June Challenge Results

When I posted the challenge for June, I neglected to include the rhyme scheme for the Dorn Septet. I apologize for that omission. I added the rhyme scheme to the challenge later, but all of the submissions I received were written by poets who read the challenge before that addition was made. I considered selecting a winning unrhymed Dorn Septet, but wasn’t sufficiently satisfied with any of the entries.

I’m leaving open the challenge to submit a rhymed Dorn Septet with a minimum of three stanzas. See the June Challenge for specifics of how the Dorn Septet is constructed. This challenge will be open at least until September 15. That will give you a chance to draft and perfect your poem. This challenge is in addition to the monthly challenges.

Wilda Morris

© 2010 Wilda Morris

June Poetry Challenge

Glenna Holloway, Senior Poet Laureate of Illinois, and founding President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, used a sophisticated modern form, the Dorn Septet, for her award-winning poem, “Losing the Farm.”

Dorn Septet: Each stanza has seven lines, all iambic (each foot has two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed). However, the first and last line of the stanza are iambic trimeter (three feet); the middle (fourth) line is iambic hexameter (six feet); and the rest (2,3,5,and 6) are in iambic pentameter (five feet). Note also the rhyme scheme: Lines 1, 4, and 7 rhyme and lines 3 and 5 rhyme. There are no rhymes for lines 2 and 6. This metric and rhyme pattern was devised by Dr. Alfred Dorn, a New York poet.


Losing the Farm

This shaggy hump of land
Comes down to settle at the shallow pond
Like our old dog, paws in his water dish.
The man I married was my father’s only hand.
His first job was to stock the pond with fish.
Young Phil was smart. Why he would work for us
Was hard to understand.

He built a barn without
Much help that March my father hurt his hip.
Spring’s greening nap resembled sheared chenille,
Our fields embroidered by the tractor’s seeding route
Like Mama’s bedspread pattern, wheel-in-wheel.
She died that June, then Phil was hired full time.
Sometimes he cleaned my trout.

I asked him how he knew
So much, and why he didn’t take a job
With more to offer. Phil said he loved farming.
Before the corn grew ears he said he loved me too.
At first, my father found the thought alarming,
But soon he recognized his stroke of luck—
What blessings could accrue.

And so they did. The years
Were mostly kind, the rains and Phil were faithful.
He turned the scrub to terraces of grapes
Where domes of purpling autumn almost vanquished tears.
Now neighbors’ spreads are gone, the city rapes
Its way toward us, my parents’ hilltop graves,
And all our gravest fears.

Besides the pond, our lane,
The graveled last ditch lifeline left to drive
The truck to market, movies, church and vet—
Was just condemned—last ploy to make us sell. The pain
Of isolation’s grip, our drought-grown debt
And kneeling crops conspire to push us out
Of our homemade domain.

With arteries now closed,
The heartbeat stops in this uneven Eden.
No mall, no high-tech electronics plant
Compares with tasseled corn, or beaded arbors posed
Against a moiré quilt in day’s last slant.
Bulldozers quickly level secret places
Where the dying dog once dozed.

Glenna Holloway

From www.poetryfish.com/archives/holloway/index.shtml

You can read more of Glenna Holloway’s poems in, Never Far From Water and Other Love Stories (PublishAmerica, 2009), available from www.publishamerica.net.


In addition to the form, Holloway’s poem is rich in narrative which tugs at the heart. The details she uses bring the narrator and her family alive.

Holloway makes excellent use of similes and metaphors, as when she likens the way the “shaggy hump of land” comes down to the pond to the way a dog sits with paws in a water dish. The pattern of the fields is like that of her mother’s quilt. The tractor’s work of dropping seeds is pictured as embroidering. These figures of speech subtly draw attention to the ways in which the outdoor farm work and the domestic work in the house are tied together in the traditional farm family. At the end, when the lane into and out of the farm is condemned, it becomes a clogged artery, another powerful metaphor.

