This powerful little prose poem would have been a good example to include in our post for the prompt from November...

Shooting the Horse

I unlatch the stall door, step inside, and stroke the silky neck
of the old mare like a lover about to leave. I take an ear in
hand, fold it over, and run my fingers across her muzzle. I
coax her head up so I can blow into those nostrils. All part of
the routine we taught each other long ago. I turn a half turn,
pull a pistol from my coat, raise it to that long brow with the
white blaze and place it between her sleepy eyes. I clear my
throat. A sound much louder than it should be. I squeeze the
trigger and the horse's feet fly out from under her as gravity
gives way to a force even more austere, which we have named
mercy.

by David Shumate,

from High Water Mark



Also:

The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems

There's an interesting astronomical coincidence this month. On December 21, 2010, there will be a full moon on the day of the Winter Solstice.

I did some online searching for poems about both events combined, but couldn't find any. There are a large number of poems about full moons and solstices and winter, of course.

I wrote a post last year at this time, because we had another coincidence - a full moon to end 2009 on December 31, and it was also the second full moon of the month - so it was a "Blue Moon.”

Solstices have long been celebrated and written about. It is the shortest day of the year and the longest night, and it officially marks the first day of winter.

Solstices are one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years.

You probably know that many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The most famous example is the stone circles of Stonehenge which were placed to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

We often see winter - in everyday life and in poetry - as a depressing time of year. Death symbolism abounds. At least in northern climes, you tend to be confined indoors. Outside looks bare and dead.

But solstice celebrations focus on hope with ithe reversal of shortening days. It is more seen as a time to celebrate the rebirth of the year.

The word solstice derives from Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still) since to the ancients the sun did seem to stand still. In Greek mythology, the gods and goddesses had meetings on the winter and summer solstice.

In many cultural histories, this is the time when virgin mothers give birth to sacred sons: Rhiannon to Pryderi, Isis to Horus, Demeter to Persephone and Mary to Jesus.

You can take a scientific look at the solstice. We know that as the Earth travels around the Sun in its orbit, the north-south position of the Sun changes over the course of the year. That is because of the changing orientation of the Earth's tilted rotation axes with respect to the Sun.  When we arrive at the points of maximum tilt (marked at the equator), we get the summer and winter solstice.

This month our writing prompt is to write a poem that uses the solstice (and perhaps the Full Moon) without falling into the cliches of winter and moon symbolism.

Two of the poems I did find in my moon and solstice search are the models for our writing prompt for this month.

The first is "December Moon" from May Sarton's collection Coming into Eighty.

The second model is Mary Oliver's poem "Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh" (from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)

With the busy holiday season and a late start with this prompt, I have moved the submission deadline a bit further into next month - Sunday, January 9.

Have a great solstice, winter, and new year!


    

Elvis reading

Expressing Elvis: Celebrating Elvis Presley's Birthday in Poetry and Song is an event in Ridgewood, NJ on January 8, 2011.

"Elvis Presley is Alive and Well on Lincoln Avenue in Fair Lawn, New Jersey...." So reads the title of a poem by Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

On that same road but a little farther north -- in Ridgewood -- Elvis will be coming back. He will be alive and well -- in poetry and song.

It seems like every poet has an Elvis poem or two. In honor of Elvis Presley's birthday, join poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, James Gwyn, and others as they share their Elvis poems.

January 8, 2011, from 1-4 pm at Ridgewood Christian Reformed Church, 271 Lincoln Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ. Plenty of free parking. A large space to accommodate all manner of bards and balladeers. Express Elvis in verse or in any variety of expression. Come on out to listen or to participate. Tune up your guitar. Dust off your jumpsuit. It will be a memorable afternoon. It's free. All are welcome.

Note to Poets: If you'd like to participate, please submit your intent to James Gwyn at ERGO.therefore@gmail.com by Dec. 31st so he can get a reading list together. RSVP

Note to Singers: Acoustic, please. There are some mics, but best to bring your own. RSVP

The Victor A. Bressler Humanities in Medicine Retreat

Caring Communication Heals - Bringing Caregivers Closer

The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey • Carnegie Library • Atlantic City, NJ

Friday, December 10, 2010

Featuring Keynote Speakers: John L. Coulehan, MD, MPH, FACP and poet on “Gentle and Humane Temper: Empathy and Engagement in Clinical Practice,” and Jon Nussbaum, PhD, speaking on “The Challenge of Effective Intergenerational Communicatio."


