Poems

I enjoy writing poems in series. It’s not that I write those exclusively, but they seem to be a ballast to my ongoing writing activities.

For example, during my “ghazal period” I wrote a number of poems in that Middle Eastern form that uses rhyming couplets and a refrain. The ghazal “Given Fire, Given Water” under the Read Tab is a variation of the traditional form championed by Robert Bly.

I have also written a series of the aptly named abecedarian poem where the first letter of each line follows sequentially through the alphabet. This form challenges the writer to come up with creative directions for the poem, especially for some of the difficult letters of the alphabet like j, q, x and z. See the poem “It Takes Two to Tarot:  An Abecedarian Romance” under the Link Tab.

The poems in Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine are persona poems written in the voice of women. I found these poems exciting and satisfying to write because I did research on the women and read about their lives. We traveled to New Mexico to see Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu and saw her work in the Georgia O’Keeffe gallery in Santa Fe. We visited the Frank Lloyd Wright home in Spring Green, Wisconsin and learned about Wright’s marital affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney and that inspired poems in the voice of Mrs. Cheney and Mrs. Wright. As a bird watcher I read the biography of John James Audubon and became interested in how his wife made possible many of his ornithology adventures.

My next series may be self-portrait poems. Contemporary poets are doing imaginative leaps using the self-portrait poem as a starting place and I want to experiment with the venue.