Today, in response to Of Maria Antonia’s 2022 Weekly Photo Challenge prompt “A New Year,” I tried something I’ve been thinking about. Using the same clear plastic that I used for my “snowglobes,” I created a filter with written words and put them in the world. This opens up so many possibilities, an exciting discovery to start the year.
Snow Writing by Maria L. Berg 2022
Stream of Consciousness
It’s stream of consciousness Saturday. The prompt for today is “resolve.” I am resolved to have a day of stream of consciousness. Let those thoughts flow unfettered. When I looked up resolve, I was surprised to find it’s almost a janus word. It has the definition I expected: to come to a definite or earnest decision, but it also means to break up or disintegrate. It also has the musical meaning to progress from dissonance to consonance which could work well as a triple meaning in a poem. If my song ends resolved, is it determined to act, dissolved and broken, or just not dissonant? It can also mean to clear away or dispel (doubts, fears, etc.), so in that way it is a janus because if you resolve an issue, you can come to a decision about it or clear it away and dispel it.
New Poem
For today’s new poem prompt I browsed my WordPress Reader and found:
We have said goodnight but light’s fingertips grip the horizon the triumphs and horrors dissolve and for a moment peacefulness smells like melting orange dreamsicles and the chill of brain-freeze does not hurt but excites almost every note I breathe is a harbinger of resolve
A Bright & Shiny New Year by Maria L. Berg 2022
Dreaming of a Happy New Year by Maria L. Berg 2022
If you’ve enjoy the photographs I’ve been taking, I’ve added some to my RedBubble store and I’m excited about the new products. The abstract bokeh really lends itself to product design. So fun. If you get a chance to take a look, please press the hearts on the images you like. It will help my work get noticed. Thank you.
An impression arrests fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas frozen mid-irritation, like tinnitus of Meniere’s before the dizzying vertigo stepping out of a spiral, the view becomes clear, as if finally finding the source of wafting, permeating decay
Contentment empties the glue of flavor and steals the scissors of artistry but constant irritation and insatiable hunger remain to this arsonist of bridges with nothing I’ve left what indelible marks will topple to the tongue?
Refreshment wriggles among the moles under the tent of solitude having vacated the house clutching ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrate new and curious spaces for contemplation where crawling, not seeing, may nourish new understanding
Redraft
Let’s warm-up with some fun and easy changes, and build through our drafts and choices.
Play with Line Length and spacing, the visual look of the poem
to look at short, centered lines. Let’s see what that looks like:
Indelible Marks
An impression arrests fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas frozen mid-irritation, like tinnitus of Meniere’s before the dizzying vertigo stepping out of a spiral, the view becomes clear, as if finally finding the source of wafting, permeating decay
Contentment empties the glue of flavor and steals the scissors of artistry but constant irritation and insatiable hunger remain to this arsonist of bridges with nothing I’ve left, what indelible marks will topple to the tongue?
Refreshment wriggles among the moles under the tent of solitude having vacated the house clutching ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrate new and curious spaces for contemplation where crawling, not seeing, may nourish new understanding
That is fun. I definitely like that.
Write the poem in different POVs and tenses to find the strongest telling.
The only place in the poem that shows that this poem is written in first person are my new lines in the second stanza, “to this arsonist of bridges with nothing I’ve left.” I think this line, though it’s doing lots of work, isn’t what works with this poem. Is the Janus turn I intended worth it, since I use it in the next stanza as well? Any ideas? Let’s see what I can come up with.
Indelible Marks
An impression arrests fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas frozen mid-irritation, like tinnitus of Meniere’s before the dizzying vertigo stepping out of a spiral, the view becomes clear, as if finally finding the source of wafting, permeating decay
Contentment empties the glue of flavor and steals the scissors of artistry but constant irritation and insatiable hunger remain with clarity, a responsibility what indelible marks will topple to the tongue?
