Articles Archives - Moms on Poetry

2019-03-112022-01-07

An Artist Photographer’s Journey

KELLĒ SAUER is a photographic artist who has a very special vision and poetic touch.

If you are looking for a special anniversary, birthday, or Valentine’s gift for your guy, or a chance to create beautiful keepsakes for your children, KELLĒ might just be your photographer of choice. (Yes, she will travel for you.)

KELLĒ is also available for weddings, to capture the heart of the experience in images so beautiful they’ll take your breath away.

I hope you enjoy this interview, that shares her heart and thoughtfulness—and I hope you find inspiration in it for your own life.

Kelle Sauer Behind the Veil — click to see photo larger

L.L.:

I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of being there almost from the beginning—at least online—of your photography journey. I’ve watched you grow and explore and, always, do beautiful work, even as your style has changed. In my deepest heart, I hope that someday your latest work will grace the walls of a museum, or ten!

Speaking of beginnings, I’d like to hear about yours a little. Who gave you your first camera—or did you purchase it yourself? Were you just exploring, or did you dream forward even at the start? I mean, wow, did you ever think you’d take your camera to Italy and do a shoot like the one featured in this interview?

KELLĒ:

I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Laura, and my photography certainly wouldn’t be where it is if you hadn’t been there for my online beginnings.

My photography beginnings came before I ever held a camera. My earliest memories come to me in pictures: lamplight, sunsets, starlight overhead on a wheelbarrow ride, rainbow plastic balloons on my bedside lamp, the slit incandescent lamplight on my floor after I’d been tucked in at night, moonlight on snow lighting a ballerina-wallpapered bedroom. I think I was making pictures before I knew my words, but I didn’t know how to speak my “native tongue” until I was about twelve years old, when my dad gifted me a little blue 35mm camera for Christmas. My first photo captured a frost that iced the fence he’d built around our Illinois farmhouse to keep my mother’s goats in.

Because money was tight in our family of ten and film was an unnecessary expense, I wasn’t to gain an opportunity to develop my work until college, when I was able to secure funds for a “real camera,” a Single Lens Reflex camera that had an automatic mode that let me point and shoot the thing with a nice lens. I began photographing my friends. The light. The campus. Anything around me that caught my eye. And then I would develop the photos and ask anyone and everyone if they were any good.

My goals in college were small, and largely successful. Some of my images are still featured in the college’s print and marketing media. I never dreamed then that I would one day be photographing weddings or traveling around the world with my camera.

L.L.:

When I first knew you, your photography was all about light. It was your signature. Yet, over time, I remember asking you if you’d consider working a bit more with darker hues. And now, to my great surprise and delight, you are. How is light still a part of your work? What has led you to do almost chiaroscuro work, in a painterly style?

KELLĒ:

I think light is still my signature. And I don’t shoot dark for the sake of shooting dark, like many photographers dabbling in chiaroscuro. As I have developed as an artist and as a human with intense periods of depression, my eye and my heart have been drawn almost metaphorically to the light entering into the darkness, to the warmth and safety of the rose-gold in the gray, but it wasn’t until the last six months or so that I (as a fully self-taught photographer) finally figured out that 1) all of my favorite photos from anyone had this quality of light within the darkness, and 2) I could actually leave behind an aesthetic I didn’t prefer anymore and try one that I did.

L.L.:

Your work is deeply poetic. Like the best poems, which contain vision and focus, your work speaks past thought and straight to the heart. How has poetry been a part of your photography journey, if at all?

KELLĒ:

I love to write and to speak and to converse, but sometimes I think my pictures may simply be the shorthand for my poetry, an easier way of communicating the feelings I am always trying to express. I often use my own images as placeholders for words I will write later, perhaps in another season, when I am able to articulate something more thoroughly.

T.S. Poetry author Maureen Doallas has called me a “poet-photographer,” and it’s a moniker that has stuck with me. My photos flow from my words and my words flow from my photos. As I mentioned above, it is a language, one worth a thousand words, and one worth a thousand pictures. I live in between. My photography clients tell me that sessions with me are like therapy sessions, because as I shoot, I speak to them the beauty that I am seeing in them, in the world around us, in the way they are, and the way they are with me.