Holloway pleases the ear of the reader with effective sound combinations: “Shaggy” and “shallow” in the first stanza; the assonance of “stock” and “pond” a few lines later; “sheared chenille” in the second stanza; “drought-grown debt” in the fourth; and so on.

Strong verbs, well-placed, also contribute to the impact of the poem. In addition to “embroidered,” which was mentioned above, notice “conspire” in the fifth stanza. The strongest verb, however, is in the phrase, “. . . the city rapes / Its way toward us. . . .”

Every other stanza ends in some way with death. Stanza two ends with trout being cleaned. Here the dead fish provide sustenance, so the image is positive. The fourth stanza, however, ends powerfully with “hilltop graves” and “gravest fears.” The poem ends with a sadness to compound that of losing the farm (and having previously lost mother and father)—the dog is dying.

Challenge

The challenge for June is to write your own Dorn Septet. Your poem can be about any topic you choose, happy or sad, serious or funny, so long as it follows the rules of the Dorn Septet (see above). Enrich it with alliteration, assonance, images, metaphors and/or similes, and other poetic techniques. No poems already published on-line or in books, please.

Send your poem to wildamorris [at] ameritech[dot] net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and . for [dot], and don’t leave any spaces). Be sure to include your e-mail address so I can respond. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog, if it is a winner.


© 2010 Wilda Morris

Middle School Winners

Students at Sam Rotolo Middle School, Batavia, Illinois, took the April Challenge to write a food poem. They were given a special deadline, which fit their school schedule. It was hard to pick only three winners out of the wonderful pile of poems submitted. Here are the three winning poems.


If Potatoes Ruled the Earth
By Owen C.

You can mash ‘em,
You can boil ‘em,
You can stick ‘em in a stew;
But what on earth would happen if
Potatoes gobbled you?

Potatoes munch on people chips
While being very lazy.
Some don’t eat meat with humans,
For reasons, some say hazy.
People chopped up thinly,
And always salted well,
No one would think it crazy,
Like any form of hell.

No more time to write now,
I wish you’d let me be;
I hear a tater coming,
The cook is here for me!


Plate of Squiggles
By Sarah K.

It takes water and heat to conceive
Depositing the brittle stick into the mix
Sizzling sounds like a round of applause
Floppy-like laces spit and your face
Until the oar of the gods
Makes a whirlpool

The pale ladies nuzzle themselves in a round pool of blood
Turing and mixing till sun-burnt red
A very light coat of snow falls
And rests over their bodies like a blanket

The swimmers go for their last dive
To the empty pit of life’s end
The stomach


Grape Casserole
By Alec C.

Grapes
I open the fridge and find a bag of grapes in the door.
They are a mix
Red, sweet grapes
Tart, green grapes
Perfect, black grapes.

In the bag I find
Large grapes, with seeds
Old, moldy grapes
Some small, some big
Some crisp, some soft
A grape casserole.

I eat them all together:
Split them with my teeth
Devour them whole.
Squish them with my feet.
They complain by letting out a little whine.


In this selection of poems we have examples of rhymed and unrhymed poems, use of imagination, appeal to a variety of senses (taste, sight, sound), metaphor, and pun.

If you are a teacher and would like your students to participate in an upcoming poetry challenge, contact Wilda Morris at wildamorris [at] ameritech [dot} net. Remove the spaces and brackets in the e-mail address and change the "at" to @ and the word dot to the period.


Poets own full rights to their own poems.

© 2010 Wilda Morris

May Challenge Winners

There are two winners of the May Poetry Challenge. In both, the concept of the map is used both literally and metaphorically.

The Map Home

Around the globe, you search
for two dots, connected
by a flight line. Distance
becomes a long string
to knot nostalgia;
fingers nudge a blue
sphere – home beckons
like an aching moon.

Your son asks
to map the family tree.
You surprise him, draw
concentric circles. Your pen drifts,
traces solar systems,
that revolve around the same point –
That’s our home!

