Something to Consider

~ Writing about writing ~

For The Young Who Want To

Talent is what they say 

you have after the novel 

is published and favorably 

reviewed. Beforehand what 

you have is a tedious 

delusion, a hobby like knitting. 

Work is what you have done 

after the play is produced 

and the audience claps. 

Before that friends keep asking 

when you are planning to go 

out and get a job. 

Genius is what they know you 

had after the third volume 

of remarkable poems. Earlier 

they accuse you of withdrawing, 

ask why you don't have a baby, 

call you a bum. 

The reason people want M.F.A.'s, 

take workshops with fancy names 

when all you can really 

learn is a few techniques, 

typing instructions and some-

body else's mannerisms 

is that every artist lacks 

a license to hang on the wall 

like your optician, your vet

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose fillings fall into the stew

but you're certified a dentist. 

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to

like it better than being loved. 

– Marge Piercy

from Circles on the Water (NY, Knopf 1982).

First published Mother Jones V, no. 4 (May 1980).

Copyright © 1980, 1982 by Marge Piercy and Middlemarsh, Inc.

Used here for purposes of study.

Note: Phlogiston is an imaginary element once supposed to cause spontaneous combustion.

No commentary from me this time. I invite your own responses. I present this piece particularly for the many fine poets amongst us who somehow don't think they are "real poets" yet. 

(Marge Piercy is one of my greatest favourites, whose books – novels and volumes of poetry – are available on Amazon.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Colour (Color)

Color effect – Sunlight shining through stained glass onto carpet
(Nasir ol Molk Mosque located in Shiraz, Iran)

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”― Alice Walker

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”― Virginia Woolf

"ME TOO" by Annell Livingston:
"Hold the world as tenderly as a lover."
(Used with permission.)

Midweek Motif ~ Color (Colour)

Working on this prompt is brightening my world! Today, I share words from Annell Livingston who created the "Me Too" acrylic painting above:  

I have been studying color for over fifty years.  And color is like exploring a cave deep underground, the doors or passageways keep opening, just when you think you have a handle on the subject, another door opens and presents new possibilities.  We begin with the hues of color, or the names of each color, like red, yellow and blue.  The lights and darks of color, tints and shades.  The temperature of color, warm or cool.   And the intensity of color, or the brightness or dullness of color.  There is so much to explore about color and its vibrations, it is a lifetime study.

Today, I'm inviting us to question how color around us shapes our moods and how our moods influence our environments.

The Challenge:  In your brand new poem, reveal the color of a place or an event.

Angostura de Paine, Chile. By Ricardo Hurtubia

The Art Room

BY SHARA MCCALLUM

for my sisters

Because we did not have threads

of turquoise, silver, and gold,

we could not sew a sun nor sky.

And our hands became balls of fire.

And our arms spread open like wings.

Because we had no chalk or pastels,

no toad, forest, or morning-grass slats

of paper, we had no colour

for creatures. So we squatted

and sprang, squatted and sprang.

Four young girls, plaits heavy

on our backs, our feet were beating

drums, drawing rhythms from the floor;

our mouths became woodwinds;

our tongues touched teeth and were reeds.

(Used with permission of the poet.)

First appeared in Song of Thieves 
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

Colors passing through us

BY MARGE PIERCY

Purple as tulips in May, mauve

into lush velvet, purple

as the stain blackberries leave

on the lips, on the hands,

the purple of ripe grapes

sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,

like a new flower in a bud vase

on your desk. Every day

I will paint you, as women

color each other with henna

on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,

as coals after the fire is banked,

the cardinal in the feeder,

the roses tumbling on the arbor

their weight bending the wood

the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit

hanging their globes on the glossy tree,

orange as pumpkins in the field,

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

who come to eat it, orange as my

cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,

yellow as a hill of daffodils,

yellow as dandelions by the highway,

yellow as butter and egg yolks,

yellow as a school bus stopping you,

yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

. . . . 

(Read the rest of this marvelous poem HERE.)

Colorful fall foliage in New York.

In a London Drawingroom

                          BY GEORGE ELIOT

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. 

For view there are the houses opposite 

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall 

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch 

Monotony of surface & of form 

Without a break to hang a guess upon. 

No bird can make a shadow as it flies, 

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung 

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays 

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering 

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye 

Or rest a little on the lap of life. 

