Prompt: Personal Holidays

December is a big month for holidays both religious, pagan and secular. Many people love these holidays and spend a lot of time and money celebrating them. But not everyone is a fan of these "official" holidays.

In the poem "A New Law" by Greg Delanty, he proposes:

Let there be a ban on every holiday.
No ringing in the new year.
No fireworks doodling the warm night air.
No holly on the door. I say
let there be no more.
For many are not here who were here before.

I wouldn't propose that radical of a change in holidays, but I understand the sentiment.

For this December call for submissions in the 25th year of Poets Online, we are looking for poems about personal holidays. These are the holidays that perhaps only you celebrate. They are not on official calendars but they might be on your personal calendar. Not birthdays, anniversaries, national holidays, or religious holy days, not even Festivus.

In Galway Kinnell's poem "The 26th of December" he marks the day after Christmas not as being connected to that holiday but as" A Tuesday, day of Tiw, / god of war." Not exactly what most people would connect to the day after Christmas.

He celebrates the short day by

"talking by the fire,
floating on snowshoes among
ancient self-pollarded maples,
visiting, being visited, giving
a rain gauge, receiving red socks,
watching snow buntings nearly over
their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits
of sunflower seeds the chickadees
hold with their feet to a bough
and hack apart, scattering debris
like sloppy butchers"

It is a short holiday, one day and in a season of short days. And when it is over, " Irregular life begins" again, as with many holidays.

"Telephone calls,
Google searches, evasive letters,
complicated arrangements, faxes,
second thoughts, consultations,
e-mails, solemnly given kisses."

Give us a poem about your personal holiday. Why do you mark the day(s) and how do you celebrate? (If celebrate is even what you do.) 

Submission Deadline: December 31, 2023   Happy New Year!

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Galway Kinnell was an award-winning poet best known for poetry that connects the experiences of daily life to much larger poetic, spiritual, and cultural forces. Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in Pawtucket. A self-described introvert as a child, he grew up reading reclusive American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. After two years of service in the U.S. Navy, he earned a BA in 1948 from Princeton University where he was classmates with poet W.S. Merwin. He earned an MA from the University of Rochester a year later.

Of his first books, What a Kingdom it Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964) and Body Rags(1968) which contains the bulk of Kinnell’s most praised and anthologized poems. Selected Poems (1982), for which Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize and was co-winner of the National Book Award in 1983, contains works from every period in the poet’s career and was released just shortly before he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. Kinnell released the retrospective collection, A New Selected Poems (2001), focusing on poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, and his Collected Poems was published in 2017.
Kinnell lived in Vermont for many years. He died in 2014 at the age of 87.

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Prompt: Valentines

I was watching the video of Naomi Shihab Nye reading "Valentine for Ernest Mann," which was made as part of the Academy of American Poets' educational project for National Poetry Month in 2014.

There will be many cards given on February 14 with good and bad verses about love. But not all Valentine's Day verses have to be about love or be happy - though that is usually the hope.

Did you give and get valentines as a child in school? When my sons were in elementary school, we were told that you had to have one for everyone in the class. This seemed to defeat the purpose, but it was politically correct and we looked for packages of cards that contained ones that were innocuous enough to give to both his female and his male classmates without causing a scene.

Reading Valentine for Ernest Mann by Naomi Shihab Nye, we find her response to a request for a poem from a boy. (I imagine it to be a student in a class she has visited.) That's not the way it works with poems, she might have said. But she does write him a poem, even though:

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Nevertheless, the poet continues:

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

She has suggestions on where you might find a poem: "They are the shadows / drifting across our ceilings the moment / before we wake up." And advice: "What we have to do / is live in a way that lets us find them."

Her valentine to Ernest is a poem, but it is also ways to find his own poems.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

Our writing prompt for February is a valentine, but that certainly doesn't mean it must be a love poem. It might be difficult to find a serious or sad Valentine's Day card in a store, but I'm sure they have been written. 



A poet connection to all of this goes back to medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. There are no records before his writing of romantic celebrations on Valentine’s Day. But when he wrote around 1375 his “Parliament of Foules,” he connected a tradition of courtly love with the celebration of St. Valentine’s feast day. That connection didn’t exist until he made it. In his poem February 14 is the day when birds and humans try to find a mate.

“For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.”

Chaucer may have invented the holiday.

The original valentine predates Chaucer. That valentine may have expressed love, but was certainly written under sad conditions. According to one version, an imprisoned Valentine (not yet Saint Valentine) sent a note of love to a young girl (possibly his jailor’s daughter–who visited him during his confinement) before his execution. He signed it “From your Valentine.” That expression is still in use today.

Submission Deadline for this prompt is February 28. Yipes! Short month!

Holidays

Holidays

       by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those

    Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

    The secret anniversaries of the heart,

    When the full river of feeling overflows;—

The happy days unclouded to their close;

    The sudden joys that out of darkness start

    As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart

    Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!

White as the gleam of a receding sail,

    White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,

    White as the whitest lily on a stream,

These tender memories are;— a Fairy Tale

    Of some enchanted land we know not where,

    But lovely as a landscape in a dream.