Laughing at your crazy map,
your son prunes the growing tree.
He does not see
rings rippling across
your night river,
and leaves fall to roots.

Anna Yin

Anna Yin blogs at http://anna.88just.com.

Yin’s blog says she was born in China and immigrated to Canada. This might help explain the poignant declaration in her poem that “Distance / becomes a long string /to knot nostalgia.” The mapping of the family tree by use of concentric circles with home in the middle mirrors the mapping of growth from infancy through adulthood. First the infant relates only to parents and others in the home; then the sphere of the child widens to include teachers and schoolmates. As the individual grows, the spheres in which he or she lives widen further. Yet, for most people, home remains central. The last stanza of the poem has several possible interpretations. It could represent the way the world ultimately narrows for one who has aged.


A dory trip down the San Juan River from New Mexico into Utah, where she hiked to the top of Comb Ridge, inspired Karla Linn Merrifield to write her map poem, “Anticline Tao: One Night at Comb Ridge.” The climb was “about 400 feet, almost straight up, and then we were on top of the world overlooking the southern Utah redrock landscape and the green snaking river," Merrifield told me when I e-mailed to ask if she had actually climbed Comb Ridge. “The geology of the place moved me as did the spectacular view,” she added.

The poem is dedicated to R. J. Johnson, one of the dory boatmen, who is also a geologist. Johnson educated the poet concerning the origin and development of the ridge. The poem's use of geological vocabulary and detail reflect Johnson's influence. Merrifield also provides information regarding invasive species of plants which need to be pulled or dug out if the landscape is to maintain its natural character.


Anticline Tao: One Night at Comb Ridge

Once over the top,
off the flat map,
down the collapsed jumble
of rocks of varied ages and depths,
I go the deeper 3-D way.
Like a grain of quartz sand,
a dustling of garnet,
a fleck of schist,
I tumble backwards
into the diatreme venting tube.
I spiral along that ancient pipe,
ignoring my rumpled Utah topo-atlas,
my damp San Juan River chart,
because it is possible to journey
freely to the center of the Earth.

Transporting myself I in turn
transport what evil I am able.
This time I take with me only aliens:
tamarisk, Russian olive, camelbush.
It’s hard work, hard work,
for one flecked particle
of polished hope to do.
But over and over I remind
my fearful phenomenal self
I do this in…this is…
the compassless geography of hope.
I travel deeper into the molten core.


for R.J. Johnson
with a line from Wallace Stegner


Karla Linn Merrifield

Merrifield begins the poem with the narrator “off the flat map.” Although her poem includes literal maps (the topographical map of Utah and the “chart” of the river, there is no map to direct the metaphoric tumble into the volcanic core.

The rich phrase "geography of hope" is from Wallace Stegner's The Sound of Mountain Water.


Merrifield is co-editor (with Roger M. Weir) of The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America (available at http://www.foothillspublishing.com/id115.htm).

She blogs as “The Vagabond Poet,” at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.


Poets retain copyright on their own poets.


© 2010 Wilda Morris

May 2010 Poetry Challenge

A Map of Texas

Dallas is allotted no more ink
than any other city, but my childhood
was drawn inside that spot, moving
vans drove its thin ink streets, and death
scrawled its signature in narrow alleys
that never made it onto maps. I can
buy a map of only Dallas, all its streets,
and still could not convey how big it is—
how even from a dot across the country,
it’s so much harder to erase than this
small circle. It’s the place I widened,
crawling out of my window—direction,
destination, left in my room
next to schoolbooks. I set out to stretch
that dot to eruption. I never could
reach the edges. But that didn’t keep me
in my room, even when my mother’s
sleeping breath floated down the hall
and up the sidewalk behind me, to whatever
car I thought might drive me to the farthest
corners of that ink spot that I cover, now,
with one fingertip.

