I will get you your three poems that I owe you from April.  Not today, though.

I did want to take a moment and mention the reading in which I participated on Sunday at Flyleaf Books over in Chapel Hill.  What a great space and a friendly staff!  And what fun (and an honor) for me to be able to be a stand-in and read the part of The Reporter in the staging of Pat Riviere-Seel’s The Serial Killer’s Daughter.  This chapbook is the recipient of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

I was intrigued by this work since  I am currently working on an historical novel.  Pat’s chapbook could be described as historical poetry; it is a work of the imagination that has its roots in a true event.  I invite you to visit Pat’s website for more information.

Anyway, my fellow cast members consisted of Pat herself, who played the part of Velma Barfield (the serial killer), Terri Wolfe, who played The Daughter, and Richard Allen Taylor who played multiple male voice roles.

North Carolina residents:  If you have an opportunity to see this production (and there are more such readings planned), do go.  You won’t be sorry.

There is one entry under “Q” in Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary:  A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices, which makes the decision-making process easy.

Quatrain:  Any STANZA unit of four lines, whether rhymed or unrhymed (see RHYME).  The quatrain is the most common stanza form in English poetry, and when rhymed it tends to fall into one of the following four categories:
Shakespearean rhyme  a/b/a/b
Petrarchean rhyme a/b/b/a
Omar Khayyám stanza a/a/x/a
Monorhyme a/a/a/a

I revised this next poem, so that the first three stanzas are quatrains. I attempted the Petrarchean rhyme scheme. Regardless of whether the poem is successful, I enjoyed revisiting a years-old poem and working with it, applying a fresh set of expectations. Thanks for reading!
Continue reading “April 28, 2010” →

Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Mammaw.

A granddaughter asks …

Some time when you are yourself
again, before heaven comes for you
and you’ve said all you’re going to say
tell the secrets you know about girls
and women and why we cannot and can
unfix and fix everything while someone
else waits, or pushes
or falls away, and why didn’t you ever say
sewing is solemn when done for the last
child or first and the talk of chores
becomes sacred curses in throats gone
gravelly from singing and thirst? Will we forever
look for what used to be ours?
Why did we ever loan it
then take it back after letting someone and everyone
else cut it to fit one size, down to size
or up to the mark, swapped over
and over, worn out
from coveting, cherishing, being lost
or trashed for duty’s sake or beauty’s
lure or whatever, whenever it happened ago?
Was yours worth no more than a pear tree’s leaves
stolen fearlessly in children’s play,
numerous, waxy tangibles
good things to trade for kisses?

(from String Quilt, poems by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner, Main Street Rag Publishing Co., 2005)

Hello, all.  This evening’s quick post is a nod to the

Metaphor:  Any figure that asserts the equivalence of two or more disparate elements, as in mathematics, for example, when one states A=B.  Thus in Martin Luther’s classic metaphor, “A mighty fortress is our God,” God is claimed to be the same as a fortress stronghold.

from William Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices.

The cool thing about Packard’s discussion of metaphor is the multiple examples he gives of the different kinds of metaphors, including, but not limited to,  the double metaphor, the negative metaphor, and the tentative metaphor. Continue reading “April 20, 2010” →

Before we get down to business, I would like to take this opportunity to take advantage of a “teachable moment.”

As you may know, yesterday I worked most of the day on a poem and then lost it because I did not save it before I closed it.  When I realized I had closed my document without saving it, I did what any doe-eyed dreamer would do, and googled the phrase “I just closed a document in Word I didn’t save. Can I get it back?”  Note how quickly desperation renders one inarticulate.  Furthermore, it is rather difficult to type and think while rending one’s garments and howling like a wolf (a wolf which, apparently, has spent some time in the Navy).

However, in spite of my inartful phrasing, Google led me to Word Tips World: Forgot to save my Word Document!! Well!  That sounds like the place for me, and I especially relate to the use of double exclamation points (even though I was feeling more quadruple pointy at the time – this was a Code Red, after all).  I found a good bit of useful information on that page, but my heart sank when I realized that the following advice there applied to my exact situation:

1) SCENARIO: Forgot to save the document at all, even when exiting Word/closed Word without saving!

“Yes!” I cried.  “That’s me!  That’s exactly what I did!  Oh, joy! Somebody out there gets me!” [read, read, read, scan, scan, scan, searching for answer]

To the best of my knowledge, if you press NO at this point [when prompted “Do you want to save changes to the Document?”] there is no way to retrieve the document.

“What?!?!  But wait – there’s more writing after this!  If I’m really hosed, why are there more paragraphs down there?” Oh, trust me.  In my head, the running monologue was even more irrational.

SOLUTION: weep quietly …[then there are suggestions to try, in case I really hadn’t made that bonehead move that I knew I really had made.  End of story.  Full stop]

Okay, in all seriousness, I am glad I stumbled upon that site.  I like how it is written with clear illustrations, instructions and humor, and it is now bookmarked as one of my favorites.  Imagine my dismay, however, when I realized that, not only had I made an irreversible mistake with my document, I also had failed to apply the only known solution to my problem properly … because what I did could not be considered, in any universe, “weeping quietly.”

As you know, I reconstructed/revised the poem as best I could and ended up with what I ended up with, and I’m okay with it.  Having thought about it, and applied some much-needed perspective, these glitches happen in life, and, yes, I think it did warrant weeping quietly.  However, the second dose of the prescription ought to be, in many cases, laugh loudly in response to the memory of the glitch within 72 hours of enduring it; otherwise, you might find yourself kicking the cat for no good reason (no cats were harmed in the making of this post – I don’t even have a cat).   Continue reading “What’s so funny about losing your document? I’ll tell you: April 15” →