Today, I’m excited to share that I have two poems published at Heron Tree. They are found-poetry nonets. Here’s the link https://herontree.com/berg4-5/ . They’re short and include a quick paragraph about my process.
For today’s MTB prompt at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura challenges us to write an Octameter – designed by Shelley A. Cephas in 2007. The Octameter is 16 lines: 2 stanzas of 8 lines each, 5 syllables per line, rhyme scheme a/b/c/d/e/d/f/d; g/h/c/g/i/g/d/d.
Another Flare-up
Last week’s healthy form I described as strong and limber, now blames me as we revert All that energy none left to exert The stress-strings loosened pull taut in concert
This recurring plight steals sense of control leaves internal flames to burn and blight Hard to believe last week filled with delight while tuned to divert attention from hurt
“Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, a ferment, a fruit of your gifts and destructions.”
This made me think of the destructive power of water, and how this lake sometimes behaves like an ocean.
After the Waves Subsided by Maria L. Berg 2024
When Her Boat Rocks
The rope must have slipped, twisted to the wrong side and when the lake filled with wake roiled like an ocean you breached and slapped like a love-lifted whale pulling with such force that your tethers could barely hold, but the rope did not break and the bumpers withstood except one is askew it’s bolts still intact tore a curve through the wood tracing the crest of waves a violent gash of witness proof of a disturbance hard to imagine in this calm
This week’s Poetics prompt from dVerse Poets Pub is to choose a painting by Alma Thomas to inspire a poem. What struck me most about her pieces is how she evoked spaces and feelings with what looked to me like uneven bricks. I made an uneven bricks filter last fall, so inspired by Alma Thomas’s work, I made some images of my own.
The Steps by Maria L. Berg 2024
The piece by Alma Thomas that inspired my poem is Light Blue Nursery (1968), acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
When the Light Hits Just Right
uneven bricks chipped and imperfect changing color in the sun’s lace
missing mortar creating crannies shady inlets for the misplaced
strength in numbers you hold together and keep the barrier embraced
form with function an aging beauty broken lines to define our space
nature’s power fought, but never won leaves us all battered in her grace
Hi everyone! Sorry I checked out for a bit, but summer hit hard, and I had some adjusting to do. The fourth of July was huge this year with my niece turning eighteen. Our fourth of July baby is going off to college. Oh, the changes keep coming.
I turned the fireworks into tigers this year: My nephew’s suggestion, and my most intricate cut. Here’s a quick edit: (warning: fireworks noises)
Exploding Tigers by Maria L. Berg 2024
Today, I read an exciting email from humanities Washington (WA State), and instantly wanted to share it with everyone.
Are you glad to have the freedom to read whatever you want?Tell us about it! Washington Reads Freely is a new project where people from across the state share stories celebrating their right to read anything. The stories will then be collected and made available online during Banned Books Week in late September. Stories can be shared anonymously. In 2023, the American Library Association reported that the number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased a shocking 92% over the previous year. The goal of Washington Reads Freely is to positively affirm the right to read and highlight the importance of ensuring access to a diversity of ideas, stories, and perspectives. People of all ages can submit their thoughts. Write about any aspect of the freedom to read, or use one of our prompts. Those who share their email address will be entered to win prizes during Banned Books Week. We’re excited to hear from you!
What a great invitation. I have too much I want to say. I started thinking about the adult books (A Clockwork Orange, Jaws, Leaves of Grass) I found in my Dad’s den, snooping where I wasn’t allowed as a child. I got in trouble when Mom caught me reading them, but that only made me look harder, and further. I have some writing and whittling to do. I hope you’ll join me.
Not in Washington State? Why not use this call to action as an example for your state, or community?
Happy Reading, Writing, Summer, and Exploding Tigers!
It’s hard to believe solstice is this week. The longest day of a summer that’s turtling—pokes its head out early, then hides, emerges then hides again. For the event it is supposed to heat up, but then a twenty degree drop by Sunday. Yet, I’m ready for the days to start getting shorter.
They are tearing down my great aunt’s house next door. The machines crunch and tear and bang and beep. It’s constant, incessant, relentless. To soothe my nerves, I take my camera out to find the beauty, something interesting and intriguing in all the chaos. Patiently waiting for the machine to lift its bucket in an appealing way feels like being on a metal-monster safari, or a trip to Jurassic Park. I spy the long yellow neck like an enormous giraffe’s through my hedge, it’s head hidden in the last sections of house, biting and tearing, gnawing on the years of memories.