Deborah Rossel

Texas Poetry Calendar 2008, edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen (Austin, Texas: Dos Gatos Press, 2007). Used by permission of the author and publisher.
You can purchase the 2010 Texas Poetry Calendar through the Dos Gatos Press Website at http://www.dosgatospress.org/).



What irony that the poet’s little finger can cover a whole city on a map! Symbolically, that finger can cover the narrator’s whole childhood and youth—including moves (within the same city), her home and school. Even the far edges of her youthful existence—driven by car, can be covered.

Part of the mystery of the poem, as I read it, is that we don’t know whether the narrator wants to cover (hide) her childhood and youth and to forget it. Perhaps she is hinting at that is so when she says “I set out to stretch / that dot to eruption.” When the narrator crawled out the window, was she trying to get away from something at home, or just seeking for something? Was she a rebel? An adventurer? Or is crawling out the window, wanting to “reach the edges” primarily a metaphor for the ways in which we “widen” our lives? In what ways did the narrator fail to reach the edges? If I substitute Iowa City for Dallas, I can read aspects of my own story into all the words of this poem as I ponder possible meanings.

Rossel uses a fairly literal description of a map, then moves to the level of metaphor. I suspect that most, if not all, of us, at some time in our childhood or youth tested the limits, moving toward the edges of what was known and what was permitted.


Another approach to maps comes from Brandel France de Bravo. France de Bravo has lived in several countries and is familiar with several languages. Perhaps that is one reason for her keen interest in the origin and history of words. In Provenance, France de Bravo provides the reader with a poem for each letter of the English alphabet and, in the back of the book, an abridged etymology of each of the 26 words chosen as titles for these poems.

Map

Mommy stone, daddy stone, and baby stone.
This is how my daughter ordered the world at two,
the family her unit of measurement.
Even the penny nails procreated, but it was she
who swaddled with maternal care
her plastic porpoise in wet washcloths.
By six she was compiling long lists of possible names
for her possessions or what she someday hoped to have:
play horses, pussy willow buds—each in its own
velvet-lined ring box—and a real dog.
Now that she is nine she makes maps:
her newspaper route, the four miles to school,
a diagram with “treasure buried here.”
In bed, the sheet over her bent knees a topography
of cotton, she sees all the mountains, river beds,
and canyons she could ever need in her own body.
She wipes her mouth and the napkin is a watercolor
of fractured countries and continents adrift in a sea of white.

Her father, on one of his trips, bought her an old Soviet compass
with a wristband but she seems to know where she’s going.
My husband and I are still trying to get our bearings,
figure out which place to call home.
I lived in Egypt once, and for a while it was the right place to be.
In Arabic, Cairo is called “Mother of the World,”
which always makes me think of my nursery school teacher.
In a room with pink-curtained light, she cut apples,
knit, and washed placemats while we played at her feet,
tugged on her apron—cloth of the world.
She was our mother for the morning, or at least a representation.
At noon she would tuck her needles into her apron pocket
and take us by the hand for Ring around the Rosies.
After ashes, ashes we all fell down and went home.

It isn’t long before we realize the world is bigger than a room,
a person, and understand that things will go un-named.
We stop going home at the end of the day and venture
farther and farther from it, carrying a map,
which some of us turn in our hands, and others in our heads.
After years of use, it’s difficult to fold up this spreading
map, blurred at the creases like memories, impossible
to return it to its neat beginnings: when it was obedient,
small enough to fit into a glove compartment.

-- Brandel France de Bravo

Provenance(Washington, D.C.: Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2008), pp. 40-41.
Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices, edited by Brandel France de Bravo, has just been published by Shearsman Books. France de Bravo, who is a health educator as well as a poet, is also co-author with Jessica Teich of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World.


France de Bravo begins by giving showing us that a map is just one of many ways of ordering the world, and that one can find figurative maps in many places, even in the stains on a napkin. The sheet over a person’s body can be a topographical map. The narrator’s daughter, the poet tells us, seems to know where she is going, whereas the narrator and her husband still have not gotten their bearings.

