Nancy Drew Too » poetry

Friday Flash Haiku

Natasha — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 18:34:32 +0000

Scrawled on a soggy scrap of paper at the beach yesterday:

Conf’rence call — cancelled.
Plan B: Pack lunch, grab suit, GO.
Low tide, warm waves. Bliss.

April is National Poetry Month

Natasha — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:37:53 +0000

I just realized this is National Poetry Month.

Favorite poets, anyone? My favorite is Mary Oliver. She captures the essence of nature and life so beautifully, so simply. I could stick one of her poems here (like anything from Why I Wake Early for example), but decided instead to share one of my own poems.

A couple of years ago I took a poetry course and had to write poems in the rule-driven structure of a particular form: ghazal, aubade, sestina. (Yeah, look them up. I didn’t know what they were, either. I majored in psych.) It was fun in a puzzle sort of way, but I certainly did not produce any literary gems.

I thought I would share the sonnet I wrote back then in honor of the fabulous Orange Oat scones I made this morning (thank you Dayner for your excellent blog recommendation of 101 Cookbooks). I used soy margarine instead of the half pound of butter (!) in the original recipe, almond milk instead of buttermilk and dried cranberries and apricots instead of currants. The 10 minutes and minor chunks of skin it took to zest an entire orange were worth it — added enough flavor that the butter was barely missed at all.

So here’s my sonnet:

Sonnet for a Carbohydrate
(with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Loaves of bread arranged in rows
From country white to whole grain wheat.
The scent of baking fills one’s nose;
the air hangs heavy with wood hearth heat.
Baskets filled with muffins, bars,
and in the Vulcan, brownies bake.
Shimmering jellies shine in jars
near racks of tortes and chocolate cake.
Congo squares, Boston cream pie;
Oatmeal raisin, snicker-doodles.
For me to shrug would be a lie:
I love them all, I love them oodles.
Mon dieu! Oy vay! – Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the carbs too beautiful this year.

This is my blog. This is my blog on Wordle.

Natasha — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:07:17 +0000

Oh, Wordle is so much fun! Check it out and try it yourself. Wordle — beautiful word clouds.

Ramblings

Natasha — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:38:17 +0000

“Oh, you’re a good bleeder!” She smiled approvingly as she said it.

Yeah, well, maybe – but I was glad I was reclining in one of those comfy chairs at the Red Cross on Friday squeezing a little squooshy ball instead of lying in the back of an ambulance where being a “good bleeder” would put me at a definite disadvantage.

Context is everything.

I’d actually thought the same thing (about context, not ambulances) when I gave blood three months ago as well. It was Friday, October 30. People came to work in costume, as they do in lots of places. No big deal. But even though I’m pretty cool – sanguine, even – (sorry) with vampires, I have to admit that having my blood drawn by Dracula was very unsettling. So, yeah, context is important. Good to remember when writing. Or just about anything.

*
What pisses me off (okay, one of the things that pisses me off – the other is that the stupid football game went waaaay past 9 PM and by the time it was finally over, I’d missed most of Emma and now I’ll have to watch it on a tiny screen) is that early Sunday morning I woke up thinking about the blood incident and I had this clever, insightful narrative playing in my head. Did I get up and write it down? Of course not, and so more than 24 hours later I’m trying to recall it and can’t, and I’m stuck with what I wrote above instead of that possibly brilliant passage.

But I do have one teeny tiny confession about those brilliant words we think we put together in that early morning dream world. I came up with a poem last week when I woke before dawn and realized that it had finally stopped raining. I remember thinking at the time it was clever and to the point. Unfortunately, I also remembered it verbatim. Please, my friends, promise you’ll think more about my bravery in posting this than the vapidity of the poem itself:

Sun. Day.
Today.
Yay!!!

Really – I thought it was clever at the time. So sometimes it’s just as well that I don’t remember what I’m thinking at 5 AM.

Struggling Artist Redux

Natasha — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:25:30 +0000

I want to thank Dayner and her thought-provoking post for getting my brain rolling this morning. This post was initially a response (okay, it’s not actually a response; I don’t answer anything) to some of her excellent questions, including these: What if I don’t want to be miserable? What if I don’t want to sit around and feel sorry for myself then write pitiful entries in my journal?

Well, historically, the percentage of suicides among poets is quite a bit higher than among the rest of the population. And we can all rattle of the names of A LOT of writers who have committed suicide or have or had extraordinarily difficult lives. I am most definitely NOT suggesting this route, though!

I think anyone who lives a real life has pain. I certainly have had my share of it — and for a while, I wrote about some of my terror. Was it eloquent? Don’t know — maybe some of it. Was it emotional? Absolutely. Did it provide catharsis in any way, make me feel better? Absolutely NOT.

So it’s not the kind of writing I am choosing to do now. And I think my writing can be pretty flat, pretty bland — perhaps as a result of tempering the emotion — which I try to compensate for with humor.

I have no pretensions of becoming a great writer though. I’d like to become an okay writer. I’d love to walk along the beach some summer day and see a couple of people slathering on sunscreen and settling in to one of my paperback novels and some PBR, maybe some tunes.

Russian angst. I guess I’m trying to escape it with my writing, not remain in it. I don’t want to be more miserable through writing. Or through reading, for that matter. If I know a kid dies in a novel, for example, I won’t read it. (I did slog my way through The Lovely Bones, but — really, never again.)

So I never answered Dayner’s questions. I guess we’re all haunted in some ways; we all have different ways of dealing with it. I’d like to think that excellent writing can come out of tapping into joy as well as into pain.

And here’s Mary Oliver’s poem, Why I Wake Early, which does just that.

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety–

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light–
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.