Poetry taught me that not everything has to make sense. Just as a poem sometimes speaks in phrases that communicate an overall feeling at the end of it, a perfectly composed picture may not be as powerful as a photo that lets the light and the dark sway and flow and communicate with one another throughout the frame. Poetry allowed me to be an artist with my camera, where photography classes about technology and composition would simply have drained the life from me.

Kelle Sauer Existential — click to see photo larger

L.L.:

You’re a mom, several times over. Do you believe you’d be the photographer you are had you not had children? How does having kids currently affect your work, whether thematically or just in terms of actually getting the work done?

KELLĒ:

No. Being a mother pushed me through doors I never would have opened if I had never had children. I have a pragmatic streak that would have kept me working in an office for financial security for the rest of my born days.

After my oldest daughter was born, I experienced two years of postpartum depression that left me physically unable to register the sunlight. I realized when she was about three months old that I could still see it in my pictures of her, so I shot and I shot and I shot and I shot, because not only could I not remember the sunlight, I couldn’t remember the days. I couldn’t remember my baby. But when I looked at the world through my lens, and again in my computer as I processed, the darkness often moved away. I found I could remember life that happened if I could remember what photo I took on that day.

Now, my children simply push me out of my natural introversion every single day. I am almost never alone, even when I am depressed, and as I watch their lives expand, I am learning to expand my own, to open my heart further, to reach out with kindness to others with whom I would like to work. I believe that my own growth as a person and as an artist will challenge them to reach higher themselves as they grow older. My work in photography has also given them a picture of womanhood that I did not receive from a mother whose gift was in nurture and homemaking.

It is always a challenge to get my work done. I am careful to set my clients’ expectations around my actual timelines with school runs and sick days. The hardest parts for me are balancing my emotional energy between my art and my children, especially as they have grown older and asked me for more. “Done” is often a moving target, but it’s also a beautiful challenge to train my own free spirit to learn the beauty of the ritual we all need.

Kelle Sauer Side 2 — click to see photo larger

L.L.:

Do you have a favorite poet? How about a favorite poem? I’d love to hear. Along these lines, have you ever thought of doing “poem shoots” sort of the way you seem to be doing “painter shoots” (I love how some of your work is channeling Vermeer these days!)?

KELLĒ:

That is not an easy question to answer. Mary Oliver is probably my favorite poet, followed closely by Christina Rosetti. Both poets speak profoundly of loss and of finding life within their loss, themes that resonate deeply with my own language of feeling. Another favorite is David Whyte, whose prose in his book, Consolations, has been a bit of a lifeline this last year as I have been deepening further after a cross-country move that broke my heart and turned my world upside down. My current favorite poem is one of his, a poem called “Stone.”

Stone (Thobar Phádraig)

by David Whyte

The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.

I have been staring at this poem for a year, slowly memorizing it with my entire being, feeling my life flashing before my eyes as I face an immovable God and reality that does not change to suit my whims. I feel I am just beginning to understand the strength I have gained through my losses and the intense changes I have experienced over extended periods of grief and depression. The invitation in David’s words to embrace the things I cannot change, and to be willing to let reality break against me has offered me a new perspective on loss and on showing up for my life and the beauty to be found – both in my daily life and within myself – even if I can’t dictate my reality.

And you’d better believe I have been thinking of shoots built around poems. This is actually one of my soft personal photography prompts for 2019. I have this little book by L.L. Barkat about love that I want to linger on.

L.L.:

Aw, thanks. 🙂 As an artist and a mom, is there anything else you’d really like to share with our Moms on Poetry readers? Some kind of encouragement or advice, a story or an observation, or even a favorite quote? Or something else altogether?

KELLĒ:

As mothers, I think we always have this idea of how we should be, how we should mother, how we should sacrifice, how our kids should turn out, how we should be feeling about anything and everything. But beginning both my motherhood and my artist journey at the same time through a haze of intense depression gave me a different perspective.

Because of my physical limitations, I didn’t have the luxury of “doing it all” after my first baby was born. I could only do things that I had energy to do, and for me that meant choosing my happy places. Creating meals. Playing with colors and design. Sitting in the light. Taking pictures. I learned what my gifts were instead of my responsibilities. I learned my own language even as my children learned theirs.

As I emerged from the fog of those first depressed years with a new lifestyle I hadn’t quite meant to create, I realized that where my mother’s gift and example to me had been nurture, my own gift is and example to my children is seeing people. The more I develop that gift, the more I am able to see my children and to provide in my own way for them both physically and emotionally.

