Valentine's Day Poems

Valentine's Day puts pressure on poets.

If you write poems, it is expected that you can and will write love poems. Poets know that's not always the case.

I went last week to a poetry and wine tasting event as a prelude to V Day. The two featured poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Laura Boss, read a variety of love poems. Variety because both emphasized that love poems and Valentines could be to husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, children, mothers and fathers.

I read one poem. I had selected three possibilities:  a love poem to Poetry, one about my wife (who was in the audience) and one from and to my father. I went with that last one. (see bottom of post). It's not my favorite or one of my best poems, but it's one I like and had never read to an audience. It's a bit sentimental and that's allowed on Valentine's Day.

Back in 1986, Ted Kooser (U.S. Poet Laureate 2004–2006) sent a Valentine's Day poem on a postcard to 50 women. Over the next three decades, he sent his annual poem to an increasing number of women (in 2007 there were 2,600 recipients). He collected those poems and added one dedicated to his wife. (Sending out Valentine's poems to women that are not your wife could be dangerous.)

There are some simple pen and ink drawings (by Robert Hanna) included in the collection which is simply titled Valentines. Not every poem is a "love poem" or a traditional greeting card Valentine sentiment - but poets will recognize why each could be a poem for that occasion.

This is the first of the Kooser poems.

Pocket Poem

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.

(from Ted Kooser's collection of poems Valentines)

Here's the poem I read that night.

Love Letters

My father hid his love letters in the ceiling.
Not a man of words,
a man who found it hard to sit
and easier to be working.
The patio built stone by stone;
a barbecue pit of bricks
salvaged from a factory razed in 1960 -
those were his stories.
And the '49 Mercury that aged as he restored it -
his first new car, four years from war, his first good job -
and a two year old daughter.
Maybe this draftsman, who planned on paper
with precision lines, measured angles,
shadings that made a two-point perspective seem real,
maybe he was trying to hold time when
in the home they bought when I was born,
he hid his love letters in the new ceiling,
and under the refinished oak floor,
inside staircase balustrades he stripped, smoothed and stained
in the roots of the peach trees
and the tomato plants,
and in pipes he replaced.
He hid them so well,
that it took me all these years
to know where to find them.

Ken Ronkowitz

Valentines by Ted Kooser
Arms: New and Selected Poems by Laura Boss
Where I Come From - by Maria Gillan
All That Lies Between Us - by Maria Gillan

Lucille Clifton Dies at 73

Lucille Clifton  1936-2010

Lucille Clifton, who achieved some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died today at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73.
Clifton had been ill for some time with an undiagnosed infection and had undergone surgery to remove her colon yesterday. 

Clifton lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state. She was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and won the National Book Award in 2001 for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation.

 

Lucille Clifton reads "What Haunts Him" and "Sorrows" at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival

SELECTED BOOKS BY CLIFTON

• Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980
• The Book of Light
• Next: New Poems
• Quilting: Poems 1987-1990

Poetry for the Mind’s Joy

Detailed information on U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan’s poetry project with community colleges—"Poetry for the Mind’s Joy"—can now be found on the Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov/poetry/mindsjoy.

Ryan, a longtime community college teacher of remedial English, last fall announced the "Poetry for the Mind’s Joy" project to highlight poetry being written on community-college campuses.

The poetry project’s new web page includes information on a poetry contest, which ends February 25, and information on the April 1 videoconference with Kay Ryan and selected community-college students and officials across the nation. The web page also features a video of Ryan discussing her poetry project.

The Community College Humanities Association is administering the poetry contest. Winning poems will be chosen by each community college and the winners will become eligible to be included in the anthology on the new web page. The anthology will be displayed this spring as a virtual book with digital page-turning technology.

The videoconference, which will include a discussion on how to write poetry, will be hosted by MAGPI, the Mid Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet 2, , in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Initiative of Internet2, . This event will be streamed live to the web, and will demonstrate the online possibilities available for educational institutions working with the Library of Congress.

The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress administers the poetry series, which began in the 1940s and is the oldest in the Washington area and among the oldest in the United States. The readings and lectures are free and have been largely supported since 1951 by a gift from the late Gertrude Clarke Whittall. The center is also the home of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, a position that has existed since 1936, when the late Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress.

