March Challenge Winner

The challenge for this month was to write a poem somehow inspired by a photograph I took in Mexico. The photo took the winning poet's imagination to the farmer's market in Lawrence,Kansas.

Congratulations to Sondy Sloan.

Farmers’ Market

No matter how tight the month,
I snap my clutch closed
around 40 bucks, squirreled away for Saturdays:
March till November;
sun or spit.

At dawn, I board the empty bus
to the center of my small city,
two totes rolled up under my arm.
I covet the 6 am sunrise as if it
were my own wee weekend hour.

Hopping off at New Hampshire
I mosey over to Massachusetts Street.
Two blocks-o-parking-lots
feature Flora and Fauna:

chicks and chorizo;
carrots and catfish;
begonias and buffalo;
emu and eggs.

Pigeons and peppers;
tomatoes and tulips;
potatoes and pumpkins;
feta and figs.

Stalling at Saturday morning stands—
eyes widen, nose inhales the newest crops;
I feel the fresh of Farmer’s Market…
I taste the week awaken,
on Saturday morn.

~ Sondy Sloan

Copyright to this poem remains with the author.

Did this poem awaken your hunger for some of the foods mentioned, or hungry for the sights provided by a farmer's market?

The next challenge will be posted on April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month. It might be your month to be the winner!

© 2012 Wilda Morris

March Poetry Challenge

Instead of providing poems as inspirations for the March Poetry Challenge, I'm providing a photograph I took some time ago. You are invited to let the photo take you where it will, and write the poem it inspires. Use your creativity!


The March Poetry Challenge

Read these directions carefully! The poetry challenge for March is to write a poem inspired by the photo above. Your poem may be inspired by the entire photo or some part or aspect of the photo. You may write a formal poem or free verse. If formal, please specify the form. The deadline is March 15. Poems submitted after the March 15 deadline will not be considered.

Copyright on poems is retained by their authors.

Due to formatting restrictions on the blog, all poems should be left justified. As much as I would enjoy a fruit-shaped poem, I am unable to publish indentations, shaped poems or even extra spaces between words or phrases.

Poems published in books or on the Internet (including Facebook and other on-line social networks) are not eligible. If your poem has been published in a periodical, you may submit it if you retain copyright, but please include publication data.

How to Submit Your Poem

Send your poem to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for [dot]. Be sure provide your e-mail address. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, 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.


© 2012 Wilda Morris

February Challenge Winners - Off-Beat Love Poems

Barbara Eaton won second place in the February Poetry Challenge. Her "love poem" has the twist that it recognizes that sometimes the loving thing to do is to let someone go. In another twist, Eaton has borrowed the first two lines of William Shakespeare's 30th sonnet, and taken them in another direction. Here is her poem

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
the things I’ve tried to do, that came to naught,
the things retained, that were not meant to last,

I think on thee, dear friend, my dearest love,
my one misdeed, my thirty-year mistake,
my many misperceptions, and, my love,
my trials of your patience. For my sake,

my dearest sweet, forget you knew me when
all innocence, I thought our love was true.
Forget I promised to be friends, and then
forget me, even if I plead with you

one more appeal, for I already know
the verdict is that I should let you go.

~ Barbara Eaton


You can read Shakespeare's 30th sonnet at http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_shakespeare/poems/1698.


Here is the winning poem by Cece Box:

It’s not exactly cufflinks, but to me, you’re more beautiful wearing poetry

If I did not have you to love
How meaningless would be
This Valentine
Receiving-and-the-giving-of.

How flavorless and without flair
Would be this life, these lives,
The hour-by-hour-living-of.

If I did not have you to love
And the by-you-being-loved-in-turn
Sure feeling-of
My poet’s license would have been
By now assuredly revoked
The cause for which
This poem has been revealing of.

~ Cece Box

Box's use of language is playful and musical. The title is clever; it takes a little thought to see how it relates to the poem. The hyphenated phrases are fun. She turns grammar on its ear, ending four lines with with that little preposition, "of," but in this poem it works well.

Having read the poem, you probably won't be surprised to learn that Box is a musician. She plays the piano and sings. She writes music and lyrics, and records them. You can read more about Box at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/cecebox.

Congratulations to both winners! The poets published on this blog retain copyright to their own poems.

The next poetry challenge will be posted on March 1.

© 2012

February 2012 Challenge - A Love Poem

Here in the United States, Valentine’s Day is coming soon, so thoughts turn to love. My Aunt Ersel and Uncle Laird got married on Valentine’s Day, which always seemed very romantic to me. They had a wonderfully romantic marriage, which lasted the rest of their lives.

In most cultures of the world, poems of love are about as old as poetry itself. You can still read love poetry from ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient India, etc., etc. etc. Poetry seems to be a uniquely appropriate way to convey love for another person.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed her love for Robert Browning in a series of sonnets, published later as Sonnets from the Portuguese. The 43rd sonnet is a special favorite of many people.


Sonnet 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Note that this sonnet is not just a discussion of love; it is addressed to the beloved. That is true, also of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, another love poem.


Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

~ William Shakespeare


Love poems do not have to begin, as do these two sonnets, with questions. And of course, love poems do not have to be sonnets, nor do they have to use the elevated language of Browning and Shakespeare. So many love poems have been written over the centuries that it is not easy to come up with a creative approach that has not already been used.

A contemporary poet, Marvin Bell, found a very unique and attention-getting way to begin a long poem to his wife. “To Dorothy” begins

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.

"To Dorothy," from Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2000 by Marvin Bell. You can also find the poem at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20932

When I decided to write a love poem to my husband, I decided to work off of a metaphor which I had not seen used for a relationship. Here is my love poem:

Love Letter
For Ed

Maybe you think I keep you
like I keep my old shoes
because I can't bear
to break in new ones
but that's not the reason.
After all these years
you’re still a good fit,
still polished to a shine
in my eyes.
I want to be laced up with you
as long as I live.

~ Wilda Morris

(First published in Grab-a-Nickel, Fall/Winter 2004-2005, p. 12).

Yep, the picture at the top is from our wedding, August 31, 1963.


The February Poetry Challenge

Read these directions carefully! The poetry challenge for February is to write a love letter in poetic form: a poem addressed to someone you love; a poem which expresses your love in a unique way. You may write a formal poem or free verse. If formal, please specify the form. The deadline is February 15. Poems submitted after the February 15 deadline will not be considered. Since this is 2012, do not use antique language (such as “thee” and “thou”) unless it is absolutely required by the poem itself.

Copyright on poems is retained by their authors.

Due to formatting restrictions on the blog, all poems should be left justified. As much as I would enjoy a heart-shaped poem, I am unable to publish indentations, shaped poems or even extra spaces between words or phrases.

Poems published in books or on the Internet (including Facebook and other on-line social networks) are not eligible. If your poem has been published in a periodical, you may submit it if you retain copyright, but please include publication data.

How to Submit Your Poem:

Send your poem to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for [dot]. Be sure provide your e-mail address. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, 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.


© 2012 Wilda Morris

January 2012 Challenge Winners - Color Poems

There were a number of excellent poems submitted for the January Challenge, a color poem. Since I knew several of the poets, I printed the poems without the names of the authors, and gave them to Judith Tullis, Vice President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, to judge. Tullis especially liked three of the poems, presented here in reverse order.

Winter White

Blowing, blowing-
The snowdrifts shift and whirl
Wafted fiercely upward,
Like so many ghost strokes.

Who wields the brush?
The One Unseen.
He lays not His hues on the canvas flat
But sends them swirling, drifting, flying.
Like sifted flour blown from beneath,
This ever-changing winter scene.

I watch.
The wind stills,
Its whirrs stop.
The Painter lays down His icy brush
And through the hush the snow-white drifts
In innocence recline.

~ Carole Mertz

This poem appeared in The Lutheran Digest, Winter, 2008.

“'Winter White,'” said Tullis, “is very descriptive of a winter storm and how wind makes the snow drift in all directions and then 'in innocence recline.'" The poet sees the hand of God conducting this event, brushing shades of white everywhere.


Come Evening

Aqua and cornflower-blue
streak the sky.

Rose tones flush and falter
as day draws to a close.

Clouds chase the blush,
make room for strokes

of turquoise, lavender, violet
that tuck in the night

and fade to indigo
with stars shivering white

as I lie
in shades of gray.

~ Marcia J. Pradzinski

Tullis wrote: “In 'Come Evening,' I like the way the poet uses color to progress from afternoon through sunset until finally day is 'tucked in' by the darkest color indigo relieved only by "stars shivering white," observed by the poet who rests in 'shades of grey.' That last line is a wonderful contrast to the rest of the poem.”


An Artist's Transformation

The black and white photograph in our family album
has been transformed into pastel shades
of blues and greens – a dab of pink.
Grandma Ella sits in the meadow,
arranging a bouquet of freshly picked flowers
as her young daughters – Vivian, Ruth, Mae –
all focus on their mother’s hands.

The old snapshot came to life a century later
when Mae’s girl, Diane, dipped her artist’s brush
into a palette of springtime colors.
These images emerge now, like old friends,
from a farm field many miles
and many years away.

~ Marjorie Pagel


“My favorite . . ., though," Tullis wrote, “is 'An Artist's Transformation.'
The idea of a mother and her three daughters in an old black and white family photograph being brought to life by the pastels of an artist from a later generation is simple and beautifully told. The springtime meadow is a perfect setting and I can almost smell the wildflowers.”

Pagel, herself, had this to say about her winning poem:

Although there are no personal pronouns used in this poem, my mother Vivian is one of the three girls seated in the grass as their mother (my Grandma Ella) assembles the bouquet. In my memory my grandmother was an austere woman, and I never would have imagined her sitting in a field of flowers, so I love to see this quiet side of her, as well as the relationship with three of her five daughters. She wasn't more than 30 years old when the photo was taken.

The original painting of this photograph has been copied in color (the wonders of modern technology!). It is framed and hangs on the wall overlooking my computer. When I thought about this month's challenge, I decided to attempt a word portrait which would capture some of the emotion I feel when I think about the original scene and the subsequent transformation by an artistic cousin.

