In this month’s column, I challenge you to update your knowledge of poets (see first link), and also take the time to celebrate the magic of what happens when just a few words, put together in just the right way, combine to create powerful human emotions.

Here is your March 2022 Leisure Learning List:

Button Poetry

This is a fantastic site to learn about cutting-edge poets. This is a small press whose focus is on inclusion, and their poets represent almost every walk of life. 

What do I mean by that? Well, just think along the lines of “Darfurian child bride who learned of this at her own wedding.” That’s the type of cosmopolitan diversity this press offers. 

The link above is for Button’s list of poets. Their bios alone are interesting, if not radiant at times. I suggest you look at some of the poets to see their specific areas of interest, then watch them reading their work on Button Poetry’s YouTube channel.

How Do We Read? It’s Magic (Almost)

This is my kid-friendly pick of the month. Obviously, if you are here, then you value reading. But how exactly does your physiology work to make that happen? Why are letters and numbers shaped the way that they are? Are curved letters the same height as flat-topped letters in the same font? 

This video is geared more for kids, but it does present some of the most recent research about how our brains process words, therefore I recommend it for all ages. It’s a good way to update what you learned in that Psych class years ago.

Inklette’s Literary Playlist

First, let me just say that this non-profit online poetry ‘zine has one of the best taglines ever—For the Ink Hearted. That alone is worth appreciating. 

Poetry is often musical, and this list takes that concept to a literal level. It starts with Tennyson’s Ballad of Shallot being retold from the maiden’s point of view and takes off from there. Even if harpsichord rock isn’t your thing, comparing the original ballad with Emilie Autumn’s version is a worthwhile endeavor.

The Last Printing Press…

In the United States, where books are produced entirely by hand, this short YouTube video shows how a team of craftsmen (and 1 featured craftswoman) work together to produce a book that is also a work of heart. From setting the individual letters to sealing those beautiful, gilded covers that are swoon-worthy, this video will wow anyone who has become accustomed to push button printing.

Visual Poetry

These are 10 examples of words that have been turned into visual art. You will find gorgeously rendered black-out poems, letters arranged into jewels and sentence diagramming turned on its linear head. 

If you are hungry for more, these should satisfy your appetite.

Tell us in the comments: Which of these March 2022 Leisure Learning picks are you most excited to try?

Melissa Haas is the author and illustrator of Catula: The Misadventures of Dracula’s Cat and The Night Before Christmas (NOW WITH CATS), among other books. Follow Catula’s whereabouts on Instagram @CatulaTheCat or download a free coloring page at www.catulathebook.com.

The post March 2022 Leisure Learning appeared first on DIY MFA.

To celebrate the almost end of this particular chapter of my life, I thought I’d share some of the books on the craft of poetry that influenced me the most over the past three years in grad school. In compiling this list, I wanted to focus on books that might be useful to brand new poets, as well as anyone looking to brush up on their knowledge. 

It was hard to narrow my list down to the five poetry books included below, but I think they offer a great starting place for beginning and experienced poets alike.  

1. The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux 

This was the first book on the craft of poetry I bought as a graduate student and one that I recommend to almost everyone who tells me they’re interested in writing poetry. 

When I first started grad school, I quickly realized that I didn’t have a lot of background knowledge on the nuts and bolts of crafting a poem. Sure, I could write poems, but ask me to explain how or why I made certain choices, and I’d be at a loss for words. 

Enter The Poet’s Companion. Divided into four parts, Addonizzio and Laux’s book includes chapters on subjects for poems, the craft of poetry, the writing life (including dealing with writer’s block and self-doubt), and a section of writing exercises. 

I found the language of The Poet’s Companion to be warm and inviting, which makes this an excellent book for poets who are just starting out. The writing exercises are also very helpful and can be used in the classroom or workshops.  

2. A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry by Robert Hass

Over four hundred pages long, Hass’s Little Book on Form is anything but little. Expansive and covering almost every form imaginable, this book has been an excellent reference to me as I read and attempt to deconstruct and analyze the books on my reading list. 

How is a sonnet constructed? How might we analyze a prose poem? What does “scanning” a poem mean? And what the heck is a variable stanza? Hass covers all these subjects and more. 

