While I am busy editting and tweaking I have prepared some Poetry Dailies in advance for those of you who savour a little poem a day. The quotation poem format is one I return to again and again. It’s a great mental stretch. Over time I have found that it lends itself to ten syllable line. Sometimes I can manage an a-b-a-b-a rhyme scheme. I have started to collect lines that beguile me. And then I begin to stitch them together sometimes in a mash up. The quotation poem, for those who are new to the form goes thus:
- Line 1 is a direct quotation
- Line 2 is refers to something in the past
- Line 3 is an action
- Line 4 wraps up the theme in a bowed parcel
- Line 5 is about the future.
This poetry meditation is a mash up of lines culled from various quotations found in the marvelous Maria Popova blog Brainpickings, specifically this post https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/12/how-to-be-a-poet-wendell-berry/. Not only might you learn how to be a poet, the blog will give you plenty of intellectual fodder to chew on your creativity cud.
The opening quote is a President John F. Kennedy comment on poet Robert Frost, who read a poem at his inauguration (oh, weren’t those the days!). Elizabeth Bishop gets a sly line in and then Wendell Berry (read his poem “How to Be A Poet” online in that blog I have referenced above) gets chawed over in the final line.
Sojourning Smith 