When my nephew was small, he made a now-family-famous declaration: “no is a hurting word.”
I share this with you, first, as solid evidence that children are the purest of poets.
And second, to say, hello, guess what?
The Poetry Sisters are doing “______ is a word” poems this month!

This prompt finds its origins with the brilliant Nikki Grimes, and is explained and modeled beautifully here, by our own Laura Purdie Salas. Our twist upon it is that we all agreed to start with words relating to conversation, which is our overarching theme for the year.

Ironically (considering said theme) we weren’t able to get our zoom together this month so we all worked on our own and, in my case at least, in a bit of a hurry. As a result, these are still at the very drafty stage, but nonetheless… here goes:

Listen
By Liz Garton Scanlon

Listen is a word
clapping
(tongue to teeth)
a teacher
insisting upon
your attention

then drawing
in close,
whispering
in confidence

this very human hum
of nearly silent letters

this very human hum

gifted and received,
unwrapped, understood

Gossip
By Liz Garton Scanlon

Gossip is a mouthy word
loose and gapey,
spilling sticky secrets
that are sipped
straight up

Find my pals’ poems here:
Laura
Tanita
Tricia
Sara
Mary Lee

And the whole Poetry Friday party is over at Denise Kreb’s blog today!

As for next month, we’re writing poems inspired by Lucille Clifton’s notes to Clark Kent! Join us if you’d like! Until then, may poetry be both balm and ballast. xo

All is not well in the world, that much is clear. But connecting to and conversing with each other? It’s something. It’s something we can do.

This year, my long-time poetry sisters and I are going to work with an overarching theme of conversation — and in an appropriately meta twist, we’d love for you to join us. Our prompts will go out each month like a call. Our poems — yours and mine — will be the answer.

This first month, we’re writing tankus — a fusion form that starts with a tanka followed by a responsive haiku. (See? Conversation!) I was happy to try these — I love Japanese forms (and very short poems in general) — so I have several, all linked.

Like so many folks all over, those of us in Texas just navigated a surprising winter weather event. Fortunately, this time (unlike in 2021), we kept our power and water, and the disruption was brief. But if we’re all really honest, we should no longer be surprised by these events, not the storms or droughts or fires or deadly freezes. Climate change is here, denial be damned. (And we’ve just left the Paris Climate Agreement and put the kibosh on the Green New Deal. It just makes me weep.)

Anyway. That’s what I was thinking about as I wrote this week. Weather, and what we’re doing about it.

Ice Strikes: Three Winter Tankus
Liz Garton Scanlon

Lantana blackened,
blue flame agave slipping
out of its own skirts.
The bitter cold unravels
well-rooted optimism.

Ice cracks like a voice,
an earthly adolescence
just inscrutable

Pipes burst and schools close,
not some storied snow-day joy,
just things freezing up –
knees, brakes, Earth on her axis.
We are stuck with what we’ve got.

This glassy snow globe,
victim to constant tumult
There’s no settling

Red-shouldered hawk screams,
her tender prey burrowed down
in cold denial
while meteorologists
repeat: unprecedented

We were invited
to make ourselves at home here
What a mess we’ve made

For the others, go here:
Laura
Sara
Tanita
Mary Lee
Tricia

And Poetry Friday is at Book Seed Studio (thanks, Jan!)

As for next month, we’ll be writing ______ is a word poems (inspired by Nikki Grimes.) Have a look at this post Laura did for more ideas, and consider using a term related to conversation if you want to play along! We’ll be posting on February 28, and invite you to do the same!

Our beginning-of-the-year selves were wise, y’all. We knew we’d be tired and short on time and pulled in different directions. We knew we’d need something short. Something manageable.

So, we chose to write haibun — a hybrid prose-poetry form that allows for longer musings first, and then, a captured moment, a grace note, a haiku. The first thing that happened (we shouldn’t have been surprised but we were) was the realization that haibun weren’t necessarily or instantly manageable. Sorry.

But the second thing that happened was stunning and beautiful and heartening. A little context. As a group, my poetry sisters and I meet once a month on Zoom — the Sunday before the Friday we intend to post new poems. We chat about life and about our prompts, and then we turn our cameras off and write for awhile, and then we pop back on — usually much relieved to have at least started something, even if (as in the case of the haibun) it was trickier than we’d hoped or anticipated.

This time, it was just Tanita and me on Zoom (see above re. being short on time and pulled in different directions this time of year). We talked a little, generally, about possible topics and approaches for our poems, and then off we went to write.

Friends, when we came back together, we discovered we’d both written about the solstice, we’d both referenced the election (although Tanita had taken her reference out by then), and we’d both ended our poems with singing!!

Wha!?!?!? It is hard not to see this as a tiny but necessary miracle, the kind that can come from both poetry and being in communion with people you love and trust and get.

So, I post this gratefully and feeling slightly more buoyed and hopeful than I was earlier. Toward the light, my friends… toward the light.

