Happy Monday! Thank you for last week’s book suggestions. I’ve added them to my list.

If you’re a regular visitor to my window, you know I associate special days with ice cream. Thank you, Dad! Well, yesterday was a special day in several ways, and not just because another lovely, cooling rain fell on our sweltering Carolinas.

My poet friend, Doris, celebrated her 90^th birthday yesterday and Hubby and I were among the guests. It was a privilege and an honor to be invited when so many of the guests were ‘kin’, as Doris called them. At 90, Doris is still vibrant and energetic. Her electric blue dress and bold jewelry could’ve landed her on the cover of a fashion magazine. Doris still drives, maybe not as much as she once did, but enough to keep her on the go attending local poetry functions and other events. She keeps active doing yoga, and I think she mentioned she plays pickleball! She told me yesterday she’s shooting for 100 years-old. I have no doubt she’ll make it. I hope I’m around to be invited to that party, too.

We weren’t the only non-family members as we sat with a couple more poet friends, and I reconnected with poet friends I’ve not seen in years. All this poetry. And that’s the second reason yesterday was a special day–I finished my scoring for Kakalak Saturday evening and yesterday I sent my scores to the publisher. The process isn’t over, but my initial work is complete. In a couple weeks we three editors will be meet at my house for a marathon session of finalizing all the selections. Out of the 800+ poetry submissions, only about 130–135 will be included in the anthology. I can hear your ‘Wow!s’ through my window. We obviously take the poems with the highest combined scores, but there are other selections to be made, and this will be the first time we three are together to compare notes. And we finally find out who the poets are. Up until then everything is chosen blindly so the reveal is exciting as we see familiar names, but there are always new ones, too.

And finally, since my editing hat is off for a few weeks, my writing hat came out of the closet. This past Wednesday I started taking a poetry workshop with Phillip Shabazz, a mentor from Table Rock Writers Workshop. Phillip always manages to push us in our writing and this workshop is no exception. He assigns ‘homefun’, not homework, so I have a poem to write for this Wednesday. And I have a poem to write for the upcoming Visions and Verse IV: an Ekphrastic Poetry Exhibit. Some of you recall my being involved in one two years ago, and our group was invited to do another one this year. I’m also working on my final poems for my Poet Sisters collection.

These three poems have something in common–they’re all traditional form poems. Many of you may remember sonnets and haikus from high school English class. There are so many other forms. Forms are a challenge because they somewhat box you in due to the rules, but like most challenges, they also stretch you and prove what you’re capable of. I find I increase my vocabulary having to dig for the right word with the right number of syllables for a spot. Being confined to a particular rhyme scheme or repetition or syllabic pattern forces me to rethink images and syntax. (I’m assuming all this brain exercise is part of what has kept my poet friend Doris as sharp as she is.)

The three new forms I’m working on are challenging but also energizing. For my ‘homefun’ assignment, I have to do a ‘call and response’ poem. Think of two voices having a conversation or debate in alternating stanzas, and you have a call and response poem. One of the best I found while researching the form is U.S Poets Laureate Joy Harjo’s Advice for Countries, Advanced, Developing, and Falling: A Call and Response.

For my ekphrastic piece I’m doing what’s called a ‘Golden Shovel’ poem, created by Jericho Brown, I believe. In this form, you take a line from a poem, and each of the words in that line becomes an end word in the lines of the poem you’re writing. It sounds a bit convoluted I know, but once you write each word in order down the side of the page, it becomes clearer. Because my piece of art by local painter Bill Bradley includes an image of Janis Joplin, I’m actually using a line from one of her songs instead of a poem. The title of Bill’s artwork is, Two Bad Girls of Rock and Roll. I can’t think of a better title or inspiration for my poem. Can you?

The third form is even more wonky than these two. I’ll save that explanation for next week.

As I said, all this brain work is energizing which helps as I get back to some yard and housework I’ve put off. I hope your week is just as fulfilling no matter what you’re doing, and if there are special days–enjoy some ice cream. Dad always seemed to find something special about every day and that’s maybe a lesson to live by. See you next Monday.

To read Harjo’s poem Advice for Countries Advanced, Developing, and Falling: A Call and Response

For information about Table Rock Writers Workshop