The poem takes an interesting turn when the narrator says she lived in Cairo. which in Arabic is called “Mother of the World.” This leap provides the poet an opportunity to skillfully lead us to a section reflecting the etymology of the word “map,” already hinted at in the reference to the stained napkin.
The abbreviated etymology at the end of the book tells us the word map “comes from the Latin word, mappa, meaning cloth, sheet or towel. Apron and napkin are closely related to this word.” The poet moves from the “Mother of the World,” to recollections of a mother stand-in, her nursery school teacher. France de Bravo writes, “we played at her feet, / tugged on her apron—cloth of the world.” Here the apron of the mother/teacher becomes a map which orders the preschooler’s world.

This poem, rich with images, especially of childhood, also holds mysteries. I’m still pondering, for instance, the last line of stanza two: “After ashes, ashes we all fell down and went home. “I know the song and the game, in which children sing, “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” But I’m puzzled by the way the line ends with that matter-of-fact way: “we all fell down and went home.” Perhaps it is only a reference to another way of ordering the world, in this case the world of time, or perhaps another meaning will display itself as I continue to live with this poem.

As in Rossel’s poem, the map becomes a metaphor, a complex metaphor for the mapping of our lives. And we all know how difficult it can be to fold up that tattered map and put it back into the glove compartment, “blurred at the creases,” as it is, “like memories.”



Other map poems to inspire you:

Kim-An Lieberman,Breaking the Map. The title poem is an especially powerful expression of what happens when the map changes because a country is split in two.

Shahid Ali Agha, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems

Lucille Clifton, “What the Mirror Said” in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (American Poets Continuum)

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map” in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (also available on-line)

Alan Kaplan, “The New York Times Weather Map,” The Nation,(July 3, 1967), p. 22.


May Challenge – A Map Poem

The May, 2010, challenge is to write a poem about or involving a map. It may be a narrative poem in which a map plays an important role, or the map may be used metaphorically. But there should be a literal map clearly behind the metaphor. You may use any form you choose, free verse or formal. If you write a formal poem, include a note designating the form. No poems already published on-line or in books, please.

Send your poem to wildamorris [at] ameritech[dot] net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and . for [dot], and don’t leave any spaces). Be sure to include your e-mail address so I can respond. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog, if it is a winner.


© 2010 Wilda Morris

Winning Poem for April 2010

The consulting judge for April, Iowa poet and writer Lorene Hoover, selected “Will Write for Canapés” as the winning poem. Hoover liked the narrative approach and said she was sure “there are many people like Thurston.” Maybe you know some of them!

Will Write For Canapés

Thurston grew thin and brittle, no longer
able to hover, elbow his rivals away from
the hors d’oeuvres. Instead he lingered
hopefully in an overstuffed chair for dainty
bits—barely enough to sustain a beetle—
on a smallish plate fetched for him by young
lady poets with svelte figures and large
appetites for encouragement, whose fathers
had urged them to become secretaries.

We called him The Cleanup Man since in
his prime he never missed a writers' reception
or awards banquet where he deftly reduced
the food tray to a wasteland, vanished like a
giant chipmunk with bulging cheeks, pockets.

In his lonely room, propped up by four pillows
on his Murphy Bed, he worked on five poems
side by side, skipped meals, munched on stale
crackers, moldy cheese leftover from his last
triumph, rummaged trade invitations to the
next small press award or writers' benefit
whose notices he pasted on the wall with
rancid peanut butter.

Thurston's work had its interest and its audience,
well-crafted, if predictable, poems about winning
motorized wheelchair races at zero-to-sixty miles
per hour down the corridors of the Indy 500
Nursing Home, fights to the death with tentacled
respirators, but nothing of the poetry to be found
in a lightly sauced Lobster Newburg or a hearty
Eggs Benedict because his stomach would howl --
it was like trying to chew recipes.