Remembering Autumn on the Solstice
A haibun, by Liz Garton Scanlon

The leaves turn a deep, warm red, and the clocks fall back, and the tired, worried, bundled-up people rush past each other. They rush and complain and lash out and vote. They vote, and the days grow darker and ever darker. A chill slips down our boney spines and our hearts crack like stone. Is there anything alive out here? we wonder. Is there anything alive?

The sun rises up
A fat orange fish splashing sky
We chase it, singing

For the others, go here:
Tanita
Tricia
Mary Lee
Sara
Laura

And for the whole of Poetry Friday, visit Michelle Kogan at More Art 4 All.

We’ll be back in January to update you on our plans for 2025. In the meantime, may you all be safe, healthy, happy and well.

Our prompt this month was to use as our jumping off point a piece by Jane Hirshfield — Two Versions, published in her latest book, The Asking. It is a spare poem, 16 lines long and a lot of white space, briefly sketching out two takes on a dream of wildness and wild creatures and our place as observers or interferers. It is painful and mysterious and lovely, like so many of Hirshfield’s poems.

I took from it, loosely, the form (mine is longer but is narrative and use some single, questioning lines)  and also the themes of duality and the dilemmas we face by being human in a wild world.

Half a Mind
Liz Garton Scanlon
Inspired by Jane Hirshfield’s Two Versions

Once, in my 20s,
I rode shotgun in a car
through a mountainous night
and we collided with a deer.

I think it’s fair to say it that way.

It was an accident, but the deer died,
and we could not bear our violence,
the consequence of being human.

Years later, newly married,
we mucked our way through
an impossibly blurry season.
Snails showed up everywhere

like some sort of patient plague…

so many that I couldn’t make my way
into the house without crushing one.
I tried. It was unavoidable.

And just last month, right there, a pile
of debris on a windowsill. Carpenter ants,
beginning the task of undoing everything
in their way. Of undoing us.

I was of half a mind to let them be

to let them have the run of the place.
It was the other half a mind
I had to reckon with.

I still, always, have to reckon with.

You can read the others here…
Tanita (who is also our Poetry Friday host!)
Sara
Tricia
Mary Lee
Laura
Kelly

Next month, we wrap up the year by writing a haibun (prose + haiku) or a haiga (art + haiku) and sharing on the last Friday, December 27th. As always, we invite you to join us. Till then, friends, how grateful I am to be amongst big-hearted, open-minded, language-loving humans like you. xo Liz

This month’s prompt comes from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. The idea is to write a poem in which we build and/or take apart something for our reader. I tried this several ways and am going to include two attempts here.

Building the Backyard
Liz Garton Scanlon

The backyard isn’t made of
lawn or lounge chair
so much as property line,
fence post and picket –

a frame with the power
to make the picture
to shape the soil and sod
to direct the sprinklers

to contain the thistles
hackberry and dandelions,
to determine where
the swing set should sit,

where there might be
a slice of shade
over the kiddie pool,
where a patch of grass

gone brown remains
once the pool is drained
once the dog’s tracked in the mud 
once the babies have outgrown

the pool, the fence
the frame, leaving
behind the bed and block
of childhood

Deconstructing a Mushroom
Liz Garton Scanlon

It is the cap I notice,
round and rusty red,
like a driving cap
my grandfather
might’ve worn

And tucked beneath it,
these papery gills,
that strong stem,
this ring and cup,
pushed open
as an Elizabethan collar

by the rusty-red cap
by the strong stem built atop
mycelium, the threads of family

Go here to read the others:
Tricia
Tanita
Mary Lee
Laura

And thanks to Carol Varsalona for hosting Poetry Friday this week!

This month we’re writing “In the Style Of…” Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, that perfect prism of perspectives, that beautiful list of looking, that incantation.

The idea, I think, was that each of us would find our own thing to hold a microscope (or telescope) to, that we would also see things in five, or nine, or thirteen ways. Nearly everything is worthy of being paid attention to like that, honestly, so it’s just a matter of choosing something…

But it just so happened that I found myself with my eldest daughter this week, in New York where she lives. And I found myself looking at her, and looking at the world with and through her, as I always do, as I have since she made me a mama. It is a pleasure so pure that I am giddy, a nostalgia so sharp it could make me weep. What a miracle to have this assignment waiting for me…

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Daughter
(After Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
Liz Garton Scanlon

I

The downy head
nestled into the notch
at my neck
was my daughter’s

II

I unfolded, becoming
someone new,
someone unfamiliar,
shaped like who I was
meant to be

III

My daughter held onto
my hair, she reached out
for something beyond me,
something I could not see

IV

We were people
who called
each other
family

V

I wanted
to stop time,
I wanted to hold
every moving moment
like a warm egg in my hand

VI

Each cry
broke crystal,
each laugh
grew wings

VII

Suddenly
she was everywhere
like wind and water,
like all the birds
in a tree pushing off
at the same time

