Scroll down for our blog posts about various topics, poems from our publications, announcements of member publications, and events.
Blog Posts
Prompt: Faults as Praise
From Western Wind by Mason and Nims: Write a poem about someone you love, using a list of his or her faults as a basis for praise.
Between the Yardstick and the Mile / Ken Wilding
Between the yardstick and the mile
The Rumor animates fields of Anemones.
It feeds the fish that drinks the rain.
It turns the plumes of broad winged hawks,
Huffs into sails of lonely ships.
It warms the tomb with candle flame
And further than this star.
All things breath in its trace,
Taste with its tongue,
Belie the exigence of form.
And in a book I read,
The wounded heart was freed
Upon a day when the rain fell up.
Can one dream of what can never be?
Is it outside of human possibility?
Words and words thrown at the corner
Where no one stands.
– Ken Wilding / Spring Lake, Michigan
“Detroit” – Joy Gaines-Friedler
PSM member Joy Gaines Friedler’s poem, Detroit, is up on Vox Populi along with some of her photographs.
Prompt: Changes
Write about something that changes over time. Could be you and an attitude. Could be a chair gathering snow. Could be the deer settling down. Could be your car rusting away.
Prompt: A Carnival Ride
From friend Eben Gering: Write a poem about a carnival ride. Then get in a brawl with it at the end. ( I don’t exactly know what that brawl part is about, but carnival rides: what a rich source!) Thanks, Eben.
Prompt: Lesson in Elegy
Read the poem “Your Birthday in the California Mountains” by Kenneth Rexroth. Write an elegy the way he does, misleading the reader that the subject of the elegy is still alive. Address the poem to the person who died. Keep it simple, clear, straightforward, and honest. From In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowitt.
A Member Responds: Niagra Falls in Winter – David Jibson
Walking Through the Hollow / Ben Snider
Walking Through The Hollow
No birds call, no crickets sing
No wind blows through no trees
No words echo, no flowers spring
No self has no value here
No heart beats, no pains sting
No way up to no way down
No way left for my being
No way right, no way wrong
No way out of no seeing
No feet on no ground
No me to know the meaning.
Ben Snider / Arcadia, Michigan
Poetry Reading: Hedy Habra
The Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle Reading Series
(Ann Arbor PSM Affiliate)
January 27 – Hedy Habra is a polyglot essayist, poet and artist whose third book of poems, The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the International Book Award. She has lived in Egypt, Lebanon, Greece, Brussels, and now Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her website is hedyhabra.com
7:00 PM – 8:45 PM • Wednesday, January 27, 2020
Email cwpoetrycircle@gmail.com for Zoom link.
The link will be sent via email the day of the event.
The reading will be followed by an open mic. Participants are welcome to to read a poem of their own or a favorite.
Your hosts: Ed Morin, David Jibson and Rainey Lamey.
The Bold News of Birdcalls / Edward Morin
The meadowlark, belting his song from a post on this book’s cover, is recognized across the country as a harbinger of spring. Enlivening the ambiance of this poetry collection, familiar birds represent the character and mood of its four sections: noisy jays, melodious wrens, steadfast robins, tranquil swans. While birds populate many of the poems, hardly more than a handful have birds as their subjects. The poems’ subjects derive from wide ranging personal experiences often narrated as dramatic situations, usually with something emotionally important at stake. Settings are urban and rural, delineated in finely tuned sensuous detail. Some poems are sonorously lyrical, others ironic or assertive.
“Publication of Edward Morin’s The Bold News of Birdcalls is good news not just for birders and other celebrants of the natural world, but for all poetry lovers. I love Ed Morin’s sense of place; he is a real Michigan bard, and his evocation of many familiar Michigan places amounts to a North American version of what the Irish call Dinnṡeanċas, “place lore,” the recitation of which is one of poetry’s most ancient and revered obligations. All this is accomplished with human warmth and a rare sense of empathy.”
— Richard Tillinghast, author of twelve books of poetry and five of creative nonfiction, most recently Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places.
“Birds flutter, feed, and swoop through these poems: motifs that knit together subjects as closely-observed as a decaying Hallowe’en pumpkin, armed robbery at a paint store where the speaker holds short-lived employment—a narrative that had my heart in my throat!—and elegies for early-passing friends, colleagues and poet-pals from the speaker’s younger years as a university instructor. Academic politics of the corporate university also grip our attention, as does some professorial ogling! The unforgiving contrasts of northern Midwest weather serve both to warm and cool the tonalities of poems filled with self-questioning, forgiveness of others, and compelling human stories.”
— Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems, and lead editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace
Paperback: 102 pages
Price: $18.50
Publisher: Kelsay Books (January 7, 2021)
ISBN: 978-1-952326-70-7
Available from Kelsay Books and at Amazon.com.
Prompt: The Right to Write
From Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write.Set aside a half hour:
Settle yourself in to write. First take ten minutes to describe where you are. (I’m in my office and furious.) Try to capture your mood, the room, anything delightful or interesting that catches your attention. Number your paper from 1-5. Very quickly list five things that would be interesting to write about. Choose one topic. What would you write about it? Why would you write about it? Spend five or so minutes writing about that.Do not go for Art, capital A, or even writing, capital W. Think of this instead as word play. Do not worry about being deep or sensible or practical.