What I really appreciate about this book is that it doesn’t read like a glossary, but more like a conversation. The chapters consist of short, informal “notes” on each form discussed, and I found Hass’s analyses to be especially helpful as I work to develop and hone my own understanding of poetic form and structure.  

3. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)Tics by CAConrad

Overwhelmed and looking for reading recommendations in my first semester of grad school, I visited one of my professors and asked for “something different.” CAConrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is one of the books my professor handed me.

I would argue that this book isn’t necessarily a book on the craft of poetry (not like The Poet’s Companion, anyway), however, it is a great book of exercises, and it is deliciously unconventional. 

To give you a little taste of the wonderfulness of this book, here’s an excerpt from one of the writing exercises: 

“What is the best Love you’ve ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you’re busy, you’re a poet with a penny in your mouth. . . . Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.” 

If you’re interested in experimental poetry or are looking for less conventional writing exercises, then CAConrad—and this book—are must-reads. 

4. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry

In his foreword to The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry writes: “I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry.” 

So begins a humorous, and very practical, guide to reading and writing poetry. This is another book I like to recommend to beginning poets, as Fry’s tone is incredibly encouraging and easy to understand. Like The Poet’s Companion, there are plenty of writing exercises included throughout the book, however, Fry focuses more on craft elements and form rather than subject matter. 

5. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle

I cheated a little by adding this book to the list since it’s technically not a craft book, but Mary Ruefle’s lectures on poetry, literature, and writing are absolutely captivating, and I really enjoyed the inclusion of personal anecdotes, as well as the instructive quality of the lectures. 

I actually stumbled upon this book when I was researching witchcraft and poetry, and though Madness, Rack, and Honey is definitely not a book about witchcraft, I think it captures the strangeness and magic of poetry in a way that feels a whole lot like witchcraft. 

For instance, check out this beautiful gem from Ruefle’s “Poetry and the Moon”: “I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon.”

Magical, right? 

Conclusion

Back to you, poets!

Tell us in the comments: Are there any books on the craft of poetry I haven’t mentioned here that you’ve found particularly helpful?

Manuela Williams lives and writes in Nevada. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and one paranormal fiction novella. When she’s not writing, Manuela loves reading romance novels, drinking *all* the coffee, and playing video games.

The post The Poet’s Toolbox: Must-Read Books on the Craft of Poetry appeared first on DIY MFA.

But first, I am excited to announce the launch of DIY MFA Radio Insiders program, a monthly newsletter, especially for our podcast listeners.

Each month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for January is Debut Authors, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders. 

In this episode Ashanti Anderson and I discuss:

• How being an overthinker influences her poetry and the messages she wants to share.
• Why setting clear boundaries helps her guide the conversation around her writing.
• When she turns to prose poetry and why she thinks it defies hard and fast craft rules.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ashanti Anderson 

Ashanti Anderson (she/her) is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Her debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter.

Black Under

The poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: “I am black and black underneath.” These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson’s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems’ linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma’s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson’s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.

Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies—and incongruences—of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

For the poet, these historically resonant questions of Black power and pain can be explored through the subjects’ consciousness of a constant gaze. “Black culture means being the creative and artistic zeitgeist of America, and often-times, popular culture around the world,” Anderson says. “We are trend-setters and our dialect, apparel, mannerisms, behaviors, and attitudes are routinely adopted by others. In my sole opinion, a big part of the Black experience is ‘putting on,’ i.e. carrying yourself in a way that makes you look and feel immortal… being constantly aware of your impending death encourages you to find freedom in expression.”

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 391

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 391: The Medium and the Message: How Poetry Communicates a Deeper Truth – Interview with Ashanti Anderson appeared first on DIY MFA.

A full-length poetry collection is typically between 50 and 98 pages. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. If you have fewer than 50 pages, you’ll be looking at a chapbook manuscript, which is typically between 25 and 30 pages. If you’re thinking about submitting your manuscript to presses or contests, make sure you keep these page ranges in mind, as some presses specifically request chapbooks (as opposed to full-length manuscripts) and vice-versa. 

