Poetic Mind Tip #3: Make a Card

When you hand-craft a card for someone you love, you hold the person in your mind as you cut, paste and stitch and prepare a surprise. 

Below are two Valentine beauties for inspiration.

Made by Sacramento artist and photographer Lynn Marlowe

Daily Prompt: Send a Postcard

A poem can take the form of a letter.  Richard Hugo wrote to Kizer from Seattle:

Dear Condor: Much thanks for that telephonic support

from North Carolina when I suddenly went ape

in the Iowa tulips. Lord, but I'm ashamed.

I was afraid, it seemed, according to the doctor

of impending success, winning some poetry prizes

or getting a wet kiss. The more popular I got,

the softer the soft cry in my head: Don't believe them.

You were never good. Then I broke and proved it.

Ten successive days I alienated women

I liked best. I told a coed why her poems were bad

(they weren't) and didn't understand a word I said.

Really warped. The phrase "I'll be all right"

came out too many unsolicited times. I'm o.k. now.

I'm back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea

and rain, the market and the salmon. 

Letters are wonderful. But a postcard requires concision: the perfect combination of form and function. 

Daily Prompt: Write a poem, your own or another's, on a postcard and stick it in the mail. Need an addressee? Send to poemcrossing at the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry.

Autobiography, a poem

Thank you to Inlandia for publishing "Autobiography," a poem about wind.

The journal includes inspiring photographs and recordings of most poems. Check it out.

Daily Prompt: Full Moon Poem

Tonight, a full moon. This January moon is called Old Moon or Full Wolf Moon. Each month's moon has a name. Some occurring later in the year include Snow Moon, Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Strawberry Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Hunter's Moon. (A full list with dates can be found at the Farmer's Almanac.) 

The moon is a poet's delight. I've carried this moon poem with me for years.

WELCOME TO THE MOON

Welcome precious stone of the night,

Delight of the skies, precious stone of the night,

Mother of stars, precious stone of the night,

Excellency of Stars, precious stone of the night.

Anon., translated from the Irish

I've written my share of moon poems. This one, about a sliver of moon, appeared in Kritya. 

MOON CANOE

Tonight the moon is a canoe 
alone in the light soaked city

sky. Other places darkness
of night floods spaces between
trees and boulders, along shores
and above lakes. So many canoes
dugout, fiberglass, plank, aluminum,
perfect form of floating. In you 

I’ve glossed rivers and lakes capsized 
more than once spending days after 
in damp clothes and sleeping bags.
Moon canoe, you are moving to
full each night. White pool, we are 
your paddlers.

Daily Prompt: Go outside tonight and observe the moon. Write a poem to or about it, four lines or longer. Perhaps set a month-poem challenge: a poem a month about the full moon. 

Poetic Mind Tip #2: Read the Funnies

The funnies, as my spunky grandmother called newspaper comics, are to your poetic mind what a daily dose of vitamin D is for your body. 

Giggling/chuckling/guffawing/ laughing over Baby Blues or Zits stimulates belly, heart and imagination. Tracking the drama of Mark Trail's adventures sharpens concentration. Like poetry, humor relies on insight, juxtaposition, originality, timing, nuance and irony. See Dilbert, Pickles, Luann, Drabble, Foxtrot, Doonesbury and Frazz. Other strips (Wee Pals, Mutts, Non Sequitur) get you thinking about humanity.  Frank and Ernest utilizes the poet's key tool: word play. And check out Beakman Jax. While ostensibly answering children's science questions, Jax shines a light on life's paradoxes and absurdities. 

Two online sources for comics are The Washington Post and The Sacramento Bee. I read 'em in print with the Bee before tackling any other news.

Poetic Mind Tip #1: Correspond with a Pen Pal

This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. - Emily Dickinson

Poems allow us to slow down, notice, reflect. Lyric poems, especially, hold a moment still--long enough to view it--the way a photograph or a painting can. A difference with the poem from visual art, however, is the degree of internalization. A word, and its sound, functions as thin gauze of meaning. Picture a beaded curtain hanging in a doorway, each bead a letter, each strand a series of words that make lines. You can slip through those dangling strings of beads and get somewhere else, to the other side of a question or into a deeper awareness.