We weren’t all made to be the same mother or to produce children who would be the same as other children. I am the mother my children were meant to have, and they expect me to be me, not some idea of a mother that they need. Living into my gifts has been the best gift I could have given them, and my favorite vision for our future is bringing them into it all with me as they develop their own gifts.

L.L.:

Thanks so much, Kellē. I’m deeply appreciative that I’ve had the chance to follow your work for so long. And I look forward watching where your art continues to take you—and, well, where you continue to take it. ☺

Kelle Sauer Gentle Leap — click to see photo larger

For a gift that will be remembered for years to come, book KELLĒ SAUER now.

2019-02-212022-01-07

Falling for Poetry—It’s as Easy as Loving Pajamas and These 10 Kids Books!

“Mama?” Jane holds a book in her hand. “Will you read the llama poem?”

“Sure, sweetie.” I shove back my dinner plate to clear a space on the table. She climbs into my lap and opens the book to the llama poem page.

“The Llama Who Had No Pajama, ” I read the title, then launch into the poem.

The llama who had no pajama
Was troubled and terribly sad
When it became known that he had outgrown
Every pair of pajamas he had.

The poem continues, picking up speed as the llama and his mama look in “each nook and each cranny / each hillock and mound” and not a pair of pajamas can they find in the whole wide wumberly world. By this time, they’re so exhausted from their search, the little llama falls asleep sans pajamas, only to wake up in the morning and realize:

Since goats don’t wear gloves
And cocks don’t wear socks
And bats don’t wear hats,
Well, why in the world,
In the wumberly world,
Should llamas be wearing pajamas?

“Will you read it again, Mama?” Jane asks. So I do. This time, Jack leans over my shoulder to read and listen along, and the twins crowd on either side, resting their little blond heads on my hips.

I confess, until I had children, poetry intimidated me. I was an English major who always felt incredibly dense when I approached a poem, as if its meaning were somehow obscured by its language, and it was my job to decode it, only I didn’t know the code that my classmates had somehow managed to crack, and I just bumbled along, feeling ever more and more stupid at poetry. Once I graduated, I more or less quit reading the stuff.

Then, Jack was born, and I started reading children’s books, many of which are poems: Goodnight Moon and Ten, Nine, Eight. Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? and Owl Moon. Jamberry and The Circle of Days. And I liked them. I loved them. I read them over and over again. I still do.

Then Jack and I graduated to Mother Goose and Jack Prelutsky and Edward Lear—whole books full of verses, of poems. We giggled over them, and I reveled in the sound of the words in my ears, the feel of them on my tongue. By this time, Jane was born, and I read to her all the books I’d read to Jack. Then the three of us discovered Mary Ann Hoberman and Rachel Field and Robert Louis Stevenson and the poems of A.A. Milne.

And somewhere along the way, I discovered that even though real poetry still intimidated me, I definitely liked children’s poetry.

Then we began reading from Favorite Poems Old and New, a book I stole from my mother’s library when I was home for a visit, and I found myself reading poems by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson—poets whom no one would accuse of writing for children. And I loved the feel and sound of these words just as much as I loved the feel and sound of the children’s poems on which I’d cut my poetic teeth.

I could no longer claim that I wasn’t really a poetry person. Reading to my kids, I fell for poetry myself. Now, there are still poems that mystify me, that I read and wonder, what the heck is that about? But I no longer feel stupid in the face of them. I just figure that poem wasn’t written for me and go read something else, something by Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or John Keats.

I finish reading “The Llama Who Had No Pajama” a second time. Jane flips to another page and asks me to read the poems there. We spend half an hour turning pages, looking at the funny illustrations, and reading poetry. The kids could keep going—they’d have me read every poem in the book—but my backside is getting sore from sitting on hard wood under a six-year-old who seems to get heavier by the minute.

So we get up and clear the table. While I load the dishwasher, Jack and Jane get ready for bed. Then they help me put the twins in their pajamas. “Our own little llamas, ” I say.

“In fleecy pajamas, ” Jack says. He and Jane and I grin at each other. Then we pile onto the sofa for stories—and more poetry.