It can be challenging to compile and organize a collection of poetry. Depending on your material, you won’t always have a clear beginning, middle, and end like a novel might. 

However, despite not being novels or short stories, I think some of the best poetry collections still have some kind of developmental arc. 

Maybe, like the original arrangement of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, they trace the breakup of a marriage before ending with the images of spring, hope, and renewal. Or maybe, like Kim Addonizio’s Jimmy and Rita, the collection serves as a novel in verse, tracking the development and relationship between the two title characters. 

The arrangement of poems in a collection shouldn’t be random. Instead, think of the individual poems, through their arrangement, as working together to create larger meaning. When readers finish the last poem in your collection, what message do you want them to take away from the collection as a whole (as opposed to the messages of individual poems)? 

Here are some ways to think about arranging your poems to maximize the larger ideas and messages as you organize a collection. 

Start with Your Strongest Poems

Generally, when readers pick up your collection, they begin by reading the first few poems to determine whether to keep reading or not (very similar to readers of novels and short stories!). So it’s always a good idea to start your collection off with your strongest work. Think of the first few poems as your “hook.” If you don’t hook your readers early enough, they’ll put your book down. 

It might also be helpful to think about your first few poems as teaching your reader how the rest of your collection will unfold. 

What major themes will you be exploring? What problems will your collection address?

Organize a Collection by Narrative Arc or Emotional Development

If you find the majority of your poems revolve around a similar theme, event, or problem, consider arranging your poems in a way that mirrors a more traditional narrative arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. 

For example, let’s say you’ve written a series of poems about the death of a close family member. You could potentially arrange the collection in three different parts—poems that focus on the time before the family member’s death (perhaps developing the speaker’s relationship with the family member), poems that deal directly with the death, and, finally, poems that deal with the aftermath of death. This is a very rough outline, but it does show a narrative arc. 

Another option could be to focus on emotional development. You might focus on how a speaker (or multiple speakers) develop over the course of a collection. To use the Sylvia Plath example from above, if you’re writing about the breakdown of a relationship, you could start from a place of endings and brokenness and move towards a sense of wholeness and hope. 

Organize a Collection by Theme or Subject Matter

If your poems are more varied, consider arranging them by theme or subject matter. That said, in order to ensure your collection feels cohesive, make sure your themes are connected in some way. 

For example, if the main theme of your collection is loss, you might consider sections containing poems that deal with loss in different ways. If you write nature poetry, you could consider arranging the poems based on setting, or even season. 

If you find that your poems are a little too varied—to the point where the transitions between poems or sections feels jarring—you might need to cut some poems that don’t necessarily fit with the major themes of the collection. 

And that’s okay! 

This happened to me a lot when I was preparing a first draft of my own poetry manuscript. Although I absolutely loved some of the poems individually, I ended up having to cut them because they didn’t really fit with the narrative arc I had planned for the collection. 

Again, this is totally normal, and it doesn’t mean that you have to scrap the poem or poems entirely. Perhaps they can be a part of a different manuscript!  

Experiment!

The tips and tricks I’ve given above are pretty traditional and they definitely shouldn’t be viewed as hard and fast rules. Don’t be afraid to try out more experimental arrangements for your collection. The poems in Like by A.E. Stallings are arranged in alphabetical order, for example, and Tommy Pico’s IRL doesn’t contain individual poems or sections at all, rather, the collection is composed of one long poem! 

Have fun with it and, remember, you can always keep rearranging your collection until you’re 100% happy with it. 

Manuela Williams lives and writes in Nevada. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks and one paranormal fiction novella. When she’s not writing, Manuela loves reading romance novels, drinking *all* the coffee, and playing video games.

The post The Poet’s Toolbox: How to Organize a Collection appeared first on DIY MFA.

Ana Maria is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights. Her previous books include: Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, which was a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) which is a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home. 

Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, released in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press this fall. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News.

