Once upon a time I wrote a truly useful post on ekphrasis, and what it is, and rather than copy it here, I'll just direct you there (though I haven't checked all the links in that post to see if they still work ( Read more... )

It's the first Friday in the month of July (tomorrow), so I'm posting my poem written in tandem with my lovely poetry sisters. This month it's triolets, and they were supposed to be heat-related.

Here's mine:

"I'd gladly move to Mexico"I’d gladly move to Mexico ( Read more... )

This month, my poetry sisters and I wrote list poems. Mine is half recipe, half doggerel, but it uses at least THREE of the words we needed to choose from, and we were only required to use two, so I consider it a win.

The real win, of course, is getting to write poetry month after month with these beautiful ladies, whom I love.

Cookie TimeGrab ( Read more... )

Today's poem is written with my poetry sisters and our challenge in mind -- use anaphora, the fine art of rhetorical repetition, in a poem. Think Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ( Read more... )

Our assignment for this month was from Laura Purdie Salas: write a short poem (6 lines or fewer) about an animal, using all three of these words: spike, roof, shadow.

My first thought was to write about a baby pangolin, because have you seen a picture of a baby pangolin?


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This month, my poetry sisters and I are working using what's called the Aphra Behn form. It is a form used by the female author and poet, Aphra Behn, back in the 1600s. I like to think of it as a mini-sonnet. It uses 9 lines of iambic tetrameter (4 poetic feet per line) plus one of iambic pentameter (5 poetic feet), for a total of 10 lines. And its ( Read more... )

This month, Tanita challenged us to write limericks about the birds and the bees, however we interpreted it. Owing to my being away this entire week at an art workshop in St. Petersburg, Florida, I only managed to write one (though I was supposed to write three). So without further ado, here it is:

When talk turns to birds and to bees ( Read more... )

Last month, we all wrote sonnets. Well, everyone in the poetry sisters except me wrote curtal sonnets, a form invented (or at least made popular) by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This month, we are each writing a tanka in response to somebody else's sonnet. I have been known to refer to a tanka as "a haiku pulling a trailer", but I've also discussed it ( Read more... )

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This month, my lovely poetry sisters and I took on a form called the lai. It is an open form consisting of one or more nine-line stanzas. Each stanza follows the form of AABAABAAB, where each A line has 5 syllables, and the B lines have only 2 syllables ( Read more... )