Part 1 What were your first ventures into the world of writing? Did you start out with little short stories? One-act plays with parts portrayed by siblings or friends? Or were your first efforts poetic? If so, were your own writings ever inspired by a poem you had read?  Recently, I was reviewing some of my early attempts at poetry and was struck by one's similarity to a Carl Sandburg classic that I studied in high school. Fog by Carl Sandburg The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Obviously, the comparison of the fog to the silent stealth of the cat intrigued me to the extent that I still remember it. Below are a few lines from my poem, which was written in 1957, a year or two after I studied Sandburg's work. Because it is rather long, I will quote only the first few lines here. Night Night creeps over meadow and hill, Stealthy like a cat,  Minding no one's business but her own, Yet seeing all… This sim...

Poetry for me started with Mother Goose, many many decades ago. I still have a fondness for the old nursery rhymes, but of course, there's much more to this particular genre. To help you (and me) celebrate/appreciate Poetry Month, I wrangled together the “list of lists" below. So, hickory, dickory, dock , let's hop to it! (Or should that be hickety, dickety, dock ?) Hickety Dickety Dock 2, by William Wallace Denslow Public Domain   Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, turned to experts for A Real Poet’s Poet: 11 Favorite Poets on What They’re Reading for Poetry Month Bustle offers 14 collections in Here’s Your National Poetry Month Required Reading List New York Public Library’s “Poetry Committee” chimes in with It’s Poetry Month: Here Are NYPL’s Best Poetry Books of 2020 Because I’m a fan of haiku (a little volume of Little Enough is sitting by my desk), here is Read Poetry’s 10 Vivid Haikus to Leave You Breathless   Moving beyond Mother Goose, this Scholastic post lists ...

Today, we continue our Q&A with poet Kim Hansen. Quick Kim bio: Kim received her MFA in dance and spends time outdoors every day. Writing, especially poems and letters, is another way she explores the relationship of humans moving in our environments. Kim is a massage therapist and Feldenkrais Practitioner and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her astronomer husband and their translator son. You can view Part 1 of her interview here and connect with her on Facebook here  or email her at kim@KimHansen.org . Why do you do post your poetry daily on Facebook? Writer Laurie Wagner (teaches Wild Writing classes ) offered the Wild Writers a private Facebook page to share our work if we cared to, and she suggested there is something helpful about putting our words out there. I decided to do everything I could to make the most of those 27 days, so I posted my first piece to that Facebook page. I asked myself what would really push me, and I knew I wanted to put it on my own personal ...

Today we welcome poet Kim Hansen. Here's a little about Kim: Kim wasn’t sure whether to dance or work for the forestry department, so she received her MFA in dance and spends time outdoors every day. Writing, especially poems and letters, is another way she explores the relationship of humans moving in our environments. Kim is a massage therapist and Feldenkrais Practitioner and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her astronomer husband and their translator son. You can connect with Kim on Facebook here  or email her at kim@KimHansen.org In this two-part interview, Kim shares her journey into poetry writing, offers some advice, and talks about what is next for her. What got you started on writing poetry? I wrote poetry in school study halls when my homework was done, and I was looking for a way to spend time while also processing feelings. But that was a long time ago, and other than writing in journals though the years, or getting together with friends for free-writing sessions...

I am not a poet. Yes, I have written poetry, and some of it might even be palatable, but overall, it would receive no finger snaps upon hearing them. What I do have, however, is poetic license within my fiction and non-fiction writing. Just like fiction, there are elements within poetry that when developed well can heighten the caliber of the work. Some of those elements include voice , imagery , sound , rhythm , and structure ; I'm sure you already see how these elements find their way into fiction, too. We can all agree that fiction writers care about the voices of their characters , especially the voice(s) of the main character(s) that readers follow throughout a novel. What these characters say (and don't say) and how they say it informs readers and helps them to make the characters real in their minds. In developing their characters and the worlds in which they live, fiction writers also care about the use of imagery . This, of course, does not mean to write flowery pr...