*****

If you’re like me and don’t know how to introduce a youngster to poetry, start with picture books, many of which are poems in disguise. In addition, look for illustrated books written by well-known poets. Some of our favorite children’s poetry books include illustrated versions of poetry by Donald Hall, Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Frost, Rachel Field, Rose Fyleman, and Mary Ann Hoberman (author of “The Llama Who Had No Pajama”).

Once they (and you) are used to the language of poetry, you could try a longer collection of poetry. Here are a few of our family’s favorites:

Children’s poetry for the very young:

My Very First Mother Goose edited by Iona Opie, illustrated by Rosemary Wells

Sylvia Long’s Mother Goose selected and illustrated by Sylvia Long

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young selected by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Marc Brown

Animal Crackers: A Delectable Collection of Pictures, Poems, and Lullabies for the Very Young collected and illustrated by Jane Dyer

Children’s poetry for preschoolers on up:

The Llama Who Had No Pajama: 100 Favorite Poems by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Betty Fraser

Talking Like the Rain: A Read-to-Me Book of Poems selected by X.J. Kennedy and Dorothy M. Kennedy, illustrated by Jane Dyer

Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart selected by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Michael Emberley

Poetry Speaks to Children (Book & CD) edited by Elise Paschen, illustrated by Judy Love, Wendy Rasmussen, and Paula Zinngrabe Wendland

Poetry Speaks to Children (Book & CD) selected by Helen Ferris, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard

Early to Late Elementary School:

Poetry for Young People series. Illustrated collections of American and British poets.

A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children, selected by Caroline Kennedy. The Kennedy family’s favorite poems. Illustrated by Jon J. Muth.

Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Poetry and Color. Mary O’Neill. Beautifully illustrated by John Wallner.

Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, Nikki Giovanni. Illustrated by Alicia Vergel de Dios, Damian Ward, Kristen Balouch, Jeremy Tugeau, Michele Noiset.

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This post is a reprint of a post by Kimberlee Conway Ireton that first appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $5.99 and get a little inbox peace (goodness knows, every mom needs a bit of that).

2019-02-192022-01-07

Hold Onto Poetry—You’ll Need It

Editor’s Note: Part memoir, part humorous and poignant defense of poetry, The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life with Poems is a book that shows you what it is to live a life with poems at your side. This is chapter one from the book.

The first poem I ever published was due to the efforts of my mother, Merry Nell Drummond. I was 13 at the time and had an assignment to rewrite “The Night Before Christmas.” I wrote about a man helping his neighbor and re-titled it “A Visit of Charity.” I’m not sure how my poem ended up on the front page of our town’s weekly newspaper, the Westlake Picayune, but I’m pretty sure my mother had something to do with it.

I had no idea that more than 30 years later I’d still be writing poetry. I didn’t know I’d have scrapbooks of collected poetry, a new one for each new year. I didn’t know I’d read at least one poem every day. I didn’t know I’d journal about poems that were especially meaningful or especially clever. I certainly didn’t know I’d write about poetry in a book. But if I had written a letter to my 13-year-old self with the benefit of hindsight, it would have said, “Stick with poetry. You’ll need it.”

My Christmas poem was published in 1984, the first time my mother’s cancer came back. She was originally diagnosed with breast cancer in 1981, when she was 35. Three years later the cancer returned in her cervical vertebrae. It was as if her neck suddenly broke. When the radiologist saw her scans, he fell to his knees and said out loud, “Oh, my God.” Her oncologist thought with radiation and a hysterectomy, he could buy her another year or two; the radiologist thought six months was a more accurate prediction. After undergoing the recommended treatment she went on, happy and healthy and apparently cancer-free for the next 23 years.

But she wasn’t cancer-free. She had a lovely pause. During that pause she saw me and my brother graduate from high school and then college. He finished law school. She welcomed five grandbabies into the world. But the cancer reappeared in 2007 in her liver. Tests revealed it was the original breast cancer in a new location.

When cancer moves to the liver, it’s fatal. Patients don’t qualify for a liver transplant because once the cancer finds that pathway, it will find it again. Her treatment plan included alternating courses of hormone therapy and chemotherapy. Later, radiation therapy would be added. During her last three years, I began writing poems in earnest for the first time in a couple of decades.