Prompt: Lost and Found

All poetry is found somewhere or in something. That's what inspiration is all about. The writing of "Found Poetry" formalizes that mostly accidental practice.

For this month, Poets Online is asking for found poems as submissions.

Not only can this technique serve as an antidote to writer's block, but it can also offer you fresh topics, language, images, and observations.

You can use newspaper articles, headlines, advertisements, junk mail, letters from others and a thousand other starting points.

In the samples I have put on the prompt on our main site (two of them are my own), the sources were a newspaper article in the cooking section and an email.

Here's a found poem that came from a magazine ad.

CHANCES ARE

Depression isolates you
all alone in the world.
Suddenly,
for no apparent reason -
trouble sleeping,
irritable,
trouble feeling pleasure,
lose your appetite.
Symptoms.
Too much to handle.
Everyday life
may drop.

That can happen.

And someone you love
is blossoming again.

(found in a magazine ad for the drug Prozac)

Here is another found poem. Reading it without knowing the source might make it work better.

TO THE HAPPINESS OF MAN

Infidelity does not consist in believing,
or in disbelieving.

It consists in professing to believe
what one does not believe.

Priests and conjurors
are of the same trade,

and the most formidable weapon
against errors of every kind

is reason.

I have used that poem with students and teachers as a way to open a discussion that might deal with happiness, belief or reason. I reveal that it is a found poems and that all the words come from a piece they are going to read by Thomas Paine. It makes the point that some of his lines, especially when read in isolation and with the focus we give a line of poetry, are profound. Later, I will have them do the same kind of thing with another reading - simply pulling out selected lines and phrases that are striking (whether or not we ever create poetry from them).

The rules for this month's writing prompt?

In its purest form, a found poem uses only the words found in the source - no changing verb forms, making plurals etc. You can add or subtract capitalization and punctuation. And your most powerful tools, next to your careful selection and ordering, are line breaks and stanzas. I would also allow that adding an original title can sometimes make a huge difference in the way the poem will be read.

You must identify the original source either at the beginning or end of the poem. (Sometimes putting it at the top ruins some poetic tension.) If the source is online, you could give a link for the reader to follow.

Found poetry is a great lesson for students because it forces them to focus on how word selection, titles and layout change the meaning of the words. Context changes everything - a good lesson for writer and reader.

There's a nice "lesson plan" on the Library of Congress website for using their vast collection in the American Memory collection (such as the Life Histories collected from 1936-1940) as starting places for your found poems.

With students, I have sometimes added additional levels of complexity - like asking that they find rhymes in the original and use them, or construct a poem in a form (sonnets etc.). You might raise the bar for your own attempt in the same way.

Here's an example poem from the Library of Congress site:

Found Poetry Based on Elsie Wall

from American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Rocks in her chair between supper and dinner,
thirty-two but looks forty-five.
Never learned how to chop in the garden,
never learned right how to pay at the store.

Rocks in her chair between supper and dinner,
children in rags lined up on the porch:
all she can count, all she can figure.
How can she clothe them to send them to school?

Daughters with bright eyes of Jean Harlow,
hang Jesus and movie stars framed on the walls.
Six dollars a week for six mouths in the family:
How will they work, get out of this town?

Jim works in the cotton mill, tends crops in the garden.
Elsie can cook if there's food in the house.
Pots catch the flow from the rainy roof leaks.
Rocks on her porch in rain or in fine.

An interesting lost and found project that has resulted in a magazine, several books and a website is Found Magazine.

They collect stuff (love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles) that they and others have found (and submit to the magazine) as a way of getting a glimpse into someone else's life.

Sometimes the things tell a story. Sometimes they suggest a story for you to tell.

You might find some objects on their site to inspire your own found poems.

Their bound collections include Found Magazine #7: Feel A Connection,  Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World, and anthologies like Found II.

Here's an example of a lost and found item from their site.

This 45 RPM record sleeve was found inside a used copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 that someone bought in a used record store.

Did the writer plan to give her that record? Did he give it to her and she sold it at the used record store, not even caring to keep the note - but also not destroying it?