Caregivers attending the 20th Annual “Bringing Caregivers Closer” will explore the role of ethical healthcare communication inspired by the arts and humanities which are vital to the healing process.

Panelists and breakout leaders include poets and writers, Renee Ashley, Barbara Daniels, Douglas Goetsch, Kenneth Hart, Penny Harter, Diane Kaufman & J.C. Todd. Facilitated by Peter E. Murphy.

Breakout sessions involve reading, discussing and writing poetry and short prose pieces.

7:45 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. Registration & Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. - 4:15 p.m. Presentations

$20 to offset cost of meals (Includes continental breakfast & lunch)

CME's available for Physicians, Nurses, Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists, Licensed Professional Counselors and NJ Public Health Professionals.

Pre-registration required

Target Audience: Physicians, Residents, Nurses, Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, Multi-Disciplinary Allied and Mental Health Professionals, Physical/Occupational Therapists, First Responders, Poets, Writers, Students of the Humanities and Public Health.

• Utilize a variety of approaches, including lecture, panel, small group discussion, review of literature
and personal writing to explore barriers and solutions in healthcare communication.
• Analyze poems, short fiction, non-fiction and personal writing to recognize their personal choice and responsibility to communicate ethically to foster healing communication.


Information and registration link, or call 1-888-569-1000

"This Is Your Brain on Metaphors" is an essay by Robert Sapolsky that I read on The New York Times’s website. Sapolsky is a professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University, and is a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.

It doesn't sound like the CV for someone to discuss metaphors.

He starts by talking about why humans beat out gophers and fruit flies even though
under a microscope they look the same. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

So, we can understand symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech and all the stuff of poetry.

We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

He cites a number of studies. I like this example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical. It was a study by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh where volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. Actually, the meeting was the experiment. They asked the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee cup - a cup that was hot or iced. The subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

I'm not sure how all this science will help you finish that poem that you last started, but maybe...

Books by Robert Sapolsky

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
• Monkeyluv: And Other Essays o
  • A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
  n Our Lives as Animals
• The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament
• Junk Food Monkeys and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament
• Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death

I had not heard of poet Kim Dower until I read an article about her "return" to poetry. For several decades, she had turned her back on the poet's life she was leading in Boston for a literary publicist's career in Los Angeles.

"Poetry came back to me," Dower says. "I never decided I'm going to start writing again. The truth is I was watching The O.C. with my son, who was at that point a senior in high school, and that was one of the few things we continued to do together. And I got up during a commercial break and I wrote a poem."

Maybe it's an inspiring story for those of us who feel some writer's block.

That was a few years ago and the spark must have caught fire because she has a collection out now titled Air Kissing On Mars from Red Hen Press.

Some samplings:

She can’t work

if the chair is there
she can’t think
if the clothes are dirty

She wrote at home, on nights and weekends after work for clients and traveled to poetry festivals and workshops in Florida and every summer for three years, she took 10 days at a nondescript hotel to write as the traffic rushed past on Pacific Coast Highway.

The Nudists Are Getting Ready to Pack

How do the nudists get ready to pack?
Do they pack in the nude
or do they dress to get in the mood?
What will the nudists pack
when the nudists are ready to pack?

These poems start from such normal places -

She’s awakened by a hair in her mouth.
It’s not enough to kill her, no
that would take a locomotive crashing
through her window, a train way off track

thundering through her bedroom,
the moon on its back,
simply a hair
stuck to the roof of her mouth,

and

They took the mailbox away

on Cahuenga and Clinton.
I know because I wasn’t feeling right,
decided to take a walk, figure things out,
remember why I love the clouds.
Found my rent check still in my purse,
gave me a goal, a project I could complete.
But when I got to the corner it was gone,
just space in the place where the box had been...

