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| Dorinda Rebecca Strange Webber |
Everyone who loves poetry has a story of how that love came about. My grandmother and mother nurtured that love in me, as did some of my schoolteachers.
I remember my grandmother, Dorinda Rebecca Strange Webber (Zam, to me), reciting poems she learned in school in Lincoln, Kansas. One of her favorites was “Laska” by Frank Desprez. Some lines of the poem have stuck in my head, though I never tried to memorize it. Better to hear Zam’s voice when I think about “Laska.”
I want free life and I want fresh
air
And I sigh for the canter after the
cattle.
. . . .
The green beneath and the blue above
And dash and danger, and life and
love—
And Laska!
It is such a dramatic narrative—and Zam’s reading could have won her first prize in a spoken-word contest. She knew how to express the range of emotions in this “cowboy poem.” What I didn’t know then is that Desprez was British. He came to the US in 1879 and lived three years as a cowboy before returning home to England, where he write “Laska.” His poem is part of the oral folklore of the Western United States.
You can find all the words of “Laska” at https://allpoetry.com/poem/8605343-Laska-by-Frank-Desprez. If you search the Internet, you can find at least two YouTube videos where you can hear it read.
Another poem I remember Zam reciting is “The Blue and the Gray” by Francis Miles Finch, which you can read at https://allpoetry.com/the-blue-and-the-gray. With this poem, too, there are lines that have stuck with me:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;
Under the one, the Blue,
Under the other, the Gray.
This poem had more
significance for me after I learned that Zam’s father, my great-grandfather
John Sylvester Strange, served in the Union Army. The poem was written in 1867
after a New York newspaper reported that a group of women in Columbus, Mississippi,
had strewn flowers on the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers buried
in their community. Their action, and the poem, were both reaching toward reconciliation. They realized that each of the fallen soldiers was someone's son or husband or father, and that the loss for both sides was terrible.
My grandmother had
a book entitled, The Best Loved Poems of the American People. I spent
many hours with it. Zam also wrote a few poems. But it was her voice and enthusiasm, her obvious love of poetry, that touched my heart deeply so that I, too, learned to love poetry.
The April Challenge:
The challenge for this month is not necessarily a poem. You are invited to write in prose or poetry about the person(s) or poem(s) that caused you to fall in love with poetry. If you submit a poem, provide some prose introduction or conclusion to your submission. For instance, let us know if the poem is just poetic license or not. Instead of waiting until after a mid-month deadline and having a judge select winners, we will celebrate National Poetry Month by publishing some of the submissions at various times during the month.
1-Title your piece.
2-Single-space.
3-Whether you put your piece in the body of your email or in an attachment or both, please put your submission in this order (on in one place):
Your poem (no more than 30 lines) or brief essay (no more than 400 words)
Your name
Publication data if your piece was previously published
A brief third-person bio
Your email address – it saves me a lot of work if you put your email address at the end of your submission.
If you put your poem or essay in an attachment, structure it this way, with all the information there in the attachment.
4-Please keep your poem or essay on the left margin and left-justified (standard 1” margin). Do not put any part of your submission on a colored background. No colored type. Do not use a fancy font and do not use a header or footer.
5-You may submit a published piece if you retain copyright, but please include publication data. This applies to poems published in books, journals, newspapers, or on the Internet. Poems already used on this blog are not eligible.
6-The deadline is midnight, Central Time Zone, April 28, but the earlier in the month you submit, the more likely your piece is to get published. There is no charge to enter, so there are no monetary rewards.
7-Please don’t stray too from “family-friendly” language (some children and teens read this blog).
8- No simultaneous submissions, please. You should know by the end of the month whether or not your poem will be published.
9-The writer retains copyright on each piece. If a previously piece is submitted, please give credit to the first publisher. If a new piece is published elsewhere later, please give credit to this blog. I do not register copyright with the US copyright office, but by US law, the copyright belongs to the writer unless the writer assigns it to someone else.
10-Decision of the judge or judges is final.
10-Send one piece only.
How to Submit Your Piece:
1-Send your poiece to wildamorris4[at]gmail[dot]com (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for “dot”).
2-Put “April Poetry Challenge Submission” FOLLOWED BY YOUR NAME in the subject line of your email.
3-Submission gives permission for the piece to be posted on the blog on the blog, so be sure that you put your name exactly as you would like it to appear if you do win at the end of the poem.
4-Poems or essays may be pasted into an email or sent as an attachment or both (Doc, Docx, rich text or plain text; no pdf files, please, if you have any other options). Please do not indent a poem or center it on the page. Put everything in the order listed above, either in the body of the email or in an attachment or both.
© Wilda Morris