All hurry on & look upon the ground, 

Or glance unmarking at the passers by 

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages 

All closed, in multiplied identity. 

The world seems one huge prison-house & court 

Where men are punished at the slightest cost, 

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy. 

In the Bois de Boulogne by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

🌈

 Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

(Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Treasure)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Poetry about the Body

    “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

SOURCE

“My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness you realize that you are not the boss. It is the other way round.” — Federico Fellini

         

Midweek Motif ~ Poetry about the Body

How do we view the image of our body? Do we see it with the eye of the media / advertisement / anyone apart from our own self or is it I am seeing my own body?

The artists of both ancient and modern world paid great homage to the human body in their art and sculpture. No less, the modern writers, in their words.


Sing about this human body.

Here is Walt Whitman in his nine part poem I Sing the Body Electric:

1        

I sing the body electric, 

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, 

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, 

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. 

               

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? 

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? 

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? 

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 

2 

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, 

That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. 

The expression of the face balks account, 

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, 

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, 

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, 

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, 

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, 

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. 

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, 

The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, 

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle, 

Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, 

The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, 

The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, 

The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, 

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work, 

The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, 

The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; 

The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, 

The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, 

The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; 

Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, 

Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count. 

                             (Rest of the poem is here)

Here are some links to some wonderful poetry on the theme:

Old Man Leaves Party by Mark Strand  

 My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy

Anodyne by Yusef Komunyakaa

homage to my hips by Lucille Cliffton

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Psyche / Soul)

                                                    

                     

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Doorway(s)

The Open Door by Helen McNicoll (@1910)

🚪

“How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, 

a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, 

desire, security, welcome and respect.” 

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“. . . I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens,

walk on through  and at least take a look around.” 

― Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God

Rock of Cashel, Ireland, Photo by Digital Eye

🚪

Midweek Motif ~ Doorway(s)

"Women lean on doorways!

Are they waiting, hesitating, 

or holding up the world?"  

I wrote those lines in a "Women's Movement" poem at least 35 years ago.  I can't find the poem, but the image sticks with me as a place where two worlds meet, a place that is neither the kitchen nor the board room ~ a place where choice is possible.

"Door" is also the deepest root meaning of January:

 January (in Latin, Ianuarius) is named after the Latin word for door (ianua), since January is the door to the year and an opening to new beginnings. The month is conventionally thought of as being named after Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions in Roman mythology, but according to ancient Roman farmers' almanacs Juno was the tutelary deity of the month.

Your Challenge:  Write a new poem with a doorway motif, one with doors open or closed.

Photo of Cape Coast Castle's 'Door of No Return"

Rotation

BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY

Like the moon that night, my father —

         a distant body, white and luminous.

How small I was back then,

         looking up as if from dark earth.

Distant, his body white and luminous, 

         my father stood in the doorway.

Looking up as if from dark earth,

         I saw him outlined in a scrim of light.

My father stood in the doorway

         as if to watch over me as I dreamed.

When I saw him outlined — a scrim of light —

         he was already waning, turning to go.

Once, he watched over me as I dreamed.

         How small I was. Back then, 

he was already turning to go, waning

         like the moon that night — my father.

(from Thrall. Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey. Used with permission)

Praying

by Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Thirst, Beacon Press 2006, 

found at Poem Elf.

From The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald,
illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1920

Doors opening, closing on us

by Marge Piercy, 1936

Maybe there is more of the magical
in the idea of a door than in the door
itself. It’s always a matter of going
through into something else. But

while some doors lead to cathedrals
arching up overhead like stormy skies
and some to sumptuous auditoriums
and some to caves of nuclear monsters
. . . . 
(Read the rest HERE.)

They Sit Together on the Porch

BY WENDELL BERRY

They sit together on the porch, the dark 

Almost fallen, the house behind them dark. 

Their supper done with, they have washed and dried 

The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses, 

Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two. 

She sits with her hands folded in her lap, 

At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak, 

And when they speak at last it is to say 

What each one knows the other knows. They have 

One mind between them, now, that finally 

For all its knowing will not exactly know 

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding 

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

Still Life with Doorway and Cat Berdichev - Polissya Region - Ukraine

🚪

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and 
visit others in the spirit of the community—

(Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Poetry about the Body)