Everything I Need to Know About Waiting I Learned in the Garden

 

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect for Roundup.

This week I've been thinking about waiting. Waiting for news. Waiting for the right time. Waiting for an important event. 

Life is full of waiting, isn't it? 

I remember reading something about how women are the ones who wait, and I wanted to rail against it. I don't want to wait, I want to DO!

But sometimes waiting IS doing. Like in the garden. And so, for this week's ArtSpeak: WOMEN I wrote this wee poem about gardens and life and waiting.

A couple of process notes:

I am kind of in love with Gabriele Münter right now. 

I had at least half a dozen false starts to this poem. I abandoned most of them because they were too long for this particular series....all my ArtSpeak! poems must fit and be legible on the graphic cards I create over at Canva.

(Apparently I have a lot to say about gardening...I'm tucking this revelation away to revisit another day...maybe there's a larger project I can create??)

When I realized I was going long, I decided to restrain myself with a short poetry form. 

First I tried a rispetto, but it just didn't stick. 

Next I tried a trinet, and came VERY close, but was one word too long...and I decided the word was essential enough to dump the trinet form and just go free verse. 

I like the bit of humor that emerged! 

Where I landed for today's offering is quite far away from where I started, with two lines from my journal that  I thought would be the heart of the poem:

What you call madness! chaos! obsession!

I call a devotion to beauty.

So I will save those lines for another (longer) poem. Thanks so much for reading.

Everything I Need to Know about Waiting I Learned in the Garden

Wait for
better weather.

Wait for seeds to sprout,
vines to twine
buds to blossom.

Wait, it died?!

Sigh.
Try again next year.

—Irene Latham

p.s. Another "waiting" poem: Girl, Waiting

For what are the bones of summer?

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Buffy Silverman for Roundup.

I'm away from my desk today, summering with a friend. Don't you love summer adventures? Today's ArtSpeak: WOMEN speaks to the magic of summer. Wishing you all that—and more! Thanks for reading.

For what are the bones of summer?

sun / bleached sky
craggy peaks / asleep

dreams / in bloom

- Irene Latham

Dinosaur poems!

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Linda at A Word Edgewise for Roundup.

Quick heads-up: Come In! Come In! Wordspinners to Welcome You Home is now available for you to preview on NetGalley!

It's Summer Reading time...hooray! The theme this year is "Dinosaurs," and I was delighted when my local library invited me to come share dino poetry with the kiddos! I packed up my stack of poetry books, including:

Dinos That Drive by Suzy Levinson, illus. by Dustin Harbin

Last Laughs: Prehistoric Epitaphs by J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen, illus. by Jeffrey Stewart Timmins

Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems by Jack Prelutsky, illus. by Arnold Lobel

Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian

In the Past by David Elliott, illus. by Matthew Trueman

...and not poetry, but my kids' favorite dino picture book: 

If the Dinosaurs Came Back by Bernard Most

And of course I wrote a few dinosaur poems, too! Here's one called "Message for a Long-Gone Dinosaur" that started as a tricube, and became an extended tricube. (Notice I started the tricube structure right in the title!)

I also helped kids create their own dinosaur poems. Fun!

I guess I still had dinos on the brain when it came to writing my ArtSpeak: WOMEN poem, because it, too, has a dino theme! I had fun exploring some drawings by sculptor Ruth Asawa. Thanks so much for reading.

What you call

watermelons,

watermelons, fresh

from the patch

I believe

are really

dinosaur eggs

ready to      hatch!

- Irene Latham

Girl Finds Power / Learning from Elders poem + Revision Notes

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit the ever-enthusiastic-for-poetry-and-life Mona Voelkel for Roundup.

me and mom at a quilt show
 photo booth :)

I've been thinking this week about the woman who've most influenced me in my life: my mother, of course. My paternal grandmother, Grandma Dykes, who taught me about love and cooking and gardening; my maternal grandmother, Grandma Oslund, who was a chemist and a librarian long before women regularly held those positions...and she was also a wizard with a needle and stayed actively involved in community leadership right up until her death; my mother-in-law Bobbie Nell Holcomb Latham who was a southern "steel magnolia" through and through, and taught me about hospitality, southern cooking, fashion, home decor, shopping, self-care, family traditions, and family business; and a host of other woman who've mentored me in one way or another. 

The one that popped into my head while writing this week's ArtSpeak: WOMEN poem is Jana Lile, the mother of the girls I babysat regularly for quite a few years. Not only was Jana a loving mother, but she modeled for me all the things women can do while raising a family. It was her attitude more than anything. She made my world bigger and helped me find my power—a process that continues to this day! So this one's for you, Jana! (I've also left a few process/revision notes below!)

Riding with Aunt Jana

Jana prepping for the 1991 bridal shower
she threw for me. :)

In a world of no
and can’t
it’s Aunt Jana
who reins the carriage
down an open road
lined with giant trees

As we bump along,
the horse’s tail
swishes yes yes
steady hooves clop
you can
you will

And the trees
bend before me

- Irene Latham

Lucky me, I was able to spend time lately with poets through Inked Voices. In those sessions, the need/desire for revision strategies came up again and again. With that in mind, I wanted to share some of my revisions on this poem:

When I started this poem, it had a placeholder name "Polly." Likely because we've been re-watching Peaky Blinders, and one of the powerhouse women characters is named Polly. But then I remembered Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly, and I wanted to change the name. "Jana" was first to pop up for me, so there you go!

I didn't want this poem to have a lot of punctuation, so I used stanza breaks to act as sentence enders and then went back and added capital letters at the start of each stanza to help convey the "sentence" more easily for readers.

The first draft had a different ending, but I decided it was too on-the-nose (about child realizing she might rein a cart someday). Poems should show more and tell less-- and use images. That's what makes it magic! And this poem is, ultimately, about the magical moment of empowerment. And that's when the image for the last stanza came to me. Only it first came as "bend down before me." But you know and I know that we don't really need "down" for the reader to get the image, so I cut that word.

Another word choice thing: I originally had "tall" trees in the first stanza. But when I added the magic in the last stanza, I wanted it to be a more magical descriptor. Thus "giant."

Please let me know if this is useful, and I may include such notes in the future!