This is a summer of destruction, of change and transition. It is loud and isolating. I am learning to work without the silence I love to swim in. This is a solstice of transformation. I don’t know if they will move straight from destruction to construction. I don’t know if they will continue to put orange cones in my driveway as if they can invade and map out their place in my space. What would it cost them to give me information, let me know what to expect? But would that make anything any better? Knowing the trucks are coming, knowing the day will be full of nerve-grating noises, doesn’t change that I have to adapt.
This transformation takes destruction and desire: beautiful monsters
If the reporter from the movie Hot Fuzz(assoc link) asked me to describe my perfect Sunday, I would only have to recall yesterday. My first real summer day this year. It was plant and swim day topped off with family time with my nieces. I finally went to the garden center and picked up potting soil and garden “fixer.” I got nice and sweaty planting herbs and vegetable then jumped in the lake and swam, and when I needed to warm up, I did it again. Gorgeous, wonderful, exhausting, and fun.
Summer days adrift in a surreal haze each glint of light on a wave a sparking figment at play with my mind ablaze I desire the keys to make real my ideas but willed by a weight I laze stuffed with rays so warm
Today is Memorial Day, but the weather isn’t cooperating: it’s too cold to enjoy the lake. I had planned to take the day off and post tomorrow instead, but it feels like any other Monday, so here I am.
However, it’s not just any other Monday. It’s a special Monday because my niece came to pick up her senior prom dress that I tailored for her, and I finished my Portable MFA, and started it again from the beginning.
What We Find in the Dark by Maria L. Berg 2024
Today’s Poem
Today is Quadrille Monday at dVerse Poets Pub. Today’s prompt is to include in our poems of forty-four words some form of the word “dark.”
The Light in Every Dark
We seldom inhabit complete darkness— lights at night so bright we can barely see stars little red indicators, computers in everything. The dark is permeated by electricity In the ocean, in the deepest dark under immense pressure, an inner light squids into the world.
Light Squids Its Way Into the World by Maria L. Berg 2024
Poetry MFA Week Eight Review
This week felt like things were really coming together. While writing into the heart of my first draft, I realized the heart of the poem I chose was conformity vs. nonconformity, and that opened my eyes to how my contradictory abstract noun study fits into my revision process. It was exciting and eye-opening. It changed how I look at revision.
Writing: Though I only think a few lines from my second draft will make it into the final draft of the poem, discovering that the heart of my poem was a pair of contradictory abstract nouns opened the world of the draft into something I wanted to dive deeper into. It changed it from a quick draft I didn’t care much about to a poem I care a lot about, and want to give much more time.
I looked at the other drafts from April that I had chosen to revise, and quickly identified the pairs of contradictory abstract nouns at the heart of each of them. So exciting!
Reading: After making my discovery of contradictory abstract nouns at the heart of each of my poems, I started reading through the collections I have from the library, and quickly identified the contradictory abstract nouns at the hearts of them as well. I found this very exciting. I think that’s why I decided to go straight into a second round of The Portable MFA(assoc link) poetry chapter.
Portable MFA Second Round: Week One
This week is about starting again: repeating the first week, but this time knowing I can get through the whole eight weeks, and understanding what to expect. My focus is on putting the time into the things I didn’t do, or only put minimal effort into, the first time around. This time I won’t have the stress of the April daily challenges of National Poetry Month, and I should be home the whole time. I’ll have guests from Sweden, so I may be reminiscing to when I lived in Sweden, becoming a teenager. I may study a Swedish poet or two, and bring some of that beautiful language into my work. In other words, I expect this second round to be very different from the first.
I hadn’t planned to continue these Portable MFA posts in this manner, but we’ll see how it goes. If I feel like the experience continues to be different the second time around, I’ll keep sharing in this review / expectation format. But if I don’t feel that I’m adding much to what I posted over the last couple months, I’ll move on to something else.
Writing: This week I’ll be back to trying out different writing times and places. I signed up to try a writing workshop that meets Wednesdays from 8 to 10 pm to force myself to write at night and see if I like it. The other thing I didn’t try last time, that I want to try this week is writing away from home: in a cafe, the library, the park. This came up for me this week because my next door neighbors will be tearing down their house and rebuilding, and the noise of them just being there is already distracting, so I may need to find writing spaces away from home. I’ve never been one to write in public spaces, but it’s time to try it. Maybe I’ll go write at the Postmark open gallery time. I can draw my poems on the page.
Reading: I thought about going back to study Ada Limón some more, but then I found “Chopin in Palma” by Susan Mitchell in The Best American Poetry 2023 guest edited by Elaine Equi and decided to study Susan Mitchell for the next four weeks. I am excited that she relates her work and her process to classical music and piano playing.
Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can buy me a beverage to support what I do here. It will help a lot.
Today I’m beginning the final week of my portable MFA in poetry. As I read the instructions, she says that after this week I can go back to the beginning and start again. I have to admit, that hadn’t crossed my mind, but sitting here looking at the final week of this two month experience, I see it as a real possibility. I guess I’ll see if I feel the same at the end of the week.
The Fallen by Maria L. Berg 2024
The Prompts
Today I ran across a daily prompt: Three Things Challenge at pensitivity101. Today’s three words are Ravage, Devour, and Detour.
It’s Haibun Monday at dVerse Poets Pub. Today we’re writing about Mono no Aware, or awareness of the transience and impermanence of things.
Today’s Poem
Offering Colors When They Fall
Saturday while I sewed, there was one bolt of lightning, one bowl of thunder, then the sky broke and the rain poured like all the faucets were cranked all the way open, battering and bruising the poor May flowers, so new to this world, tearing them from their clusters and throwing them to the ground ravaged. I walked the yard today, observing the piles of red and pink, tinged brown, already decomposing, and though they have fallen, they are like stars in the heather, constellations detoured to the dirt sky.
Time will devour all May blossoms fall in the storm paint the walk pink
The Fallen Through a Kaleidoscope by Maria L. Berg 2024
Poetry MFA Week Seven Review
This week felt like I made real progress. The focus on stanza breaks and how they control time during reading came up in a Critique of the Week I watched on Youtube, and then I was able to offer advice about stanza breaks at the Burlington Writers Poetry Review. Critique of the Week is offered by Rattle poetry every Friday at 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern).
Writing: This week’s work with stanzas helped me become more aware of the interplay of form and function in a poem.
Reading: I became much more aware of how many of the poems in the three collections I’ve been studying don’t have any stanza breaks. This made me even more curious about why the poems with stanza breaks had them, and the meaning of their placement.
Portable MFA Week Eight: Endings and Beginnings
This week is about continuing to revise my favorite poem I wrote over the last two months of this MFA until I have worn out the impulse (at least for now) to work on it. I would usually think that shouldn’t take long, but I’ve been looking at the revision demonstration I did two years ago and I put a lot of time into revising one poem for that, so I have a lot of work to do.
Writing: This week’s assignment is to “work toward wearing yourself out with a favorite poem you’ve written.” I’ll be journaling about the poem I wrote. Then I’ll create two new drafts and comparing the three drafts later. I’ll also be reviewing the whole eight weeks to explore the experience.
Reading: This week, the assignment is to look back at the first poem I studied, and explore how my interaction with it has changed.
This week ends the poetry chapter, but it also says to go straight to the beginning and start again. I’ve gotten a lot out of this experience and think I would continue to progress by putting more time into each step of the program. Something to think about this week.
Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can buy me a beverage to support what I do here. It will help a lot.
This week jumped from a cold and rainy Spring, to a hot and sunny Summer. I took my first dive into the lake, was greeted with an icy bite, and got right back out. Saturday, I took the slow walk down the ramp, but didn’t get all the way in. Which was better? Each had its purpose. This seems like a metaphor for reading and writing. The first time reading something, quickly diving in then getting out. But then studying something you read, slowly moving deeper and deeper. Or in writing, diving in, writing the draft as quickly as possible to get everything down and then getting out. Then revising, slowly getting deeper and deeper.
Favoritism in Impartiality 3 by Maria L. Berg 2024
This life doesn’t provide a place card on a placemat
I’m stumbling around trying to find my place— like a game of musical chairs with half the seats and Loki in charge of music, or being placed in the middle of a race in a hoop skirt, stilettos, and blindfold: an unfair placement test.
Poetry MFA Week Six Review
This week was a bit tricky. The last week of Doug Kearney’s workshop was about Revision, and the MFA was about reviewing everything I’ve written in the last five weeks and finding what I haven’t been writing yet, and taking risks. The prompts given didn’t help me write deeper as they intended, but they did help me get through some review and pick out my favorite lines.
Writing: Though I didn’t feel like I got very far with my review of last month’s writing, I became aware of something I haven’t been writing about during a conversation with a friend, and wrote a poem draft right after I put down the phone. And later in the week a poetry prompt inspired me to start writing about my vacation, finally.