Congratulations to the three winners, and thanks to Judith Tullis for judging the poems this month.

Copyright to the poems posted here remain with their authors.

Thank you to everyone who entered the January Challenge. Watch for the February Challenge, which will be posted soon.


© 2012 Wilda Morris

January 2012 Poetry Challenge

Colors can inspire very interesting poems. In “That Vase of Lilacs,” in The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (NY: Grove Press, 2010), Kay Ryan tantalizes us with the immortality of purple. In Hailstones and Halibut Bones (Doubleday, 1990), her popular book of color poems for children, Mary O’Neill says purple is “sort of a great/Grandmother to pink.”

Purple was featured in a very different way in one of my poems, which was published in the Rockford Review (Winter 2005-2006).

Propositions

Plum-purple truth drips blood
across pages of history,
across prairies and rivers and diaries.
Its fist slams into the sides
of mountains, bridges and breasts.
Its mouth devours all it desires:
dirt, deserts, and dresses.
Its boots battle, abuse,
kick against courage,
against compassion.
Where is the turquoise truth
which binds with soft scarves
not rough ropes, not scars,
the pastel pastiche of tender truth
that listens and loves?

~ Wilda Morris


Marge Piercy frequently makes use of color in her work. Perhaps that is why she entitled one of her books Colors Passing Through Us (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). The title poem of the collection has a rich palette, with its various shades of purple, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and cobalt. It’s not just any yellow (for example), though, but “Yellow as a goat's wise and wicked eyes,” and the yellows of daffodils, dandelions, egg yolks, and more.

Another excellent and interesting poem with a broad palette recently won the free verse competition in the 18th Annual Illinois State Poetry Society Contest. In “Deluxe Box,” poet Kathy Cotton likens herself not to just one crayon but to the whole box of 125 colors.

Deluxe Box

Beneath this pale Caucasian skin—the skin
of my mother’s mother and father’s father,
beneath this unremarkable brown hair
and behind these ordinary brown eyes that are the eyes
of all my family, even the dog

beneath, behind, beyond this commonness, I am

the Deluxe Box of Crayons: one hundred twenty
unblended colors scribbling exotic names—
Cerulean, Burnt Sienna, Mahogany, Maize, a crowd
of immigrant pigments unwilling to melt in my melting pot.

This Deluxe Box holds Fuchsia to attract hummingbirds.
Quaker gray for silent sitting. Outrageous Orange for
stumbling over politics. In the company of Blue, I can
match that patch of sky, her silk shirt, his denim jeans.
See me here, Red as habanero; there—White as arctic ice.

Some believe I should defect from every hue but one,
become a single color’s citizen, wear its official seal.
But, no! I am the Deluxe Box, dressing my heart in tie-dye,
rainbows, confetti; waving on the hill of each moment
its hand-made, one-of-a-kind flag. I am the Deluxe Box

whose skin is red and yellow, black and white.
I am male and female, flower and beast, bright light
and midnight. Come close, look inside. Watch me pull
from my chameleon stash a deluxe handful of myself

perfectly matched to you.

~ Kathy Cotton


You might also enjoy:
* "Theme in Yellow" by Carl Sandburg at http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/carlsandburg/4696
* "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/gold.htm

The January, 2012, Poetry Challenge is to write a poem featuring a color – or colors. You may refer to paints or crayons, but that is not necessary. Your poem can be free verse or formal. If formal, please specify the form. The deadline is January 15. Poems submitted after the January 15 deadline will not be considered.

Copyright on poems is retained by their authors.

Due to formatting restrictions on the blog, all poems should be left justified. Unfortunately I am unable to publish indentations, shaped poems or even extra spaces between words or phrases.

Poems published in books or on the Internet (including Facebook and other on-line social networks) are not eligible. If your poem has been published in a periodical, you may submit it if you retain copyright, but please include publication data.

How to Submit Your Poem:

Send your poem to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for [dot]. Be sure provide your e-mail address. When you submit your poem, add a note indicating where you took poetic license with the facts of your life. The poem should be in first person, as if it actually happened to the speaker in the poem. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner, 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.


© 2012 Wilda Morris

December Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Judith Tullis for winning the December poetry challenge with her poem, "Lego Man." The "Lego man" in this photo, built by my grandson, would not meet the conditions for the Lego man the narrator has in mind in this quirky poem.

There were other excellent poems submitted this month, but none as clever as this one.


Lego Man

I wish I had a Lego man
a hold-tight-will-not-let-go man
a red, white, black or yellow man
a tier above his fellow man
who’d pull himself apart for me
and disconnect his heart for me.
He’d be much better than the last
who never would do what I asked
just smothered me in apathy.

I wish I had a Lego man
an Eggo-in-the-morning man.
We’d sip our coffee hand-in-hand
while brick by brick our life we planned.
He’d never cause a scream from me
nor scheme to take my dream from me.
He would love me to distraction
though he might be short on action
without his Lego battery.

~ Judith Tullis

Copyright to this poem remains with the writer.


Watch for a new challenge on January 1.


© 2011 Wilda Morris