When she was told that her poems are like "Joan Didion meets Tinker Bell," she agreed that she has a "California sensibility – poems about driving, poems about L.A. and the quirkiness and desperation.. and the Tinker Bell element, I think I'm very whimsical."

The poems are accessible and often funny. Those are qualities that often don't serve poets well with critics. Think of the early success of Billy Collins. But deeper reading of many of the poems reveals deeper meanings.



Dower reads some true stories from her book in a noisy outdoor setting.

Burt Kimmelman's poem "Taking Dinner to My Mother" serves as our model for this month's writing prompt.

The poem marks a point in the poet's relationship with his mother just before she died. The poem's movement is from "mother sits on the edge of her bed", to a cafe where "a new mother fed her infant daughter", and finally to his own daughter, the granddaughter, who "met a boy for a moment in a fleamarket, who is now a first love."

Usually, we avoid assuming that the voice in the poem is the poet. But, Burt is a friend and colleague at NJIT and I know something of the poem's genesis.

It's a poem that I connect more directly to myself lately because I maintain the same ritual of bringing dinner to my 92 year old mother.

There was an article in Poets And Writers magazine about reading John Donne (The Sick Genius Of Remorse) by William Giraldi where he talks about his own depression that hit him after his father’s untimely death. He rediscovered the poetry of John Donne as a way out of the darkness.

Of course, the John Donne of “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so...” is part of a body of poems of grief that includes Gerard Manley Hopkins and poems like "Deathfugue" by Paul Celan, or many of Marilyn Hacker’s poems, My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy and “Little Father” by Li-Young Lee.

But that's not what Kimmelman is doing in his poem, or what I want you to try in your own writing this month.

I hesitated to even list those poems because I don't want to receive an inbox of elegies.

Burt also sent me two other poems that he feels serve nicely as companion poems. Both about the end of his mother's life.

The Waves

When you told me, "I'm dying - it's
all right," I dreamt I was treading
water in the ocean, no land

in sight, and a great ship, its sails
jutting into the night sky, was

making its slow way toward the far
horizon. The world of the dead
must be like that realm where dreams hold

the living, where we come and go,
breathing stars. If I could rouse you

from that place I would tell you how
I swam, swam to shore, exhausted,
where I hear your voice in the waves.

The Sleep of the Dead

My mother would sleep "the sleep of the dead,"
she used to say. We would wake her and she
would sigh, saying she had slept longer than
she had meant to. On the day my father
was to leave our home he lay in bed with
his back to her, a single tear in his
eye - and she, breathing softly, lay with her
back to him. "I wake to sleep," Roethke wrote.
In her sleep she seemed to leave her daily
torments behind with her two sons, boyfriends,
job, landlord, books, music, movies, paintings
and sculptures - as if sleep were without thought,
without language or dream, the stepping out
of time and into a still and deep lake.

In her old age she grew sick, too full of
pain to walk more than a few steps from her
bed. One night, after a light meal with wine,
she fell asleep. When we found her in the
morning she was lying on her side, her
arm crooked at the elbow and tucked under
her pillow, her eyes and lips closed, her cheek
smooth. A thin thread of saliva and blood
had trickled from the corner of her mouth
and turned brittle on her chin. Her heart had
surged and stopped, She looked like she had not known
it. Perhaps that night she dreamed - dreaming of
lying in her mother's arms, of sinking
into the calm water of her embrace.

For this month's writing prompt, try writing a poem about caring for someone old, or sick,  or dying. But don't write an elegy. Celebrate the life, the ritual and the connections that caring has to other parts of life.

You can hear Burt read all three poems at the page for his poetry at PennSound from a reading at the Kelly Writers House. The reading of "Taking Dinner to My Mother" includes some back story about the poem, and refers to Garrison Keillor's reading of the poem on public radio's The Writer's Almanac.

On his blog, Al Filreis has commentary on Burt's poetry and two videos of him reading at the University of Pennsylvania.



   

Burt Kimmelman has published six collections of poetry. "Taking Dinner to My Mother" is from As If Free (Talisman House, Publishers, 2009).

He has also published There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007), Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), and Musaics (Sputyen Duyvil Press, 1992).

Burt Kimmelman is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters and The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry and co- edited The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry. He has published scores of essays on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry.