It's not a trick - National Poetry Month starts today. As in past years, I'll be putting up poetry-related posts each and every day that I post this month. (There may turn out to be some non-posting days due to upcoming travel, hence the caveat ( Read more... )

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Last week, I posted My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold by William Wordsworth, and I'm back again this week with more of his work. I was thinking about this poem the other day, on noticing the green shoots of daffodils outside a friend's door.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud ( Read more... )

Today, I'm doing something I rarely do - posting an original poem. Even though I write quite a lot of poems, I don't usually share here because I remain hopeful that someday, I'll be able to sell them. Even though that remains an extremely remote possibility. Which means that the only ones I'd be willing to part with for free are the ones that are ( Read more... )

Allow me to share with you the poem heard (or at least posted) around the world. Literally.

The talented !an of Hot Cross Haiku has posted one of my poems, a haiku defining a pop-up book.

He has also made me hungry for chocolate cake.And yes, I have a Blogger blog too, which is where the chocolate cake comments will take you -- it contains ( Read more... )

The wonderful docstymie has written a poem in my honor. Not only that, he's directed my attention to a new form of poem called a kwansaba. The form was invented by the Poet Laureate of St. Louis, Eugene Redmond.

The rules are, apparently, simple:

Seven lines
Seven words per line
No more than seven letters per word

By all means, check out Doc's poem, ( Read more... )

I'm not talking about the craze that recently swept at least some parts of the nation, where writers spent time trying tell a complete story using only six words. I'm talking about using the same six words over and over again in a poem, using a fixed pattern. That's right, poetry fans, I'm talking SestinaThe Sestina consists of six stanzas of six ( Read more... )

1) Be prepared to wander around with "higgeldy piggeldy" type gibberish in your head for quite a few days ( Read more... )

Not to be confused with some sort of dinosaur. I've been spending quite a bit of time writing poetry lately, and have been playing with some traditional forms in addition to working in free verse. I must say that the structures can be a lot of fun. Now I've run across the double dactyl, and desperately want to write one. Sadly, what's come to ( Read more... )