His poems got him into the worst
and the best receptions in the city:
from the upscale congregation of Poetry,
to the Jiffy Peanut Butter with Gallo Jug
Wine buffet for donators to the latest
desktop collector’s issue—Friends of
the Poet, Volume One, the One and Only.

It was not that he lacked discrimination,
it was just that he had to eat. Social Security
barely covered his rent, and Thurston
was serious when he joked that he was
the only one of us who actually made
a living off his poetry.

And so he accepted The Final Invitation
with a shriveled grin in an overstuffed
wing chair, teeth clenched on a shrimp
scampi, and when the proofreader who
moonlighted as a mortician, couldn't pry
the cheese ball loose from his grip,
we gave up and buried Thurston with it,

but for a year afterwards, no one had any
appetite for canapés, and the piled up
leftovers had to be shoveled into bins
for the homeless.

-- Tom Roby

Tom Roby, who is the President of the Poets Club of Chicago, is the author ofShape Shifterand other books of poetry.

Among the phrases which boosted this poem to first place in the April challenge are “elbow his rivals” and "appetites for encouragement” in the first stanza, which help draw the reader in. The idea of attending poetry events primarily for the refreshments and thus to "made / a living off his poetry" is a clever commentary on the fact that poets are often "paid" only in copies. Hoover says that the conclusion is “yummy, satisfying.”


Students at a middle school in Batavia, Illinois, took the challenge. They were given a different deadline, one which fit their class schedule. Thus, a Junior Winner for the April Challenge will be announced soon.


NOTE: Winning poems posted on this blog are sole property of the poets who submitted them.



© 2010 Wilda Morris

April 2010 Poetry Challenge

“Animal Crackers” by Christopher Morley was one of my favorite poems when I was a child. The idea of having nothing but animal crackers and cocoa for supper appealed to me, because I was quite fond of both. I also liked the rhythm and the rhymes of the poem.

Animal Crackers

Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink,
That is the finest of suppers, I think;
When I'm grown up and can have what I please
I think I shall always insist upon these.

What do you choose when you're offered a treat?
When Mother says, "What would you like best to eat?"
Is it waffles and syrup, or cinnamon toast?
It's cocoa and animals that I love most!

The kitchen's the cosiest place that I know:
The kettle is singing, the stove is aglow,
And there in the twilight, how jolly to see
The cocoa and animals waiting for me.

Daddy and Mother dine later in state,
With Mary to cook for them, Susan to wait;
But they don't have nearly as much fun as I
Who eat in the kitchen with Nurse standing by;
And Daddy once said, he would like to be me
Having cocoa and animals once more for tea!

by Christopher Morley


At a later age, I became enamored William Carlos Williams' poem, “This Is Just To Say,” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939. The poem takes the form of a note, in which the narrator apologizes (sort of!) for having eaten the plums from the refrigerator. When I read this little imagist free-verse poem, I can almost taste the plums and feel their cold skin and flesh in my mouth.

A few years ago I was introduced to another poem focused on food – “The Showdown,” by Marilyn Taylor, who is the current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. When I asked for permission to use "The Showdown" on this blog, Taylor told me this poem resulted from a workshop exercise. Each participant was asked to bring some kind of food to the session. Members of the group swapped food items, and Taylor was stuck with a zucchini. When I see a listing in Poet's Market which says not to submit workshop poems, I think about this poem and ponder what delights may be missed! If all workshop poems were as good as this one, editors would be begging poets to send them! Taylor’s poem instantly made my list of favorites.

The Showdown

Okay, Zucchini,
with your sleek Sicilian good looks –
I know all about you and the rest
of the Zucca family, how you start out
small, in the corner of some
respectable old giardino (nobody
eve notices) and then you spread,
don’t you, till you’ve moved in on
all the little guys, the beans
and the carrots and cukes,
and pretty soon you’re in charge
of the whole damn fattoria, right?
Well, I’ve got news for you, pal,
you’re past your prime. You’re ripe
to spend the rest of your natural life
in the cooler. Think I’m kidding?
Listen, either play along or its
Ratatouille! Ratatouille!
-- a year in the jug for you, Zuke.
And your little tomato, too.