After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

In this episode Ana Maria and I discuss:

• How to write, assemble, and edit collections for two genres at the same time.
• The importance of non-writing work and why it is so valuable to the process.
• What writers of prose can learn from reading and writing poetry.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several previous nonfiction books on nature, work, civil, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights, including Reclaimers, stories of elder women reclaiming sacred land and water, a finalist for the 2016 Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2010 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, and two previous essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home.  Her first novel for young people, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, about a 14 year-old snowboarder and her activist father, appeared in 2017, and her first chapbook of poetry, Mile Marker Six, will appear from Finishing Line Press in Fall 2021. 

Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School, and regularly in High Country News. Her current NF work-in-progress about Chinese miners along the Columbia River in the late 1800s has received support from Washington Trust Grants for Artists Program. After working fifteen years on backcountry trail crews for the National Park Service, she turned to teaching and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and Western Colorado University.

Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Mile Marker Six

From the back cover:

From Rancho Cucamonga to the Lost Coast, from the scablands to Tupshin Peak, Ana Maria Spagna’s debut poetry collection quakes with the full magnitude and magnificence of a life spent up close and personal with nature. Coyote pups “nose into rattlesnake weeds” and mud bees nest in knotholes under a “sky awash in waves of stars.” Taut lines etch an account of contemporary life in the Anthropocene, chronicling humanity’s effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth’s effect on us. “How rarely, now, we drop to our knees,” Spagna laments, “to protect what’s ours,” though she reminds us that “None of it is ours!” Tender in their recollections and observations, these poems teem with the poignancy, precision, and clarity of cut diamonds or, more accurately, splitting “a fir needle lengthwise to spare it harm.” Pulsing. Dazzling. Fierce.

–Jill McCabe Johnson, author of Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea

“Having read some of the poems that have become Ana Maria Spagna’s At Mile Marker Six since their beginnings, I can advise the reader to follow—follow her anywhere, into the deep, over the edge, back to brass tacks, and forward into the somewhere that is a dream of the each and the every.  Most crucially—and with a sacredness she invents through her clear-eyed, open-hearted looking—follow Spagna’s language to its precise and lyrical root.  Such is her capaciousness that the poet invites us to introduce what is known to what is felt, and that is where love roosts, not just for us, but for every made, built, or born thing.”

–Carol Ann Davis, author of The Nail in the Tree, Atlas Hour, and Psalm

Ana Maria Spagna’s words invite the reader to embrace the intrigue of the wider world. Her poems are not pretty for pretty’s sake, nor do they distract the reader from things often considered ugly. Love, wonder, and the wild are sacred but also sometimes dirty and dead. Is it dirt or is it soil? To some, it is dirt if it is smeared on your face, but soil if we are planting in it. Spagna’s poems impress upon us this: it is always dirt and it is always soil. She takes the world and pokes at it with a trailside stick – forcing us to pay attention, to gaze, to engage with each object of her noticing.

–Mara Panich, author of Blood is Not the Water

You can pre-order a copy here.

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 364: How Writing Is Like Walking a Tightrope – Interview with Ana Maria Spagna appeared first on DIY MFA.

I bought ‘American Sunrise’ on Audible first, by accident, but I am so glad I did. Usually, I prefer hard copies for poetry books so I can underline at my leisure, and to stop at a particular passage to think about what and how they’ve written something.

American Sunrise is narrated by Joy herself, and while I encourage people to buy the hard copy too, hearing her speak her own poems in her own voice is a delicious indulgence. I cannot overlay my white perspective on top of her melodious, sometimes haunting intonations. Her voice turns her words into birds that fly over me too high to reach.

The Trail of Tears

I had never heard of The Trail of Tears. Maybe it is because I’m Canadian by birth, or because I’m white, or because my privileged education did not have the courage to embrace all of our history both cruel and horrifying.

The first few poems immediately pull me into the mud and bafflement of being thrown out of my own home, on my own land. Of having my children taken from me and forced to learn about a strange god in a foreign language, their homemade clothes suddenly not good enough. The trail of tears and everything that went along with it is a grief-rupture that is carried along ancestral DNA from parent to child. It is difficult to sit through. And it is not theirs alone to endure. If 2020 has taught me nothing else it is that no community suffers in isolation. What affects one will spread to the other. We are all connected. Hurt never stays contained within the one holding it.