After the publication of my Christmas poem I continued to write poetry in high school, when it was assigned, but I gave it up in college. For years I focused on marriage and children, not poetry. When I went back to work as a writer at a city magazine, I started reading a poem a day. It was my personal writing ritual—a poem from The Writer’s Almanac and a pot of tea kept the words flowing. But until my mother’s cancer returned, I only wrote a poem when the mood struck, and it didn’t strike often. With the change in her health status, I needed the kind of sustenance I could store. I needed a mouse named Frederick.

Published in 1967, Frederick, by Leo Lionni, was a Caldecott Honor Book featuring a mouse who is also a poet. While the other mice gather food during harvest time, Frederick gathers sun and colors and words, which he shares with his fellow mice in their stone den during the winter. When the mice are cold and depressed, having exhausted their store of nuts, they ask Frederick for his supplies. He gives them a poem about seasons. All these years later, the book still has a fine message: We need words during dark days.

Let’s imagine our poet Frederick wrote more than the one rather sweet rhyming poem featured in the book. What if he wrote a silly one all the mouse children would memorize (and their parents would wish they’d forget)? What if he wrote a couple of really weird ones? Might dear Frederick write a sexy poem to whisper in the evening to his favorite lady mouse? Or a ghost poem about a headless squirrel who comes looking for hidden nuts? Maybe Frederick might write a monster poem, just for fun.

Monsters
furry,
fluffy,
feared.

scaly,
slimy,
seen.

ghostly,
gassy,
gone.

pointed,
purple,
possible.

monsters,
under your bed,
in your closet,
waiting and watching.

—Katherine E. McGhee

Although the book ends with all the mice complimenting Frederick on his poetry, perhaps when spring finally arrives, each of them will gather their own words, along with berries and seeds. Maybe the next time winter comes, there will be more words from more mice to share.

Comparing winter to cancer is an obvious metaphor, but it is useful. In my mother’s story, her cancer ebbed and flowed from 1981 to 2010. Some seasons were longer and more intense than others. Hers ended in spring. And during the late winter of her cancer I was Frederick, writing poems, 72 in all. This book contains some of those, as well as poems by others I discovered along the way, in every season. Some of them came to me after she was gone.

Don’t expect a trove of maudlin poems. I needed variety.

I needed every type of poem Frederick ever considered writing, along with poetry written by contemporary poets like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, previous-generation poets like Sara Teasdale and Shakespeare, and a host of poets I’d never heard of, like Ruth Mowry, until, through serendipity, I found them.

The earth’s economy

Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate

of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill —

the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the

special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,

the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull —

I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon

and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber —
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred

years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry

as much as she could carry

—Ruth Mowry

This poem surprised me like finding an unexpected nut in January. Often “when I thought the day/had nothing left to give” I’d read a poem, and everything would change. I love that roadkill (which I loathe) and kale (which I love) both appear in this poem. I am neither the woman in the kitchen, tearing kale, nor the farmer’s wife, opening “her apron/like a cradle.” I am the one “gingerly receiving” the gifts from the poem as it moves from the hard pungency of death to the joy of unexpected bounty. How much?

As much as I could carry. As much as I could carry.

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This article is a reprint of chapter one of The Joy of Poetry, by Megan Willome.

Read an Interview with Megan at Wacoan Magazine

__________

“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

Buy The Joy of Poetry Now

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Poetry Hearts at the Table

I bought milk in a glass jug—a charming, thick jug with no label except for the cap. The jug brought a comforting heftiness I felt when carrying it back to the fridge, a friendly clink and rattle when I twirled the cap back on.

“We should keep this jug after the milk’s gone,” my daughter Hadley said, scooping up the last of her Rice Chex, then lifting the bowl with both hands to slurp the rest of the milk.

I agreed. We needed to keep this jug.

“But what will we do with it?” my other daughter Harper asked. I told her I wasn’t sure, but something this delightful couldn’t be recycled just yet.

It was December when I rinsed the jug and placed it in the dishwasher; once it was clean and dry I placed it on a bookshelf, waiting for what would happen next.

The beginning of a new year is supposed to be an inspiring time for resolutions, goals, and intentions. But, to be frank, the newness I feel at this juncture is more stark, raw, like a tree branch that’s lost all its leaves. I don’t mind this feeling. I believe rebirth and growth will happen, but I’d like to spend a bit of time in the bareness of a new year.