Refreshment wriggles among the moles under the tent of solitude having vacated the house clutching ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrate new and curious spaces for contemplation where crawling, not seeing, may nourish new understanding
A different form in a different tense:
Curious Spaces for Contemplation
An impression arrested fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas frozen mid-irritation, like tinnitus of Meniere’s before the dizzying vertigo stepped out of a spiral, the view became clear, as if finally finding the source of wafting, permeating decay
Contentment emptied the glue of flavor and stole the scissors of artistry but constant irritation and insatiable hunger remained with clarity, a self-fulfilling responsibility what indelible marks will topple to the tongue?
Refreshment wriggled among the moles under the tent of solitude vacated the house clutching ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrated new and curious spaces for contemplation where crawling, not seeing, could nourish new understanding
For each line, write its opposite. Search for the turn in the poem.
For this exercise, let’s stay with the short lines centered and play with opposites.
Invisible Ink
An ignored cry for attention frees (what is the opposite of fruit flies) a cougar from a shower empty of thought on fire while at peace (in meditation) like hearing you clearly from miles away
after the still grounded stoicism of a point the closed dies fogged, unlike instantly losing a copy of placid dry existence
Restlessness fills the slime bland or gifts some screwdrivers of incompetence and irregular comfort or constantly quenched flee obscured many whims the erasable touches won’t stand away from an ass?
Thirst sits in the grass over non-sheltered groups of people refusing to leave a wildness letting go of nonsense or right a singular idea from the (what is the opposite of fruit flies?) cougar a light, destroyed sky blockades adumbrate old or bored blanks of not thinking here walking vision will not feed old ignorance/stubbornness
Combine the opposites with the original
The Kitchen Sink is Backed Up Again
An impression arrests fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas An ignored cry for attention frees a cougar from a shower frozen mid-irritation, like tinnitus of Meniere’s before the dizzying vertigo empty of though,t on fire while in meditation like hearing you clearly from miles away stepping out of a spiral, the view becomes clear, as if finally finding the source of wafting, permeating decay after the still grounded stoicism of a point the closed dies fogged, unlike instantly losing a copy of placid, dry existence
Contentment empties the glue of flavor and steals the scissors of artistry Restlessness fills with bland slime, or gifts some screwdrivers of incompetence but constant irritation and insatiable hunger remain creating irregular comfort constantly quenched with clarity, a self-fulfilling responsibility fleeing obscures many whims what indelible marks will topple to the tongue? the erasable touches won’t stand away from an ass?
Refreshment wriggles among the moles under the tent of solitude Thirst sits in the grass over non-sheltered groups of people having vacated the house clutching ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies refusing to leave a wildness, letting go of nonsense, or right a singular idea from the cougar the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrate new and curious spaces for contemplation a light, destroyed sky blockades adumbrate old or bored blanks of not thinking where crawling, not seeing, may nourish new understanding here walking vision will not feed old stubbornness
Next Steps
At this point in the process, it looks like I’ve made more of a mangled mess than improvement, but I do like some of the new phrases created by the opposites. I’ll free-write around my favorites in my morning pages and see if they add to the poem. In the next post, I’ll play around with more expansion techniques and then put it all together into a new draft.
The seed yet planted has potential it may be the one to burst into sprout the tiny green hope watched by the discerning eye not ignored as the yellow flowers in the garden, the kale gone to seed soon composted to clear the way
That quadrille (a poem of 44 words) in response to today’s dVerse Poets Pub prompt, feels like a great way to start this week’s adventure in revision. Merril’s prompt “seed” is also a fun tie-in, because it’s a Janus word.
Now that the April challenges have ended and I have over thirty new poems drafted, it’s time to think about revision. Last year in May, I had the same idea. I read a lot of posts and books and started charting my revision process in my poetry notebook. I’m going to attempt to approach each draft as a seed, full of potential.
The Process
Here’s what I have come up with thus far:
Review
After letting a poem rest a while, come back to it as if reading someone else’s poem for the first time. What do I like about it? What don’t I like about it?