Standing Witness

The imagery gives me chills –  the line from “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War”, ‘The torn pocket of your daughters home made dress…’ makes me want to cry and I am not a crier. I am a mother though, and this line makes me want to fight, and cry, then fight-cry.

In the past I would have stopped reading. I would tell myself this is hard, and you’ve had enough hard in your own life, and there is nothing to be done about it now. But this is 2021 and I am still alive and so I don’t turn away, feeling like it is my duty. It is my personal responsibility to both our ancestors to stand witness to her pain. And there is pain. There is grief. There is also this strange and wild voice threaded throughout her poetry, startling me like birds taking flight abruptly. 

Startling because it feels familiar. And even though I do not have even a ghost of a similar experience to relate to, even though this is the first time I am hearing these stories from her grandmothers, I find an echo of my own pain in hers, a glimmer of shared human suffering. Her poetry calls for us to stand still for a moment and listen to what was lost.

Humor connects us quickly but it is a light touch. A lover’s graze. This deep mourning, this sharing of her grief through poetry is a mother’s birth travails. There is hurt you don’t think you’re going to survive, and there are tears. In the end there is a love that shatters you more completely than suffering ever could. 

Shovels of Grief

She doesn’t shy away from the heavy topics, the thoughts we try not to think. In her poem “Singing Everything”, she reminds us that ‘For death, those are the heaviest songs. They have to be pried from the earth by shovels of grief.’

When you think you’re just reading a Joy Harjo poem and then the words slant sideways and winnow down deep inside your being to a sacred, secret place you are surprised to find is there. 

And it blooms, awakens, shoots out like a fire-cracker lilly back into the poem that birthed it and you are connected as surely as to a telephone line. You are never the same. This is the wonder of poetry in general and the skill of Harjo in particular.

As usual, Rumi said it better than I ever could:

Cry Easily

Keep your intelligence white-hot

And your grief glistening,

So your life will stay fresh.

Cry easily like a little child.

And so, I think I will cry. And then maybe dance a little, just like in her poem “Seven Generations.” I’ll dance and cry, and hold space for the relief of grief. 

Angela Yeh hails from Atlantic Canada but lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning with her online writing community at DIYMFA.com. She also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies. You can check her out on Insta – @thatpluckygirl or at her website, www.thepluckycanadian.com

The post A Dance of Joy and Tears appeared first on DIY MFA.

I fell in love for the first time in July – there were fireworks (literal and figurative) and I wanted nothing more in my whole thirteen years of living than to kiss that boy. Growing up in a small Atlantic Canadian province I hold snapshots of summer in my memory – the soundtrack  ‘Patio Lanterns’ by Kim Mitchell. I remember the glee, the novelty of endless summer days with no schedule and plunging into the cold Atlantic Ocean. If summer is remembered in snapshots and slips of songs, winter is bone deep in the spine of my childhood. 

A maritime winter is long and cold and treacherous. You layer up starting in October and you don’t unpeel yourself until around May. Snow is all around but so is salt. Not the small, clean looking table salt, it’s road or rock salt. The big, brown rock salt is laid down on the plowed roads, the shoveled sidewalks, eating away at the undercarriage of your car, stuck to your boots. It makes the snow turn brown and muddy-looking long before the ground has thawed. Winter can sometimes be a drag.

The Magic Of Winter

Of course, winter is also magical – and the world really does look new with a fresh layer of snow. There is something enchanting about crunching through the snow at night, the world muted by layers of insulating snow.

It sparkles in the moonlight; did you know that? You’re exhaling the warm air and it puffs around you like smoke and the whole world is white and still and iridescent. You feel your own smallness, your own fragile body immersed in this frigid air so cold if you ran your lungs would burn with it.

I’m living in Texas now and because of COVID I haven’t been able to travel home this Christmas. The year 2020 has been chock full of fun hasn’t it?

All that to say…I have been feeling nostalgic this holiday season and have combed the internet to find the best ‘snow’ themed poems in the universe, for you. Well, for me too, but now I’m sharing with you!