So one afternoon, I took a walk around our backyard looking for sticks without leaves. I decided to fill the jug with fallen branches—a reminder that it’s okay to sit in the empty newness, enjoy its crispness, its vacancy, its silence.

The jug sat on our kitchen table holding the branches. The table is old and small, one my husband Jesse and I got 18 years ago. We’ve had Thanksgiving dinners on this table and lazy Sunday morning breakfasts. I wrote my first published essay on this table. It’s dented with marks from my pen, our daughters’ first attempts at scratching out letters on paper, accidental scrapes from a knife or fork.

One Friday long ago, Jesse had come home from work with a hankering to try a DIY project. “I’ll weather our table,” he said. He turned it on its side and rolled it to our balcony of the third floor condominium we were living in. All weekend he worked, sanding it and painting it white then sanding it again. It was a beautiful table before, but I love it more now because of what he turned it into. We can see the dents more clearly now, and there is fluorescent pink paint that won’t come off from an art project one of our daughters pursued on a rainy day. I am thankful for what this table shows, what it has held, and what it’s turned into.

Now the milk jug was holding bare branches at the edge of the table next to a window.

Making the Poetry Hearts

1 • Choosing a line to copy

The last week of January had me thinking about making paper hearts and hanging them on the branches. The girls and I drew hearts with pink markers on computer paper. Harper’s art teacher taught her how to Zentangle, a phrase I think is fun just to say, but it’s equally fun to practice.

Harper showed Hadley and me how to fill up a space with a design, and as we worked, we did some talking. We discussed recess and soccer, art, and books, boys and friends, Maryland and Michigan, all while we tangled designs into our hearts. We slipped string through a punched hole, tied a knot, and hung about ten hearts from the bare branches.

The next morning, I pulled a stack of books from our shelves and told the girls I thought it would be fun to write phrases we liked on the back of the hearts. I showed them my Anna Kamienska poetry book, Astonishments, running my finger under lines I liked.

Hadley liked “Gratitude is a scattered/homeless love,” and wrote that on a heart. I think scattered is the sound the dead leaves make when the winter wind blows, freezing the leaves back into the earth, sinking them into something new.

2 • Write It on Your Heart

Harper liked “I believe that radiance/spreads splendidly/on all things,” and wrote the words around the perimeter of her heart.

I said that the word radiance makes me feel warm as I spread cream cheese in thick swaths over our bagels.

“Mommy! Look out the window!” Harper stood, holding her Bear with one arm and pointing with the other. Hadley and I looked, and right away we knew what she was excited about—it was well before 8 a.m., and the sky was a fiery orange blasting away the dark and leading the sky to blue.

3 • Hearts Filled and Arranged

Featured photo by Kelle Sauer. This post is a reprint of a post by Calie Feyen that first appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry.

By Callie Feyen

TRY TWIRL ON NOW

READ A SAMPLE CHAPTER

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Reading Poems is Good “Mom Medicine”—Especially When the Kids Are Marching

The other night, I took Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems and a glass of my favorite drink upstairs to the bathtub while my kids hung out in the family room with their dad. I call this combo my “mom medicine.”

I started off with some of Bishop’s well-known pieces, like “Filling Station,” “The Armadillo,” and “One Art,” inhaling some of the beautiful, witty lines I hadn’t visited since college. Then I flipped back to a section titled, “Poems Written in Youth ”– poems, according to the volume’s Publisher’s Note, that Bishop “would not have reprinted. . .for she was too severe a critic of her own work.”

Of course, that note made me want to read them all the more.

I began to recite some of the lines Bishop wrote when she was a teenager (still exquisite, of course). Then the marching began.

Two weeks ago, I had taken my middle schooler to see Mockingjay, Part 1. At one point in the movie, Katniss, the main character played by Jennifer Lawrence, sings the haunting “The Hanging Tree.” My daughter sat transfixed. And she wasn’t alone. The song quickly moved up the charts upon the movie’s release.

That night, my daughter taught the song to her younger sister, and now, to my annoyance, the two were singing the dirge-like tune quite aggressively, marching throughout the house. Their pounding feet sent waves through my bathwater.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
They strung up a man
They say who murdered three.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where the dead man called out
For his love to flee.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

And so forth, for several more stanzas. It is a disturbingly beautiful song, but now I wanted to keep reading the Bishop poem open before me:

To a Tree

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
Admiring infinites’mal leaves.