VIII

She was the shape
of the world,
she was the way
we learned to fly
beyond ourselves

IX

Finding her meant following
dropped crumbs and stitches
to see where we’d been,
to see where she’d landed

X

She didn’t belong
to anyone
and she never had

XI

A crowd gathered
around her, leaning in
to love her, parting
to let her through

XII

Listen to that
impossibly singular song

XIII

The woman
stepping off the train,
bag on her shoulder,
small silver bird nestled
into the notch of her neck,
was my daughter,
is still, is always
my daughter

Read the others here:
Tricia
Tanita
Mary Lee
Sara
Kelly
Laura

Hello, friends — I hope this finds you warm and well in the waning days of summer. Our prompt this month was to write ekphrastic poetry — commonly understood as poetry based on another piece of art. We all shared photos to use as our source material, but beyond that we went forward without boundaries or direction. Yikes, but also yay!

I created my own guardrails by working on a villanelle — increasingly my favorite form because of how insistently and inevitably musical it is. (Not to say I achieved that — just that it is a lovely land to visit…) Meanwhile, you’ll see that, while my poem is writing to and about a spider web, it took a distinctly family turn. The muse does what she does.

The Web Holds
Liz Garton Scanlon

Grandmother’s story hangs threadbare
unwinding with us as we go,
our loose attachments barely there

like spider silk, both art and snare.
A promise made too long ago,
Grandmother’s story hangs threadbare

and were she here, she’d say a prayer
that we’d hold tight to what we know
(our loose attachments barely there,

our grievances as clear as air)
and still, the tempting status quo:
Grandmother’s story hangs, threadbare.

What does it mean to be an heir?
First warp, then weft, then vertigo,
our loose attachments barely there,

it’s hard to say what’s right or fair.
The web is holding, even so…
Grandmother’s story hangs threadbare,
and our attachments are still there.

Enjoy the other poems here:
Tanita
Tricia
Mary Lee
Sara
Laura
Kelly

And here:
Susen Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti hosts Poetry Friday

See you in September, all!

Nine years ago we wrote some Want Ad haiku, and they were fun!

So, in the spirit of doing what we love at least once a decade, here we go again, although this time we’re using our neighborhood Buy Nothing groups as inspiration.

Oh, and from me an extra caveat. I’m currently trying to be on vacation, thus the brevity of this post, and the subject matter of my poems. Happy July, all!

Free for the taking:

this solitary morning

still as a stopped clock

Free for the asking:

Undivided attention

and my ringer off

This month our theme was wabi-sabi — a Japanese concept recognizing and honoring impermanence and imperfection — in us and in our earthly lives. The Zoom call with my poetry sisters was long and meandering and, if you must know, a bit fumbling and imperfect. As was the practice of writing this poem itself. So meta.

My draft (below) is in honor of my dad — a subtle and exquisite cook-without-a-cookbook kind of cook…

Kitchen Wabi-Sabi
By Liz Garton Scanlon

My dad, when he still
had his eyesight,
read cookbooks

and then cooked
without them

heating the oil
crushing the garlic
adding the salt

with gutsy abandon,
simmering and searing
to a timer

of his own making

following his own
loose lead, dancing
backwards

without assurances
that his foot would land
as intended

and the meals – each taste
a soft-shoe on the tongue –
well worth that risk

To read more imperfect poetry, visit:
Laura
Tanita
Sara
Mary Lee
Tricia
Kelly

And our very own Tricia is the Poetry Friday host, too!

As for next month? We’re writing haiku (it’s the heat of summer, please forgive our brevity) that resemble classified ads or Buy Nothing Group posts. Fun, right? Please join us — we love it when you do!

Our challenge this month was to write “In the style of…” Lucille Clifton’s homage to my hips. Specifically, we agreed to write in honor of a body part. Well, hello humanity, This Was Hard. I mean, not the poeming part so much as the honoring our body parts part.

Tanita recommended we watch Ms. Clifton read the poem aloud, instead of just reading it ourselves. That helped. She was funny and bold and irresistable. And then we talked about youth and age and society and … I don’t know … I think we got somewhere! Then? We wrote.

homage to my clavicle
after Lucille Clifton
by Liz Garton Scanlon

this bone drifts like a tilde

across my shoulder,

suspends itself

like a strut

so i don’t cave in

upon myself,

turns

like a little key

when i reach or wrest

or wave goodbye.

this bone, like that one

and that one and even

those, they construct

the house of me,

the room i wake up in,

the creaky floors, the doors

that sometimes stick,

the space i make

for myself.

Find my pals’ poems here:
Tanita
Tricia
Mary Lee
Laura

And Poetry Friday is being hosted by Janice at Salt City Verse!

Looking ahead… in June we’ll be writing poems entitled Wabi Sabi, which refers to the Japanese idea around finding beauty in the imperfect and incomplete. (HOW interesting that this follows on the heels of our body part odes, huh?) Anyway, join us?