Getting Cozy

But let’s do this right shall we? Go make a mug of hot chocolate with those small marshmallows that puff up soft and melty, or your favorite peppermint latte and a warm blanket. I’ll wait! I’m breaking off teeth shattering pieces of the gingerbread house we decorated. That’s okay to eat right?

Allright. Ready? Cozy? Okay read away my friends.

The Best ‘Snow-Themed’ Poems In The Universe

Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The Snow by Emily Dickinson

Snow-Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Snow Shower by William Cullen Bryant

Winter-Time by Robert Louis Stevenson

Spellbound by Emily Brontë

The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe

Angela Yeh hails from Atlantic Canada but lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning with her online writing community at DIYMFA.com. She also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies. You can check her out on Insta – @thatpluckygirl or at her website, www.thepluckycanadian.com

The post Seven Cozy Poems of Winter appeared first on DIY MFA.

Maybe it’s my lingering ADHD, maybe it’s my fractured, multitasking brain, but the reason I love poetry so much is, frankly, for its brevity. 

Like a well-crafted espresso, poetry takes emotion and compresses it, crushes it down into this cold, hard nugget of truth that can pierce our apathy and lets the light of emotion flood through. Then it turns that truth sideways, and I just love how it does all that in a fraction of the time it would take to read an article about the same issue. Poetry is efficient that way. And I love efficiency.

Great poetry isn’t just a short-cut to learning about the human condition; great poetry is transcendent. It makes you feel something, a jolt, a shock to the system, the espresso of the literary world. I’m juggling two toddlers (haven’t dropped one yet), two day jobs I love, plus this beast called a ‘yen to write’ so basically, if it isn’t an espresso, mama ain’t got time for that.

Here are the two espressos I’m reading this fall – fair warning – it is by women, for women – so of course behooves every one of any gender and in between to read.

The Mother of Written Poetry

Inanna – Lady of Largest Heart by Enheduanna translation by Betty De Shong Meador. If you read my first column, you will have seen where I first stumbled upon Enheduanna. I’ve had time to dig into her ancient poetry, and I am enthralled.

But who is this poet? I haven’t been this excited over history since, alright, honestly, never. Why? Because, pause for drum beats here, Enheduanna is the mother of written poetry. The literal mother of all written poetry. And I bet two KN95 masks and a lifetime subscription to Amazon Prime you’ve never even heard of her.

To give us some perspective, she wrote over 4500 lines, seventeen hundred years before Sappho. Eleven hundred years before Homer.

Girls, she was writing slam-dunk poetry before most of the world could even read it. Her subject matter is femininity and the sacred, creative powers of the feminine. She was the daughter of a king and the Sumerian High Priestess of Inanna’s temple in ancient Mesopotamia. Her job was to unite the different cultures under one to make life easier for her dad. What a good daughter!

Here are a few lines she wrote about her love and devotion to the goddess Inanna.

Lady of blazing dominion

Clad in dread

Riding on fire-red power

Inanna 

Holding a pure lance

Terror folds her robes

Flood-storm-hurricane adorned

She bolts out in battle

Plants a standing shield on the ground

Great Lady Inanna

Battle planner

Foe smasher

The raw imagery, the aggression of her descriptions seem almost shocking to us now. As a woman, I have never been encouraged to ‘bolt into battle.’ No, sir, not once. I have been encouraged to smile more, talk less. (Thank you Hamilton).

She goes on to say that ‘fury overturns her heart,’ another touch-button issue in our own culture, especially right now. ‘Angry woman,’ nasty woman,’ these are all things we’ve heard dismissively from the highest office in the country. Talk about timely. Enheduanna penned (inked?) these words over four thousand years ago. But, progress, right? 

My Literary Crush

Because I am a word nerd to the core and a bibliophile, I am often reading more than one book at once, while drinking espresso. Lucky for you! The second poetry book I am reading was just released by G.P Putnam’s Sons (an imprint of Penguin Random House) authored by Nikita Gill.

“The Girl and the Goddess – Stories, and Poems of Divine Wisdom” reminds us that there are women whose courageous stories we have probably never heard of in the western world. And she does it using the Snapchat crispness of poetry. I have a few authors I don’t even read the blurb anymore. I just buy the book because they’ve proven anything they write is magic – and Nikita Gill is one of those authors.