Of course. I was getting distracted reading a young girl’s poem about a tree because my two young girls were marching and singing about a tree.

But then the connections began to hit me. One scene is haunting and one comforting; however, both capture the intimacy and mystery of our relationships with trees–how the young are drawn to them irresistibly as places to love, grieve, and imagine. As places to find oneself or lose oneself. Trees are our mirror selves of growth, change, and loss, limb by swaying limb.

I won’t get into any mystical theories about how or why these poetic connections happen, but they seem to happen for me all the time. Most people would probably say they are coincidences. Fine. I can accept that. But even with coincidences, why not have a little fun?

Pick up a book of poems, and start reading them aloud. Don’t read with a goal to “get” the poems. Enjoy the sounds and images and see how they touch on the events, experiences, and feelings in your own life. Write these connections in the margins. They may change tomorrow or the next day. No matter. See how the poems speak to and reinforce your day now. These connections will make the poems more real. And perhaps your life.

Reading poetry. Strange things do happen here. And that is sufficient bliss for me.

This post is a modified reprint of a post by Tania Runyan that first appeared at How to Read a Poem. Photo by Kelle Sauer.

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A Little Mom Music—from D.H. Lawrence

A poem can sing to you, even if you don’t totally “get” it or enjoy every line.

“Piano,” by D.H. Lawrence, is not one of my overall favorite poems. It’s not a bad poem, of course, and I can’t pretend to even approach Lawrence’s levels of literary influence in my lifetime. However, references to “weeping” and “floods of remembrance” don’t grip me in the same way as precise, sensory details that invite me weep and remember. Which is precisely why this poem sticks with me.

In the first stanza, a woman’s voice seeps through the dusk like the soft, remaining glow of light. The speaker, drawn into this beauty, experiences an out-of-body memory and imagines himself as a child many years ago.

The next two lines are what grab me:

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings/And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

What I love about this memory is the full sensory appeal of it, especially the sense of touch. I feel the vibration of the strings under the piano–both the “boom” of the bass notes and the strains of the “tingling strings,” words whose similar sounds cause the music to tremble under my own skin. The tender detail of the child “pressing the small, poised feet” of his mother is just unusual enough to make the scene real to me. Specific is universal. I can imagine a child touching his mother’s feet because of my own children, who affectionately tug my sweater sashes, knee me in the butt, or whack my head with coloring books.

In Everything That Makes You Mom, author Laura Lynn Brown asks readers to recall memories of their mothers in specific situations, such as concocting treats in the kitchen, driving, playing, or tending plants. By imagining and recording these scenes in writing (remember, imagining is image-ing), readers not only reward themselves with rich pictures from the past but can give their mothers the invaluable gift of showing how they noticed things all those years.

My mom is not a musician. She’s creative, yes, but as a master quilter, builder of Victorian dollhouses, and any other task requiring an eye for detailed design. The images of my mother embroidering calico brown wedding rings and laying tiny shingles one by one on gabled roofs will never leave me. But these wonders were wrought in her own private moments as I stood in the background. We did share some important times together, however. And they did not take place alongside a musical instrument, easel, or Great American Novel.

Every Saturday night, during my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom and I watched The Love Boat while sharing a one-pound bag of M&Ms. We weren’t the snuggliest family in the world, but once a week we put our feet up, threw comforters over our legs, and huddled with a bag of candy between us.

Of course The Love Boat was not a masterpiece. Plot lines were predictable and corny. Charo was a frequent guest star. But it was “our thing.” In fact, one year my mom gave me a sterling silver heart necklace to commemorate our sweet ritual, and even when I returned from college on the weekends, years after The Love Boat went off the air, I would find a large bag of M&Ms awaiting me on my bed.

As a mother, I wonder what close moments my children will remember. Hugging my son as I walk into his first-grade classroom as a volunteer? Squeezing through clothing racks with my oldest daughter at the mall? Lying next to my middle daughter as she paints watercolor flowers while on her bed? (Yep. I’ve decided to let her paint in bed.)

A whole poem can capture you, each word catching more and more of your breath until you’re dizzy with wonder. Sometimes just part of a poem does it: a stanza, line, or word. This is what “Piano” has done for me, releasing my own, okay, I’ll say it—flood of memories.