Here is my review checklist:
Identify POV, tense, form, voice
setting, narrative
themes, moods
words to mind map
alternate titles
highlight the best lines
mark weak verbs & nouns
mark areas to expand
highlight cliche language
choose what to edit to (theme, idea)
make notes to guide re-write
Redraft
Here are some ideas to try while redrafting a poem:
Choose the best lines and freewrite. Dig down, find the deeper meaning.
Use the best line as the beginning of a new poem.
For each line, write its opposite. Search for the turn in the poem.
Cut each line in half. Write a new beginning and/or ending for each line.
Write the poem in different POVs and tenses to find the strongest telling.
Expand, write past the ending. Tighten, to it’s most succinct telling.
Force into a form, or change from formal form to free verse.
Revise
Read the poem aloud. Feel the words in your mouth. Sing it to your favorite songs. Walk to it. Dance to it. Feel the rhythm. Have the computer read it aloud. Highlight anything that doesn’t flow, that doesn’t sound right, anything that feels forced or doesn’t fit.
Feedback
When you feel ready for some feedback, you might want to try Poetry Free-For-All, an online poetry workshop for poets to exchange critiques. There is a lot of useful information in the forums including A Workshop for One.
I like that poets giving critiques are called critters. It makes me think of the campy horror movies. It’s fun to imagine getting poetry feedback from balls of fur with sharp teeth.
Learn from other poets
The forums of Poetry Free-For-All also include an extensive Recommended Reading list.
Take the useful feedback and things you’ve liked from reading and listening to other poets talking about their work and come to your poem again with a fresh, critical eye. Read it aloud until it feels good in your mouth and body while clearly expressing your intended meaning.
A Demonstration
I thought it would be fun and useful to take the first poem I wrote this April, since it has had a good rest, and demonstrate each step through the entire process as a series of posts this week.
An impression arrests the fruit flies in kitchen sinks full of ideas frozen in mid-irritation, fleeting yet multiplying before your eyes what indelible marks will topple to the tongue and adumbrate the growing clutch
Contentment empties the glue of flavor and steals the scissors of artistry the constant irritation and insatiable hunger –of those fruit flies, feeding in the sinks– sketch an impression of furious flight
Refreshment wriggles among the moles under the tent of solitude having vacated the house with the ideas, but left the kitchen sink to the fruit flies the dark, fresh-earth tunnels adumbrate new and curious spaces for contemplation where crawling, not seeing, may nourish new understanding
The Draft
This poem draft follows a form I created myself that for now I call the Jar and Janus form. I started collecting words in vases last year when I enjoyed the Coursera course Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop with Douglas Kearney for the second time. While working with abstract and concrete nouns, I decided to create vases full of each, to make random connections to spark ideas.
For each stanza of this poem, the form (followed loosely) is:
expand on the response in line two including a Janus word
Use the Janus word to say the opposite, or create a second thought, or point of view
Repeat for as many stanzas as you like
Now that the draft is created, the form isn’t particularly important, except to remember the Janus words and think about their opposite meanings.
Motivations
Before we dive into revision, it’s a good idea to focus intention. Why do I want to revise this poem? I want to improve it, of course, but why? And why this poem?
I want to revise this poem because:
It’s one of the first examples of a form I invented and I want to continue to explore the form.
I want to take one of April’s poems through revision to work through my revision process. This poem has had the most time to rest.
I think it’s a good example of my unique poetic voice that I want to continue to develop.
Though I will be publishing the revised poem here, so it won’t be eligible for journal publication, if I love the results, I may want to include it in a collection.
Since I plan on developing this form further, what I learn from this revision could be very useful for future poems.
My main motivation is to learn by doing and share the experience to inform others.
Next Steps
I hope you will join me this week taking a poem through all of the steps of my revision process. In my next post we’ll go through the Review and plan some re-writes.