-- Marilyn L. Taylor

Used by permission of the author. From Exit Only(Milwaukee, WS: Prelude Publishing, 2003), p. 16. The poem has been so popular that it also appears in Taylor’s Shadows Like These: Poems,and Greatest Hits, 1986 - 2000.

NOTE: The third line from the bottom of the poem should be indented.


Another food poem which appealed to me from the first time I read it is Robin Chapman’s “For Dinner We Had Potatoes.” This is both a food poem and a list poem. It reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking. Potatoes could easily be grown in the garden, or, if purchased from the grocery, were not very expensive. Having grown up on the Kansas prairie, married a rural, small-church pastor who was often paid in kind, and lived through both the depression and World War II rationing, Zam (as I called her) knew a lot about economical cooking! And it was Zam, not my mother (who worked full-time when I was a child) who taught me to cook.

For Dinner We Had Potatoes

Boiled, baked, fried, mashed,
Peppered, with onions, hashed,
Parsleyed, whipped, buttered, creamed,
Cubed, scalloped, cheesed,
Twice-baked, pancaked,
New in their skin, vinaigretted,
Moat to hold gravy---my mother
Made them in endless variety.

And I learned to peel,
Mastering the rhythm,
Long strokes of skin, not slicing
The thumb knuckle, a knife
For sunscald spots,
Dimples that could be navels
Called eyes---must be
Looking in---I dug them out,
No omphalosceptic, knowing
We wanted two each,
More for the pot.

-- Robin Chapman

Used by permission of the author and publisher. From Abundance (Winner of the 2007 Cider Press Review Book Award; Halifax PA: Cider Press, 2009), p. 7. Abundance can be purchased through www.ciderpressreview.com/bookstore/.

Note: According to www.medterms.com, “Omphalo- is a combining form that indicates a relationship to the umbilicus (the navel).”

In addition to the memories this poem elicits, I appreciate the word combinations Chapman uses, such as: “Boiled, baked,” “Peppered. . . Parsleyed,” “Cubed, scalloped, cheesed,” and best of all, “Twice-baked, pancaked.” Her play on words and ideas with eyes, dimples and navels is clever. And due to some overlap in sounds, “omphalosceptic” makes me think of the vocabulary of optometry, which brings me back to those eyes, which in the case of the potato, are, as Chapman says, “Looking in.”

Chapman is a scientist (maybe you guessed that from her use of the word "omphalosceptic") and painter as well as poet. She was given an Outstanding Achievement Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her gifts for science and poetry are linked in Images of a Complex World: The Art And Poetry of Chaos.


White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006by Donald Hall, includes a number of interesting food-related poems, including, "O Cheese," "Eating the Pig," "Wolf Knife," and "Beans and Franks."

Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetrycontains a wonderful variety of food poems, including "Coca-Cola and Coco Frio" by Martin Espada; "Mama" by Claire Kageyama, "Preparations for Seder" by Michael S. Glaser; "Rib Sandwich" by William J. Harris and "Chinese Hot Pot," by Wing Tek Lunn.

If you enjoy food poems, you will find more poems to chew on in the following books:

Food Fight: Poets Join the Fight Against Hunger With Poems to Favorite Foods

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Poems About Food and Drink (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

O Taste and See: Food Poems (Harmony (Bottom Dog Press)


The April Challenge

The challenge for April is to write a food poem. Your poem can be free verse, or you can use a form (sonnet, villanelle, etc.), but include a note saying what form you are using. Poems of 40 or fewer lines have a better chance of being selected, but longer submissions will be read and considered.

Send your poem to wildamorris [at] ameritech[dot] net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and . for [dot], and don’t leave any spaces). Or you can access my Facebook page and send the poem in a message. Be sure to give me your e-mail address so I can respond. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog, if it is a winner.

© 2010 Wilda Morris