Give every poem a chance to explore you. You’ll never know what will sing.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

—D.H. Lawrence

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This post is a modified reprint of a post by Tania Runyan that first ran at How to Read a Poem.

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3 Tricky Ways to Become a Mom on More Poetry

Poetry makes you a better writer, a better reader, and it fills a space in your life that nothing else can in quite the same way that poetry does.

I know this. But I’ve often struggled with formulating a good poetry reading plan. I’ve watched stacks of poetry collections teeter on my nightstand. I’ve stood frozen in bliss/terror at the hundreds of colorful volumes in independent bookstores. I’ve even struggled with the guilt of not having read “enough” of the classics.

For this school year, however, I’ve developed a plan, and it’s one you can easily adopt for yourself if you wish. These three cool tips for bolstering your poetry reading can provide you with some structure, a sense of accomplishment and, above all, the wonder and beauty of hundreds of new poems in your life.

1) Go all-out fangirl, with one classic poet per season.

Carolyn Forche, a wonderful poet whose works include the haunting collection The Country Between Us and the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, suggests choosing one pre-WWII poet per season and immersing yourself in his or her work.

You can also absorb any other information you’re able to find, such as letters, biographies, and interviews. She suggests keeping these materials at your bedside or favorite chair–wherever you normally do your reading–and picking up the work whenever you can.

This approach has been liberating for me. At the end of the summer, my nightstand and bedroom floor were piled with books. Many people welcome this “problem,” but for me, the image was a daily reminder of the time I lacked, even a source of guilt.

So I took the books down to the basement office, shelved the ones I suspected I wouldn’t get to for awhile and built a “to-read” stack that would remain safely out of my daily line of vision.

Then I ordered Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems.

While studying creative writing as an undergraduate, I read a number of the famous Stevens poems, such as “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emporer of Ice Cream,” and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In my book How to Read a Poem, I feature one of his earlier poems, “The Snow Man,” as an example of expert imagery. But I’ve always known I had so much more to learn from Stevens. Personally, I’ve been interested in this insurance executive/poet because, like me, he lives an “atypical” poet’s life.

These days, I keep just one thick book on my nightstand. I take a few moments each night to enter the mysterious rooms of these Stevens poems, savoring lines like “But on the first-found weed/She scuds the glitters” or “Fill your black hull/With white moonlight.”

Even if I don’t really “get” the poem (one reason, I believe, I avoided Stevens for so long), I allow the light to shine through and the words to hum until I feel the poem in my bones.

2) Remodel your bathroom–with poetry

Forche also recommends staying in tune with contemporary poetry by always keeping a current volume in one of those other popular reading spots, the bathroom. The choices are endless. Where do you begin?

Word of mouth is always my favorite way to pick up ideas for new collections of poetry. When I start to recognize a fresh poet’s name from Facebook or Twitter, I pay attention. Reviews from Tweetspeak Poetry or The Poetry Foundation also abound with interesting titles.

Sometimes, the best approach is to just pick a book you’ve never heard of from the poetry shelf at your library or local bookstore. That’s how I discovered Li-Young Lee and Sharon Olds as a college student–I closed my eyes and picked.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve had Andrew Hudgins’s selected poems, American Rendering, in my upstairs bathroom. In fact, it was the first book I grabbed from that basement “to-read” pile. I’ve always enjoyed his work, including Tree, which I use to teach line breaks in How to Write a Poem. This book includes many of his best poems from six volumes that cover a twenty-five year period. His voice is fresh, dark, and funny, but I often get through just one stanza at a time.

“If you can’t finish a slim volume of poetry per week,” Forche says, “you’re not spending enough time in the bathroom.”

Duly noted.

3) Get poetic, by email

You can subscribe to a poetry delivery service that sends daily poems to your inbox. I suggest Every Day Poems, sponsored by Tweetspeak Poetry. Poets and editors lovingly curate a variety of classic and contemporary poems paired with beautiful artwork, exploring a monthly theme.

Consider the daily poem as important as any of your other emails and take a few minutes to breathe and read (and find a little inbox mom peace!). With 260 weekdays in the year, you will have read the equivalent of several more books of poetry.

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This is a modified reprint of an article by Tania Runyan that first ran on How to Read a Poem.