Fleda Brown: On Poetry
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On Poetry: Knitting, like love, has a fringe
Even if this winter's been mild, we've had plenty of chances to appreciate our knitted scarves, shawls, and sweaters. I think the hand-knitted ones are the warmest, holding all that personal care and attention in their fibers.
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On Poetry: 'Be gentle with small ... things'
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On Poetry: Advent calendars and uncertainty
- On Poetry: Poem's start-and-stop just right
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On Poetry: Sudden bolts, threshers
- Sunday, September 4, 2011
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On Poetry: Poem subtle in its message
We ask a lot of our schools. We hope they'll impart not just information but something about how to live, how to be in the world in relation to others. It has been ever thus — when I was in fifth and sixth grades in a public school in Arkansas, our teacher began the day with a Christian prayer. We gathered at the lunch table for a blessing before we ate. Can you imagine that now? The lesson, if there was one, was how to be oblivious to those who don't think like us. Louise Erdrich's poem offers an example of how far we have gone sometimes, to our shame, in that direction. Erdrich is half-Chippewa, half-German-American. She's best known as a novelist, but her poems are very much worth checking out. She grew up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In her poem, she invents a speaker who remembers how it was, as a Native American, to be forcibly sent away to boarding school to forget her heritage, to learn to be White.
Continued ... - Sunday, August 7, 2011
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On Poetry: We can't control the moonlight
In little ways and in large ones, we are not in control. We can move ourselves into the moonlight, we can choose to notice it, but we can't move it. "It" — like love, or awe, or hatred — isn't a thing.
Continued ... - Sunday, July 3, 2011
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On Poetry: Summer romances, disasters
A lot of us have had our summer romances. When I was 13, there was this guy, Lee, whose parents stayed at Ken-Thelm resort just down the lake. I was madly in love. I would paddle my canoe down his way and just circle around, hoping he'd come out. Though I probably couldn't have seen him if he did, since I refused to wear my glasses. On land, I crashed into trees for the sake of love. I started using my middle name, Sue, because Fleda was too dumb. However, after all my efforts, just as his family was packing to go home, he told me that he was in love with Judy, our next-door neighbor at the lake, because "she's such a good dresser." I couldn't argue. She was. I'll dedicate my choice of this poem to my old friend Judy. J. Allyn Rosser's sonnet — notice that it is a Shakespearean sonnet! — is about passing on a lover to someone new.
Continued ... - Sunday, May 1, 2011
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On Poetry: Lake water lapping by shore
In May our thoughts turn toward lake water as surely as William Butler Yeats' did while walking the streets of Sligo in Ireland, hearing the sound of a nearby fountain. Yeats said that when he was young he wanted to imitate Henry David Thoreau by living on Innisfree, a small island in Lough Gill. Jerry and I have stood on the shore of Lough Gill, which, sure enough, glimmers in the morning like our own lake.
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Beside our fireplace mantle, we have a small framed copy of Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." - Sunday, April 3, 2011
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On Poetry: My National Poetry Month column
More poetry is being written and published now than ever before — which of course means that a lot of bad poetry as well as good is out there for us to discover. That's all to the good, to my mind. History tends to forget how much bad art it takes to make a small amount of good art. Nature is wasteful.
Continued ... - Sunday, March 6, 2011
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On Poetry: March is a turning point
March feels like some kind of beginning to me. Too soon for spring flowers, too soon to even think of spring, but the year has turned, and the mind turns with it. For a poet or a fiction writer, every day is a beginning. There's no map. It's all uncharted territory. And there have been other "prints" before us. We have to face our betters — that jealousy, or "professional fear" that we have to acknowledge as ours.
Continued ... - Sunday, February 13, 2011
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On Poetry: Poetry in bleak midwinter
This time of year, I often think of Christina Rosetti's poem, "In the Bleak Midwinter." When it's attached to its gorgeous melody, you may know it as a hymn. Fairly or unfairly, we often use the seasons as metaphors for the state of our spirit. We're in the bleak time of year, holidays over, spring a long way off. Sometimes everything feels that way, suspended in sadness, waiting. The thought of waiting made me remember this poem by a friend, Margot Schlipp, who, like me, has published several books from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Margot is former editor of Quarterly West, a major literary journal."The Fish Channel" is from her first book.