Why bother? What's so great about being aware, present, sensitive even? You have to answer that for yourself.

I can tell you that this quality of attention necessary for writing poems, what I call "the poetic mind," can be cultivated in other ways. One of the most satisfying? A pen pal. 

Write a detailed letter, by hand preferably, calling on powers of observation, description, and a sense of interiority. There's an element of gift-giving, which poems also have, the notion of making something for someone else as a way of sharing the world. Among poets are great letter writers, Rilke, Neruda, Bishop and more. But you don't have to be a great poet to write a great letter. Find someone in another city, state or country and take the time to write. Within a few months, your relationship to time will change and you'll be thinking more like a poet, which is to say, like someone who believes in truth and beauty, in being present and noticing.

Need inspiration? Check out The Letter Project.

Bruce Forman's "Journey"

The silent vastness envelopes you    

   within a stark white world--

    an icy stream cascades from

    sun-polished peaks.

-Bruce Forman

Remember OR7, the lone wolf that journeyed into California in 2012? Naturalist Bruce Forman brings OR7's story to the stage. I worked with Bruce on revising the poem that will be performed with music and dance. The project merges art and science--two sides of the same coin of life.

Come see! 

Backstage: 

1. What inspired you to write "Journey"?

The long solo journey for a young wolf to take...is inspirational. The idea of wolves re-establishing in California after being extirpated is exciting; it may still take years, but it's now possible. Who knows, maybe OR7 will come back with a female wolf.  

2. What steps did you take to prepare the poem for performance?

I went through an analysis of scenes that worked fine as a poem but needed more time to breath on stage for dance movements, for emotions to gel, for artistic quality to be realized. Having a poetry critique and feedback from dancers really helped. 

3. How does art figure into environmental education? 

Art is very important in environmental interpretation or education as it appeals to a person very differently than information. Art can inspire, evoke emotions, express a point in a way that way words have difficulty. Art, whether music, dance, masks, costumes, lights and/or the poetic verse, adds key layers of the experience that can change a person's attitudes, emotions and ultimately behavior. Information is important as a foundation, hence my interest in having a wolf lecturer to open the program with the science and politics of wolves. And the storytelling element which follows adds to the richness of perspectives about wolves.

   

4. What facts would you like people to know about wolves?

Wolves have a right to live just an any other animal, for their own intrinsic value. Wolves as a keystone species are vital for healthy food chains and the balance of habitats.  Wolves are team players with various roles that help a pack survive. We can learn much from wolves, from parenting to hunting to reducing stress and increasing compatibility within a pack. Wolves are excellent communicators. Wolves represent hope, for the recovery of nature in our world. We need to have more of [what Aldo Leopold calls] their glow of "green fire" in our society, by first  finding our own green fire.

5. Have you encountered a wolf in the wild? 

I experienced seeing a distant wolf on my honeymoon in Alaska at Denali National Park. It had this haunting, stoic look, gazing out on the vast open mountainside. But in terms of intimacy [with the wild], it'd have to be swimming with a wild dolphin in outer cays of Belize on scuba trip. After a full day of diving, docked at a tiny island, I joined a dolphin near sunset, and we swam and played. It was very perceptive, affectionate and powerful.  

6. Tell us about your other projects as a naturalist and writer.

I'm working on a new book of poems on cranes and introspective elements, from love to loss, friendships to aloneness, dreams to realities of living, and a few oddballs. It will be accompanied by awesome crane photographs and illustrations. The writing is largely done, photographs taken and moving into next steps of production, hopefully in time for fall.  Possibly as an accordion book with book ends so the changeable beauty of it can be displayed.

As a naturalist, I'm involved with starting a new wildlife festival in the region, developing a new trail at an awesome yet trail-less natural site in the region filled with wildflowers, waterfalls and unusual, less seen wildlife. And I'm expanding an environmental education project (in its 29th year) to advance environmental science and conservation literacy of youth. I'm also wanting to return to Alaska with my family and close friends, to raft the Alsek-Tatshenshini Rivers over two weeks, and howl with the wolves.