In ‘Mama,’ Nikita touches on similar themes of mama being a ‘goddess without her powers…’, finally ending her lessons to her daughter that ‘Girl is not a dirty word. Girl is power.’ She talks about the stories her mother would read to her of Jhansi ki Rani, of the Goddess Durga, of Draupadi’s origins.

There is a beautiful poem on page 37, ‘Tonight’s Tale from Nani,’ that the Goddess Aranyani guided her grandfather’s hands as he planted saplings year after year. 

Nikita, too, brings me from my narrow spot on the earth to strange new places. If you can’t travel, you can read this book and explore lands and cultures that will charm and discomfit you. Oh, and she’s going to make you cry. The poem on page 40 about ‘How to leave Paradise’ will have you hugging your nana and blubbering about never flaking out on a visit to her again.

If you’re like me and you’ve only got time for the espresso of the literary world – poetry – these two books will send you well on your way to (brief) ecstasy. 

My Question to You

But tell me what you’re reading – has it enraptured you? Enraged you? Made you cry, made you make a positive life change, sent you stumbling down to your mama’s house asking why? Tell me! You must tell me now.

Angela is a freelance writer and coach who wants to motivate and encourage beginner writers to put their thoughts to paper (or computer!) When we all listen to the voice that tells us to create, we are better humans no matter how many people those words reach.

She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning and also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community.

She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies near Houston, Texas. You can follow her blog at www.thepluckycanadian.com. Or on Instagram: @thatpluckygirl

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Poetry Is Play

Poetry, for the most part, is playful, intuitive. If not ‘fun’ exactly, it’s fun-adjacent. It’s hard to imagine a single poem changing the world, but I’ve often thought the world changes every day, all the time, in big and small ways. Haven’t we all read a poem or a line that struck a chord deep within us? One that we remembered long after we needed to remember it for a test?

Who among us doesn’t remember this verse of William Blake’s “The Tyger”  from our school days?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 
In the forests of the night: 
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Poetry Is a Tool

Poetry is this beautiful, terrible tool where we carve out our inner experience and jumble it around in a pleasing way in the hopes someone, somewhere will connect with it.  Maybe even be bolstered by it. If not healed, then have the understanding they’re not alone in how they’re feeling.

Sometimes it feels hopeless. Sometimes it’s our last hope that allows us to scribble out the dark complexity between our mind and our heart. Or praise the way the light falls on our lover’s cheekbone.

Sometimes it’s a tool for social justice. A way to bridge the gap between disparate life experiences. It can create empathy and understanding. It can hit us where we didn’t know we were hurting. It can help us make sense of loss, of death, or boredom. 

In “Speechless,” Audre Lorde talks about how death “folds the corners of my mouth.” When we read that, we assume she means a frown. But what a lovely way to say it! Sharp imagery, concise and expertly placed words carry us over the threshold of “other” until we can feel what the poet might be feeling no matter how different we are.

Nikita Gill said it best in “A Universal Truth,” when she talks about us having “storms and stories” inside our “starmade bodies.” 

And maybe that is why we write poems. To learn how to hold space for our own flawed beings, and how to hold compassion for others. That feels world-changing to me.

Angela McAffee-Yeh lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. Now she has a husband, two kids, two dogs and two feral cats that swing by for treats. She teaches gardening and yoga to pre-kindergarten children by day, and spends her nights fantasizing about being the next JK Rowling. Sometimes she even manages a sentence or two. She is thrilled to be a part of the team at DIYMFA and to be contributing as a community helper. There isn’t anything more important than community – especially for writers. You can follow her blog at thepluckycanadian.com.

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I can’t help but wonder what we will remember from this year. A lot is going on right now, and it feels mostly bad. But I’ve lived long enough to know when life gets complicated, that’s when we need to stop and pay attention. There is a lesson here, or a hurt to heal, and probably it’s both.

Here are five poems that will help you get through this year – whatever you’re facing.