Continued ... - Sunday, January 2, 2011
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On Poetry: Snow and silence
I'm a poet. White space is my working tool. It's space that allows us to turn back and see what's there, to really focus on it. It's silence that allows us to hear. Line breaks stop us a little. Stanza breaks stop us more. Slowing down and paying attention is what a poem means to do. Each. Single. Word.
Continued ... - Sunday, December 5, 2010
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On Poetry: Pleasure of feeling happy and sad
The longer I think, the more intensely the memories flood over me. It's an intense time for most of us, made more so by the pressures we impose on it, the buying and spending and baking and so on.
Continued ... - Sunday, November 7, 2010
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On Poetry: Intelligence of limericks
The world is so deadly serious right now. It's time for some limericks, don't you think?
Continued ... - Sunday, October 3, 2010
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On Poetry: All places sacred to someone
I grew up in Arkansas, and I couldn't wait to get out. But when I moved to the East Coast, I found myself still warmed by the good soil of Arkansas, still writing about it.
Continued ... - Sunday, September 5, 2010
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On Poetry: Political statements as satire
When a poem is openly political, we recoil, feeling ourselves pushed around and preached at. But some poems get away with having strong opinions without alienating us.
Continued ... - Sunday, August 1, 2010
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On Poetry: A poem's public, private land
Poetry is political — sometimes overtly, but mostly not. When it's not, it's still in the business of making the private public and the public private.
Continued ... - Sunday, July 4, 2010
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On Poetry: The 4th, return and endeavor
I started thinking about the idea of return, that we can no longer assume existence is linear. What is coming may also be going away, even at the same time.
Continued ... - Sunday, June 6, 2010
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On Poetry: The common moment hits hard
"Was each an Eden waiting to be lost?" asks Linda Pastan in her poem. She names roses, lemons, lilacs, hemlocks, grapes as the things that make up the garden of the world, while the ice caps are melting, the water rising.
Continued ... - Sunday, May 9, 2010
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On Poetry: Taking poems personally
I just got back from the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs convention in Denver. I love to go — I see friends I wouldn't see otherwise, I hear lots of good poems, and I'm involved in some great conversations about poetry, both contemporary and classic.
Continued ... - Saturday, April 3, 2010
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On Poetry: Smarter, braver with poems
Can poetry be powerful? If so, how? First let me say, there's poetry and then there's poetry. Some is all hearts and flowers, confirming our collective prejudices and making us feel nothing but self-satisfied. The other slaps us awake, lets us see with new eyes.
Continued ... - Saturday, March 13, 2010
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On Poetry: Two art forms 'talk'
I walked into the sculptor Bill Allen's studio near Maple City last year and in one breath said to him, "Let's do a project together. I want to write poems that bounce off your sculptures."
Continued ... - Saturday, February 13, 2010
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On Poetry: Sad valentine, still beloved
Not a terribly happy valentine! But sometimes I think the way we most appreciate the ones we love is when we are most aware of the presence of death -- ours and theirs. This poem is one of a large group of poems Tess Gallagher wrote after the death of her husband.
Continued ... - Saturday, January 16, 2010
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On Poetry: Choices in the new year
If I picture this new year in the typical way, as a baby, I'm seeing that baby looking utterly baffled. Huh? What now? Within our country, we suffer with deep differences over the route we should take toward universal health care, over war or no war, over what to do about the environment, human rights, and so on.
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First glimpse of Blue Ivy Carter
Absolute Lin-sanity
Test on Comforter in Powell Unit Shows Blood
Angry Dad Shoots Teens Laptop
Hero Driver Saves Kids From Burning Bus
Funeral to be held for Powell boys
Kobe was 'rooting for Patriots' in Super Bowl
Sandusky on having to stay inside and people turning on him
Wookie Sensation
Uzbek Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Kill Obama
Woolly Mammoth Caught on Camera?
Sandusky makes a statement
Did JLo 'Assault' Marc Anthony on Camera?
Christie Brinkley's Runway Slip
Toddler forced to run half-naked in snow
Halle Wants to Leave the Country
Northern Lights shine above earth
Plane makes perfect belly landing
Kris Jenner New Face of Arousal Oils
Raw Video: School Bus Burst Into Flames
