P is for Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Magic

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words.
In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel.
In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes.
In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart.

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.
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I'm not sure how old I was when I found Edgar Allan Poe. I'm pretty sure I was still in elementary school. I can remember coming home from school and telling my mom about "The Raven."

I was a bit of a macabre little thing, with a fascination with ghosts, witchcraft, demons, and other spooky things. That poem had me at Hello, or in this case, at "Once upon a midnight dreary."

If you are going to grow up a bookworm, it helps if someone near and dear to you shares your addiction and my mom was and is a total bookworm, too.

When I told her about "The Raven," she told me about his short stories and took me to the library to borrow a collection. I stayed up late into the night scaring myself silly (and occasionally pulling out my dictionary to find out what some of his fabulous words meant).

Sadly, this led to a long period of me writing terrible poems with overwrought vocabulary and lots of exclamation points. I'm sure my parents must have bitten the insides of their cheeks raw trying not to laugh at some of my efforts.

Happily, this led to my lifetime love affair with language, with words like languid, quaint, sepulchre, lattice, and tintinnabulation. That man had a vocabulary and could weave it like magic, casting a spell over a reader that lasts a lifetime.

O is for Mary Oliver: Soul Salve

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Are there any poetry readers who don't love Mary Oliver? Heck, even people who don't read poetry read Mary Oliver. There's this acceptance in her work, this reassurance.

Her words comfort me like Judy Blume's did when I was a kid.

She feels like that rock-steady friend that you know you can't shock and who won't think less of you no matter what you're thinking or feeling.

How many times have I turned to Wild Geese in times of trouble?

So many of her poems are calm contemplations in the face of nature, small epiphanies that bring peace and understanding. 

Dang. I think I want to be Mary Oliver when I grow up. 

N is for Pablo Neruda: Love in Small Things

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Pablo Neruda came across my radar in a Spanish textbook. Oda al tomate (Ode to the Tomato) was selected probably because the verbs are mostly in present tense, making it more possible for a beginning Spanish student to be able to parse the poem, but I didn't care about that. I was drawn in by the absurd imagery and the humor.



I began to seek out Neruda's other odes. Ode to my Socks brought such joy to my heart, with its celebration of the commonest of comforts in life: a good pair of socks given in love. Ode to Broken Things full of domestic remembrance and familial love.

Neruda did not only write odes, though. He wrote lyrically of sadness and loss. What I always feel in all his lines is the love.

Some favorites:

Here I Love You. 
Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines.
His sonnet: I Do Not Love You.

He's good in translation and a reason to learn to read Spanish!

M is for Michelle Boisseau:

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Michelle Boisseau was my teacher once. She and George Eklund were the two poets on the teaching staff at Morehead State University during my tenure there. 

Michelle lost to lung cancer last year, so can now only teach me through the words she left behind now. 

 Counting was the first of her poems I loved. "After a while, remembering the men you loved/is like counting stars." I think it might have been the line about the lover whose skin still smelled of milk that got me, back then. 

She was always so good at that striking and powerful first line. 

Another one, Eurydice, is my favorite retelling of that particular myth. "It isn't you he wants, but the getting you out." This poem might be why I've become such a lover of back and side door stories, that reinterpret stories I already know and love. 

Michelle was the person who turned me on to Louise Glück, who remains one of my favorite poets. 

The Fury that Breaks with that lovely structure, where the object one line becomes the subject of the next. 

This poem sent me off to explore the work of César Vallejo, for whom the poem bears a dedication. So, even there on the other side of the veil, Michelle is still telling me who to read, knowing just who will speak to me. And she's right, too. I'll miss her. 

L is for Li-Young Lee: Lyrical Loneliness

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Li-Young Lee earned his place in my pantheon of poets with The City in Which I Love You, which is both the title of a poem and of one of his collections.

I found this collection during my searching years: my early twenties. A time when I didn't yet know what I wanted, but was starting to understand what I did not want out of life. A time when I sought strange horizons to explore, the better to find myself contrasted in unfamiliar surroundings.

I was romantically lonely, even while with friends, in the same way Lee's poetry was.

Lee's poems pull from both the personal and the political to give a vision of a wanderer seeking home. I'm drawn in by the yearning of the poems, because there's an echo of it in my own heart, still, even now that I am older and much more settled. His work touches the melancholy in me, without dragging me down into depression or burning me in anger. 

Immigrant Blues: 

Persimmons: 

Re-reading his poems now, it is the pathos of these narrative moments that strikes me. The directness, the seemingly emotionless uncolored and stark portrayal of painful moments, made that much more powerful by understatement. Amazing. 

K is for Maxine Kumin: Seeking Connnection

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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I first found Maxine Kumin in her prose, in particular a collection of essays and stories called Women, Animals, and Vegetables which centers around her experience in transplanting her family from an urban to a rural setting. I felt a kinship with the woman I found in these pieces, a woman seeking a life of meaning, a woman drawn to nature, with an underlying whimsy in her thoughtfulness. Like me, she seeks connection.

A poem from that collection remains one of my favorites by Kumin. The Word. It describes an encounter with a doe while on a horse ride and captures some of that joy and longing that such an encounter can elicit, a feeling of awe intermixed with more complex emotions like jealousy and loss. A feeling of being lucky and wanting to be that lucky again.

My favorite lines are in the middle:

Part of why I read poetry is for that feeling of recognition, when a poet articulates something I have also felt but could not explain, even to myself, nearly so well.

J is for John Donne: Spiritual Matters

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.

• In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. 
• In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. 
• In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. 
• In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. 

My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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If you ever took a British Literature survey course, as many high school students of the United States have, then you've probably read some John Donne. A deeply serious poet, concerned with matters of the spirit and of morality, he has the distinction of having written one of poetry's oft-quoted lines: Death be not Proud. It comes from one of his Holy Sonnets:

It's a poem I've taken comfort in, when mortality is knocking louder than usual on my peace of mind. I also deeply admire Meditation 17, which includes the immortal lines "No man is an island" and "ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Meditation 17 is maybe not a traditional poem in structure, but in feel and sound, it certainly is poetic. 

But, what I love about Donne is the chance he gives me to contemplate G-d and spirituality, separated from politics and particular religions. He approaches these topics as an individual person, with passion and anger and seeking of peace. And in that, I find more connection than in the words of someone who no longer grapples with the big picture.