From a lawn chair to the clouds...

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"To me, 

poetry is a marriage 

of craft and imagination.  

The making of a poem 

requires attention

 to form, sound, 

revision, and precision. 

(…) 

But imagination lifts you 

from a lawn chair to the clouds.  

And this is the mystery of poetry." 

~ Christine E. Hemp,

 in The Place My Words are Looking For

Hemp's image of imagination lifting poets "from a lawn chair to the clouds" makes me smile and nod.  Yes, it's important for writers to pay attention to the actual crafting of their poems.  But if that's the only thing we focus on, we'll be stuck sitting in our metaphorical lawn chairs, feet on the ground.  To soar to the clouds with our poems, we also need a healthy dose of imagination.

Ruminate

While this verb can also mean "to chew over and over" (often used with cows and other similar animals), ruminate [roo-muh-neyt] has another definition I want to focus on this week: "to meditate or muse; ponder".  After a little rumination (see what I did there?), I came up with these sentences using the word:

Walking alone in the woods each morning 

gives me a chance to relax and ruminate.

Why don't you ruminate on those facts for awhile 

and try to come up with a solution to our problem?

How would you use the word ruminate?

Autumn

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Autumn

The morns are meeker than they were,
  The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
  The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
  The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
  I'll put a trinket on.

~ Emily Dickinson

I love Dickinson's images of the world around her, decking itself out in its autumn finery.  What natural "trinkets" have you noticed so far this fall?

Sky full of wings...

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An excerpt:

     All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings.  Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it.  Wings of geese, of brant, of ducks and pelicans and cranes and heron and swans and gulls, bearing them all away to green fields in the south.

     The wings and the golden weather and the tang of frost in the mornings made Laura want to go somewhere.  She did not know where.  She only wanted to go.

~ from By the Shores of Silver Lake,

written by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I go walking at a nearby forest preserve several days each week.  When I'm there, I always pass by a small lake that attracts all kinds of birds and other wildlife.  Now that it's fall, I often see the sky there filled with wings.  Flocks of birds stop at the pond for a break on their way south. When the birds are rested and take to the skies once again, I feel like Laura.  I want to go somewhere, too.

Homework

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Homework

Homework sits on top of Sunday, squashing Sunday flat.
Homework has the smell of Monday, homework's very fat
Heavy books and piles of paper, answers I don't know.
Sunday evening's almost finished, now I'm going to go
Do my homework in the kitchen.  Maybe just a snack,
Then I'll sit right down and start as soon as I run back
For some chocolate sandwich cookies.  Then I'll really do
All that homework in a minute.  First I'll see what new
Show they've got on television in the living room.
Everybody's laughing there, but misery and gloom
And a full refrigerator are where I am at.
I'll just have another sandwich.  Homework's very fat.

~ Russell Hoban

It's been awhile since I've had to do homework myself, but I remember how I'd feel on Sunday evenings when I still had work to finish.  Hoban describes it very well in this poem!  I like his image of all those papers and books squashing the fun out of Sunday.

My three children aren't procrastinators like their mom, so they're usually finished with all of their weekend homework on Friday night -- smart kids!  However, I bet they'd still agree that homework's very fat. :)

Dear Diary...

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"A great library 

contains the diary 

of the human race."  

~ George Mercer Dawson

I hadn't thought about it before reading this quote, but it's true.  The books in a library make up our diary, telling all about who we humans are now, who we've been in the past, who we want to be in the future.  They reflect our hopes, our dreams, our fears, and much more.  I wonder which diary volumes I'll check out and bring home next?

Just Keep Writing...

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Even if you've never seen Disney's animated movie, Finding Nemo, you've probably heard its most famous line, sung by Dory the fish (and voiced by Ellen DeGeneres), "Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming."  In that scene, Dory is trying to encourage Nemo's father, Marlin, not to give up.

I've decided to take Dory's line, change it a little to fit my needs, and use it as my personal mantra:

Just Keep Writing.  

Just Keep Submitting.

It seems like obvious advice for a writer, I know.  One's work will never be published if one doesn't first write it and then submit it somewhere.  As I've written here before, however, it's so easy to get discouraged.  I did quite a bit of writing last year and quite a bit of submitting, but all I got in return was a pile of rejection letters.  It's easy to give up after that. I wouldn't say that I did give up, but I'll admit that I haven't been nearly as enthusiastic or motivated about writing and submitting this year as I was last year.  Until....

Until last month when, out of the blue, I received an email stating that one of the poems I'd submitted to Spider magazine over a year ago has been accepted for publication. (Insert happy dance here!)  That one little email changed my whole perspective.  While it's true that I still have to wait a few years to see my poem in print, the knowledge that someone out there liked it enough to accept it gives me hope. It also reminds me that I need to keep on writing and keep on submitting.  

In all likelihood, most of the poems and stories I write will never get published.  I need to keep on trying, though, and never give up.  Someday, when I least expect it, I will get good news again!

Autumn Night Music

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Autumn Night Music

Summer is waning;
nights are gaining.
Evening trees have lost their song.
Katydids, the last to strum,
are packing up and moving on.

Music lovers, don't despair!
Autumn tunes are in the air.
Just tonight I heard a breeze
practicing inside the trees.

There is music after summer
with a different kind of strummer!

~ Constance Levy

I love the images (and the rhymes!) in this poem.  Days are getting shorter, we've said goodbye to summer, but there will still be music and beauty to enjoy now and in the months to come -- it's just a different kind of music and beauty than what summer brings....

Vermillion

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I can't believe it's October already, can you? One of my favorite things about this time of year is the rich, beautiful rainbow of autumn colors everywhere I look. There are the oranges, the purples, the yellows, the browns, and the reds. One of those reds is vermillion [ver-mil-yuh n], which is "a brilliant scarlet red". Here are a few sample sentences:

The trees on the hillside blazed with crisp vermillion leaves, 

brilliant against the blue October sky.

"Sweet ride," he said, trailing a finger 

along the vermillion hood of the car.

What other vermillion things can you think of? How would you use the word vermillion?

We'll discover...

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An excerpt:

     "It's Batty's fault," said Skye.

     "It is not," said Batty.

     "Of course it is," said Skye.  "We wouldn't be lost if Hound hadn't eaten the map, and Hound wouldn't have eaten the map if you hadn't hidden your sandwich in it."

     "Maybe it's fate that Hound ate the map.  Maybe we'll discover something wonderful while we're lost," said Jane.

     "We'll discover that when I'm in the backseat for too long with my younger sisters, I go insane and murder them," said Stacy.

~ from The Penderwicks,

written by Jeanne Birdsall

I just started reading The Penderwicks yesterday, and this humorous passage jumped out at me.  Maybe that's because our family just got back from a three-day road trip, and by the end of it I was wondering if one of my darling children was going to murder a sibling or two, LOL.  Have you ever been on a trip like that?