those I’m particularly captivated by to understand why they reached more deeply inside me than others. Here are a few things that I admire in good poems and that I keep in mind while writing my prose.
Poets are an economical bunch. They use few, but powerful, multi-tasking words to create their stories. I think prose writers can learn so much about the fine art of word selection by reading poets, old and modern.
Here’s one of my favorite classics A Shady Friend for Torrid Days by Emily Dickinson. In three stanzas she covers the ups and downs of human relationships and she does it with such tactile images.
Poets weave the sounds of their language in such a way that they create special rhythms and harmonies.
I can’t read Vachel Lindsay without hearing the beat of the drums or feeling the heat of The Congo. It’s not among my favorites, but it’s one I hear long after reading
Sandberg brings the city of Chicago to life as no tourist guide book could ever do. Read these lines and you are there as the poet was those many years ago.
Alliteration: The repetition of the inital consonant sounds.
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds.
I’ve been collecting poetry from kids that either I know or, after reading what they write, would love to know. Today I thought I’d share one of those with you. This is from my nephew and appeared in the local Yuba-Sutter Living.
I am from . . .
I am from candles
From Fabreeze and Windex
I am from the tan giant
That protects me from the rain
I am from the flower
the daisys
whose long gone limbs I remember as if they were my own.
I’m Christmas and Thanksgiving
from Pa and Grams
I’m from jokes and laughs
and from fun and gags.
I’m from Santa and the Boogie man
and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
I’m from Easter
I’m from Yuba City and Ireland
turkey and chicken
From my uncle skydiving
and breaking his leg
beach campfire
in my heart
and on the wall
Bearson Smith, age 11