Robert Frost  – ‘A Time to Talk’

Robert Frost is a beloved American poet I’m sure you’ve read in school. Most of his poetry centers around his struggles with both the beauty and sorrow of life. From ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ to ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay, ‘ he is painfully aware of both the beauty and transitory nature of even a small green leaf.

In ‘A Time to Talk’, Frost reminds us in our isolation, there is always time to meet that need for companionship, even for busy, grumpy writers (or farmers) who prefer working to mingling.

‘When a friend calls to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don’t stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven’t hoed,….

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod; I go to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.

Making the time for friends, even socially distanced and in masks or over zoom is a balm for the soul – even a soul who doesn’t like or need a lot of social interaction. We all need a good laugh with a friend now and again.

Audre Lorde – ‘Coping’

Which brings me to Audre Lorde, and her poem aptly titled ‘Coping’ about a young boy bailing out water from his flower patch after heavy rain. The narrator asks him why he would bother to do that, and his response is both haunting and reassuring. He tells her that young seeds that haven’t seen the sun

‘forget

And drown easily.’

In a twist that is both tender and heartbreaking, Audre Lorde tells us that every small seed matters and even a child recognizes there must some hope of joy, or we will not grow. Like a seed, we have to experience the sun to know to reach for more. Sometimes we have to look hard for that hope, and some days joy seems like a memory – but if we’ve seen the sun at all, we must bail out the water from the seeds which have not. 

Nikita Gill – Lessons in Surviving Long Term Abuse

Which then brings me to the poetry of Nikita Gill. I struggled with which poem to pick from Nikita Gill’s “Fierce Fairytales” – any poem in here is a lesson on how to survive and thrive from both abuse and the daily indignities women can face.

COVID19 is front and center of our attention but if anything it seems to be magnifying all the other faults and cracks in our society. If you’ve felt this, then the poem for you would be ‘Lessons in Surviving Long-term Abuse’. It’s a little ‘on the nose’ but stay with me. It talks about a young woman who;

‘…placed her trust in these little things’

When Nikita is talking about placing trust in little things, she’s talking about savoring the little joys, the tiny luxuries like baking bread and apt words that ‘touch her slowly fraying soul’. I’m giving the punchline away, but it might be the most accurate re-write of Cinderella I’ve ever read and a call not to underestimate the power of beauty and comfort to lift the soul. Some would say this is the very secret to a life well-lived no matter what happens to us along the way.

Rumi – Sky Circles

No poetry collection would be complete without Rumi – a master of longing and striving. In ‘Sky-Circles’ Rumi tells us;

‘Birds make great sky-circles

Of their freedom.

How do they learn that?

They fall, and falling,

they are given wings.’

No matter who you are or what you do for a living – the year 2020 has changed your life. I say, let it. There is a core strength in us that we don’t even know is there until everything else is stripped away. We get to choose how we respond to that.

There is a proverb I keep taped to my favorite journal, and that is, ‘“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking because her trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”

Listen to Rumi – you’ve got wings.

Dylan Thomas – ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’

Carrying us home is my friend Dylan Thomas and his poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.’ We can take this as a dark and desperate plea for a sick father to get well – I see it as a rallying cry to never give up.

‘Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

We can survive this year of reckonings. This year has been nothing but a big ol’ shiny searchlight on things we’d rather not see let alone talk about let alone live through. If we let the pain this year has caused to touch us, it can make us better, stronger, more aware, kinder, even.

Rumi said it better; ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’ 

As for the over one hundred and seventy-five thousand families that have lost a loved one due to COVID19 so far, that is a reckoning and a call to answer our grief. It isn’t a time to sweep feelings under rugs. It’s a time to find that poem that pricks open our grieving hearts and spills out all the poison we’ve been carrying onto the floor, into the light. Then we can start to heal again. Happy reading, my friends!

What books or poems are you reading right now?

East coast Canadian native A.D Yeh received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and literature from Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, Canada. 

She helps the online writing community at DIY MFA by day and spends her nights writing fantasy novels and poetry she would like to read. She is currently in the throes of self-publishing her first fantasy novel. She also teaches the love of gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community.

She lives with her husband, two human children, and two fur babies in a quiet corner of Texas.

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