Today is reflection post day for the A to Z Challenge. I enjoyed their theme and posts about games this year. Though I did not remember to do the scavenger hunt, I really liked the idea, and if anyone is still looking for a post for “bear”, I wrote a poem called Black Bear’s Branch. I also did a questions post.
Though I made it through the alphabet with Janus words (also known as contronyms, antagonyms, or auto-antonyms), exploring their uses in my poems, I didn’t find them to be as useful in turning the poem as I thought they would. Without holding both meanings of the word in mind, it’s too easy to glance over the words less familiar, or less contextual meaning, which takes the power from the twist the Janus intends.
I wish adumbrate was a more common word because it’s a great Janus, meaning both to disclose and obscure. My post that got the most likes was a puente form poem called Overwhelming Possibilities which used the Janus phrase “wind up.” My post that got the most views included my poem Put Out by Perch which was selected as a featured poem on NaPoWriMo.org. It was an amusing rant using the Janus phrase “put out.” I think my favorite Janus used was “overlook” in my poem He is a Selfish Moon. My other favorite outcome of the challenge was discovering “Popcorn-can Coveer by Lorine Niedecker and attempting to emulate her form. In one of these concise poems I used the Janus word “terrible.”
At the end of the first week, on my birthday, I found out a friend died. That messed up my motivation and put me in a bit of a funk. Writing poems was more difficult and reading and commenting was also more challenging. Definitely my least favorite part of the challenge, but not something that could be learned from really, unless it informs me to prepare for the unexpected. I’m not sure how I would do that.
I know that many A to Z bloggers prepare their posts in advance, but I don’t have a way of doing that and combining the challenge with NaPoWriMo. I guess I could prepare alternate, off-prompt poems for each day, just in case life gets in the way–in case of emergency posts for the whole month? Writing through it, was probably a good thing. Something to think about.
Overall, April (for me) came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. I hope May will leave me focused on revision.
Flower Basket (2020) multi-media collage by Maria L. Berg
I did it! I made it through April with over thirty new poems posted, inspired by NaPoWriMo and the Poem-a-Day Challenge. Congratulations to everyone who met these challenges. It was very fun to see the winners posted for last November’s Poem-a-Day Chapbook challenge. Congratulations De Jackson!
At the A to Z Challenge there’s an after-challenge survey. I enjoyed using the challenge to explore Janus words and phrases in my poetry.
I also enjoyed discovering art, craft and design sites I hadn’t visited before along with other writing sites.
This challenge isn’t quite finished. There will be a reflections post sign-up on May 3 and a blog road trip starting May 10th.
It’s time to get back to revision. This week I’ll be posting about my poetry revision process. I hope you’ll join me and share your tips and tricks for poetry revision.
Over at the A to Z Challenge they have a word scramble. The Janus word for today is zip which can mean energy, vim, or nothing, nada, zero
Time To Go
Goodbye. It’s time for me to be on my way
If only I knew where I wanted to be
I would zip up the stairs and burst out the door climb into the car and back down the drive
I could turn right or left and loop directly back here somehow climbing uphill both ways
with water always at my right hand an eagle soaring overhead
and if I venture further past the pentacostals and jehova’s witnesses the elementary school or the gas station speed down the hill or up the road will bring me here again
larger loops radiating as if a stone dropped in the lake on a still day I might as well stay
Over at the A to Z Challenge they’re playing the Yes Game. My Janus word is yield which can mean; to give up, surrender, or relinquish, but also; to produce by natural process.
Today is Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub where you can share your best recent poem and read and comment on all the great poetry being shared.