Even if I admit to being deeply moved by Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb , delivered with such stirring passion at President Biden’s inauguration, poems are still not my thing. And even if I have a favorite poem that I’ll read again and again, specifically The Calf-Path by Sam Foss, poetry does not regularly call me to read or write in any of its forms. Counting syllables to create a meaningful haiku does not feel like fun. Even if I wanted to write more ambitious poems, I’d have to go back and learn the basics all over again. Any little thing I might have learned from my college class has long ago been deleted from memory. For me, National Poetry Month is less exciting than some of the other national month options. Did you know that April is also National Fresh Celery Month? I thought not. I love celery, especially with cream cheese. Or peanut butter. April is also National Humor Month. Humor has carried me through the last year via television comedy and the antics of my cat and do...

When I recently self-published my haiku books, I had to make many decisions that weren’t word-related. Like the cover designs for the books. I worked with Cathy Davis who I already knew to be an outstanding designer because she designed the covers and interiors for some of my clients’ books. First, Cathy and I, plus my VAA Janica Smith , spent half an hour on the phone talking about the general plans for the book. Because this was not just one book, but a series of seven, Cathy suggested that they all have commonality of design and color, yet could stand alone as individuals. Yes, that’s it, I said. Then Cathy emailed me a bunch of very detailed questions about my vision for the books, what I wanted readers to feel or know by reading them, what colors or images came to my mind when I thought about my books, and other great questions that made me think. I answered her questions as best I could. I said that haiku can be deceptively simple, deceptively plain, understate...

I was asked to present some of my poetry as examples of narrative, lyric, and dramatic—all dealing with a valentine theme and all about a similar subject. It was suggested that I do this in four lines apiece, but it is very difficult to write a narrative or a dramatic poem in only four lines. Lyric, however, no sweat—so here they are. The narrative and the dramatic could have had a rhyme scheme if I’d had longer to work on them. The lyric is free verse. The dramatic is sort of an unrhymed cowboy style. Note that “blush” is the key to all three. I hope you enjoy them. Narrative Maggie sat straight yet nervous at the interview, left hand smoothing out her skirt, right balancing her pen, point to tablet. Her blue eyes smiled when the chairman welcomed her, but I, from then on noticed only the smile in her blue eyes. And when they rested on me, I blushed. Dramatic Well, the stuffy chairman welcomed the bright new prospect gal after we had gathered in the stuffy room. “Well, y’all...

Dramatic poetry most often refers to the poetry used in writing stage plays such as tragedies and comedies. Poets who created works in this form include Aeschylus ( Agamemnon ), Sophocles ( Oedipus Rex ), Euripides ( Medea ), and Aristophanes ( Lysistrata )—all Greeks who utilized a specific poetic line. Shakespeare employed blank verse in his plays, and T.S. Eliot used verse in Murder in the Cathedral . In this discussion, however, I want to show how poetry forms can overlap by addressing the dramatic aspects that appear in both narrative and lyric poems. For example, when the poet speaks through another person or persons—that is, when he expresses his emotions through characters—we have drama, especially when the characters interact with one another. An application of this technique can be found in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” where the Duke as narrator speaks to another person about the painting of his last Duchess. This is known as dramatic monologue. Another option is fo...

Most poems express emotion, but lyric poetry expresses personal emotion. It may convey feelings of pain, fear, grief, love, anger, or joy. These emotions are communicated by using an economy of words worked into a number of possible patterns. The poet chooses the pattern that best fits his or her message. If the poet wants to write a love poem, for instance, he or she might opt to use the sonnet form, which contains fourteen lines divided into three quatrains (four line stanzas) and a couplet. An abab or abba end rhyme pattern may be used for each quatrain, and a cc end rhyme pattern for the couplet. Rules then dictate the progression from quatrain to quatrain. All patterns have basic rules, which must be learned by the fledgling poet and should be appreciated by the reader. These patterns include the ode, the triolet, the pantoum, blank verse, terza rima, ballad form, eulogy, elegy, and so forth. The poet may choose one or another pattern because of specific meter (iambic for the sonn...