Reading: I didn’t read through everything I wrote in April as I wanted to. I did get a good start though and I’m excited to keep ruminating on all the work I’ve done so far.
Portable MFA Week Seven: Time and Space
This week is about working with stanzas. Stanza means room in Italian. I think it will be interesting reading and writing poems like moving through a house, exploring different rooms.
Writing: This week’s assignment is to choose two pieces of my writing from last week and experiment with the use of the stanza.
Reading: This week, the assignment is to look back at some of the free-verse poems by other writers I’ve read not just in the last seven weeks, but also over the past several years, noticing what the poet is doing with stanzas. So this week I’ll be reviewing and comparing poems by Ada Limón, Louise Glück, and Stanley Kunitz, along with the poems from Poem-a-Day to see how and why they use stanza breaks.
Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can buy me a beverage to support what I do here. It will help a lot.
Exciting News! The Spring 2024 Vol. 26 Edition 2 of Stirring is now available, and I’m one of two featured artists. The online magazine includes two of my black and white photographs from my Murmurations series. Please check it out, and let me know what you think.
Back to the Mirrorworld
This morning I reconfigured the lights in my mirrorworld with finding the Favoritism in Impartiality and Impartiality in Favoritism in mind, and took some preliminary photographs.
Impartiality in Favoritism by Maria L. Berg 2024
Contradictory Abstract Nouns
I saw no reason to alter the random order of my new Big Five, so I’m starting with Favoritism and Impartiality. Here’s something to think about: favoritism means both the act of favoring one person or group over others with equal claims, and the state of being a favorite. I wouldn’t have thought of that second definition if I hadn’t looked it up. Impartiality is the quality of not being biased or prejudiced.
On my axes of abstractions: fear, bias, and locus of control; I would put favoritism as fight / negative / internal, and impartiality as flight / positive / internal. However, if I’m looking at that second definition of favoritism, being a favorite I would say fight / positive / external.
Starting with Impartiality, I can already see that this is a broad and important topic for study. Impartiality on Wikipedia says it is both a legal and religious concept, and says to also see: Equity, Fairness, Justice, Neutrality, and Objectivity. In an article called “Impartiality in Moral and Political Philosophy” by Charlotte Newey at Oxford Research Encyclopedias it outlines a debate between impartialists and partialists and concludes, “The debate between impartialists and partialists looks set to continue unless progress is made in elucidating a concept of impartiality that can accommodate the concerns of both.”
This already challenges my bias. I instinctually think impartiality is good and favoritism is bad. I’m looking forward to exploring the opposite idea further.
Favoritism in Impartiality by Maria L. Berg 2024
A to Z Road Trip
Continuing my trip today, I stopped at sites that used the A to Z challenge to explore poetry and poetic topics (like me). First I stopped by The Versesmith and learned about Alphabet Haiku invented by Beatrice Evans which is a traditional haiku in which every word starts with the same letter. And Verso-Rhyme invented by L. Ensley Hutton which is an eight line poem with lines of six then four syllables, and an XAXBXAXB rhyme pattern. It’s only punctuation is an exclamation point at the end.
On this May Monday morn- ing I rejoice to dive into a new study heady and design a bright world of mirrored voice every possible angle ready!
Portable MFA Week Six: More About Risk
This week’s focus is to review and find what I’m not risking to write.
Reading: This week’s instructions are to read through everything I’ve written in my journal for this course so far, and then reflect on my life. “Take a brief inventory of the essential themes of your life. When you are done, ask yourself what, out of that inventory, you have completely left out of your writing to date.”
While reading and learning about Louise Glück last week, I learned her mentor was Stanley Kunitz, so I decided to study him this week. I picked up The Testing-Tree(assoc link) and Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected(assoc link) which won the National Book Award. Only three poems from The Testing-Tree are not included in Passing Through. I was curious as to why these these three, so I read the Notes at the back, and found one was a translation, one was based on a translation, and the third didn’t have a note and I like it. It’s really short, so I’m going to share it here:
Again! Again! Love knocked again at my door: I tossed her a bucket of bones. From each bone springs a soldier who shoots me as a stranger.
The poem I chose to study this week is in both collections and is called “The Mulch.”
To begin learning about and from Stanley Kunitz I found a lecture “From feathers to iron” from the Library of Congress and this video:
Writing: Though the only writing instructions for this week are prompts to “help steer you toward greater depth in your poetry,” I believe the writing assignment is to write a poem that takes a personal risk when it comes to the subject of the poem.
Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can now buy me a beverage. It will help a lot.
Experience Writing 