This is the window
with the slightly broken sill covered in flakes of pop-corn ceiling with semi-sheer blinds that when open tuck up all wrinkled on one side through this dusty, cobwebbed window revealed by off-white sheers belted to hooks where a speck of a beige-dotted bug climbs there’s a once thought impossible view
because for my whole life it was blocked by next door’s tall firs providing cool shade lakeside my great aunt told me she did it on purpose to hurt her brother next door a family feud of unnatural proportion wielding God’s power one sibling on another imagine each day’s hurt never recovered
But they’re all gone now and I can finally see past the iron railing, the rhodie, and the hedge to the rippling water, a dock, and a buoy to the houses and the park, but above that what this table was so long deprived is the sky filled with mountain– ignore the threatening volcano inside– massive contrasts of blue and white glacier and rock, snow blanketed slopes it’s never not amazing, not one single time I look, even hiding behind complete cloud cover when a stranger wouldn’t know it’s there
I tried to think of any other window where I would rather look and suddenly, I am in the international space station, looking down on Earth my body is confined, but my view through this small portal is as if the eye of God. To see the sphere its atmosphere floating in the void to know the glorious insignificance of momentary stresses, bringing overwhelming strife, but seeing all connection of a day in life
But there’s no coming back from that I’ve already known what new seeing can do, would I want to add that fractured knowing too?
I only have this window for a ticking-clock of time, I want to be aware, to take in each tick of this view while it’s sublime, the years of firs blocking the way flew so quickly by knowing there are limits, a coming end erases the flaws in the pane, even the baked-on bird gifts that won’t scrape with a blade, all I see gleams this view holds a vivid shine
Some fun products from my RedBubble store with my question mark bokeh design.
The NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to write a poem that poses a series of questions. The PAD prompt is to write a remix poem. These should work well together. It’ll be interesting to look back through this month’s poems and see which questions spring to mind.
My Janus for the A to Z challenge is the letter X which can mark a spot, or delete it.
At the A to Z Challenge they are turning their thoughts to what’s next. At the end of the challenge in May, I’ll be back to my revision focus. What is your revision plan? What is your revision process?
The Janus phrase for today is wind up meaning (1) To start; (2) to finish.
The poetics prompt at the dVerse Poets Pub today is about poetry as a bridge and includes the puente form. Here’s hoping it will help me bridge all my ideas.
To Know Every Heather Flower – by Maria L. Berg 2021
Overwhelming Possibilities
Each time I try to imagine the life of every human I wind up faced with the limitations of my perception I thought I might start with those in the houses I see, try to have empathy for their children and spouses a plot at a time, from the blue rambler to the three-story brown but that’s already too much, overwhelmed I shut down
~because I don’t believe it’s possible~
to know every tiny blue flower along the drive or each of the purple heather visited by bees it would take all my time to give each a name recognize each quality that is not the same and that’s but the surface, as precious and delicate as we are we may as well be numerous as the heavenly stars
Over at A to Z Challenge there’s a challenge to add some variety to the day. One of the options is to try a new kind of exercise. I saw cardio drumming for the first time on a mystery show from New Zealand. I have a yoga ball and drumsticks. I think I’ll give it a try.
The Janus word for today is vault (1) A small locked box; (2) the expanse of the heavens.
My parody was inspired by a silly thing Larry Kudlow said. After watching the segment, he may have been making fun of “plant-based” as terminology and not saying the ridiculously stupid thing he appears to be saying, but my poem’s a parody and the idea is funny, so his original intent can linger as nonsense either way.
Lest a Green New World, All Must Fear the Plant-Based Beer
We’ve all been warned it was on the “news” from that treasured vault, got those TV views
Do not listen to scientists if they don’t agree but he says there’s a study that supports, soon we’ll see
They’re coming for our summer meats no more family bar-b-q’s We’ll be roasting brussel sprouts and then what chaos ensues?
That’s right! We’ll be drinking plant-based beers removed of all that tasty flesh or at least that’s what Larry hears
No more hamburger in our hops no more bacon in the barley no more yak shank in the yeast might as well cancel all the parties
No fermented flank steak or bubbly buffalo wings Absent the Angus ale and the joy a perfect pork-loin pint brings
How will we get a buzz without a beefy broiled Bud and what will tint the goggles if there’s no sirloin in the suds?
*After writing my poem, I found this post about beers that are brewed with meat. Gross, but I felt it should be included.
Experience Writing 