Introducing 2025 ArtSpeak: PICASSO

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit our organizer/poet extraordinaire Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading for Roundup.

First: be sure to check out the Cybils Poetry Finalists. Congratulations to all...and yay for beautiful poetry books for kids!!

I have a new One Little Word: SISU (see-soo). It's a Finnish word I fell in love with last week. It hard to translate into English, but it includes courage, resilience, and an inner something...

Sisu makes me think about these lines from "Go to the Limits of Your Longing," by Rainer Maria Rilke, trs. by Joanna Macy:

"Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final."

Find out more about what sisu is and why I selected it over at Smack Dab in the Middle. 

In related news... it took a long time for me to settle on my 2025 ArtSpeak theme! 

But a couple of days ago, I just knew. 

No, I am not a giant Picasso fan. Some of his (Analytical Cubism) work creeps me out! 

BUT. 

I've never before focused on a single artist. And who better than Picasso, who was such an outlaw-artist and so darn prolific? (According to this article at The Met, he produced more than 20,000 works over his lifetime!)

I love that Picasso was brave. He wasn't a follower. He made art on his own terms. And he kept his creative fire burning for decades. These are traits I aim for in my own creative life!

Check out these Picasso quotes. Here are a couple of quickies:

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."  (He totally could have been talking about poetry!)

"I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else."   (Yes! That pretty much sums up my writing process. :)

"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good sense.'"  (YES) 

So I look forward to getting to know Picasso a bit better this year. I have written poems after a few of his works in previous years. . .

Red Skirt

Hello, Neighborhood!

 I did a series of (16) animal haiku after his line drawings that became a limited-edition chapbook last year! A Little Book of Animal Haiku: Across the Seasons by Irene Latham, illus. by Pablo Picasso (SOLD OUT - but we are considering a second print run in advance of 2025 National Poetry Month!)

Here are a few of the poems featured:

cat haiku

pig haiku

owl haiku

And here is today's poem. (Bet you wouldn't see this image and think "Picasso"!) Thank you so much for reading!

Yellow House, Blue House

Look! A yellow
house that's really
a blue house,
a brokendown house,
a where-did-
they-go? house.

Let's pop by
and say hello!
Fix those doors
and windows!
Let's go slow—
maybe later
we'll add a patio?

Already the house
is a little less blue.
All this time, it sighs,
I was waiting for YOU.

- Irene Latham