Poets and Poems: Jen Karetnick and "Organ Language"

A grandmother’s jewelry. A heavy rainfall. The fruit in a pina colada. A soccer game. Accompanying a parent to a medical procedure. Waiting for biopsy results. A can opener. Grief. Riding in the car with your sister. Gardening. A frog. Cicadas. Arthritis. The neighbor who calls you by the wrong name. 

What all these disparate things have in common is that they’re familiar. common, everyday. They’re so familiar that we often forget them or overlook them. 

 

In the hands of poet Jen Karetnick, however, the familiar and the common become something else. She reaches into her own childhood. She considers the experiences of her own children. She looks at the life she’s living now. The subjects are largely what we know as experiences common to all of us, but Karetnick shows us how the familiar will also indicate something deeper, something more profound. That’s the heart and soul of her new collection, Organ Language.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Night jar – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Planted – poem by L.L. Barkat at Every Day Poems.

 

“You, Andrw Marvell,” poem by Archibald MacLeish – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poetry Club Tea Date: The Pershing Hotel – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Do You Hear Birds? – poem by Elizabeth Wickland at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Peter Murphy and “You, Too, Were Once on Fire”

About the time my mother turned 75, she said something to me that she’d been apparently been saving up. “You know,” she said, “I’ve reached an age when I can say what I think, and I don’t have to worry about what happens because of it.” This was something she learned from her own mother, who’d made some kind of similar announcement at about the same age. Except my grandmother had been doing exactly that long before she announced it. So had my mother. 

I remembered those statements as I read deeper into You, Too, Were Once on Fire: Poems by Peter Murphy. Ad those thoughts hit me as I read “Stairs to All Levels,” a poem about Frank O’Hara and New York City and the Twin Towers and 9?11, and you don’t even realize it until the end of the poem hits you upside the head with a smack. It was that poem, followed immediately by “Miss Besieged Sarajevo,” about a beauty contestant during the Bosnian War in 1993, that made me realize I needed to make sure my seat belt was buckled and tray tables were locked securely for takeoff.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

A Giant on the Shoulder of Giants – J.C. Scharl at Public Discourse.

 

Hands of Christ – poem by Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Your Poems: The Beachy Poem Challenge – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (excerpt), poem by Samuel Talyor Coleridge – Every Day Poems.

 

“Jabberwocky,” poem by Lewis Carroll – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and “Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life”

The end of a relationship with a spouse or partner is like a death – a death of familiarity, a death of structure, a death of how we live our lives and who we share that life with. I’ve never experienced that kind of loss, but I’ve seen it happen to close friends and family members.  

Gabrielle Myers experienced that kind of loss, a relationship she ended after “five years of verbal abuse.” She did what many poets do – she turned to writing poetry to understand it, assimilate it, and resolve it –if such a thing can ever truly be resolved. But she did it in a rather unique way, by using the natural landscape around her to structure and explain her poems. And her loss.

 

The result is Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life, Myers’ fourth collection of poetry. It could also be subtitled with the words she uses to begin her introductory essay: “Begin to Know the World Again from Nothing.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Splendor of the Orient – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17.

 

August, in Passing – poem by Riyanka Paul.

 

Sonnets in St. Louis: The Life of Sara Teasdale – Zoe Korte at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Piets and Poems: Martyn Hesford and "Ash Light"

I don’t know if grief is really a thing with feathers. Sometimes I think of it as a ghost, sometimes there, sometimes gone, but able to suddenly appear and startle you almost to tears. My father died nearly 40 years ago; grief didn’t hit me until three years after his death. My mother died 12 years ago; I felt it immediately. My half-sister, 11 years older, died several years ago; it felt like part of my childhood died, the time I knew her best. My half-brother, eight years older, died last year, and that one hit me harder than all the others. The best and worst conversation of my life was our last phone call, when he knew he’d die soon and was saying goodbye.  

But all these griefs return, not at once and not with the same intensity. Some dull with time; some don’t. The ghosts of grief are likely a measure of the strength and depth of the relationship. What I’ve learned is that grief, with all its ghosts, can be another form of love.

 

These thoughts about griefs and family and ghosts came bubbling up when I read Ash Light: Poems, the latest poetry collection by Martyn Hesford. (The collection is available through both Amazon UK and the publisher, Grey Swan Press.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

St. Clare: A Sonnet – Malcolm Guite.

 

Summer Camp Highlights – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

The Ragged Hand of Winter – Sonnet by K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

Poets and Poems: Sally Nacker and "My Wild Yard"

Poet Sally Nacker lives in a house in or near a woods. That means her home is surrounded by nature. To experience nature, all she has to do is open her door and inhale. It was perhaps inevitable that she would find poetic inspiration here. All she had to do was walk in her yard. 

Find it she did.

 

My Wild Yard is a small taste of living in a natural setting. The 16 poems of this chapbook are simple and direct, inspired by the landscape around her. The poems are short; the longest is four stanzas of four lines each.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

How a Luna Moth Grows Up – poem by Adam Whipple at New Verse Review.

 

The Weight of Time – poem by Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

“On Vacation,” poem by Sally Thomas – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Sleep of Seeds – poem by Lucia Cherciu at Every Day Poems.

 

“The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life” – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review.

Poets and Poems: Tamara Madison and “Morpheus Dips His Oar”

I don’t think I was quite ready for Morpheus Dips His Oar: Poems, the 2023 collection by Tamara Madison. The word that comes to mind is raw, something beyond candid. These are the words of understanding of what has shaped a life. 

Most of that shaping is by people – parents, siblings, family friends who might be a bit too friendly. There’s the mother who is mystified by her own grandchildren and any other children not her own, but she can quickly sketch them, “stilled like insects on flypaper.” The postmaster, her mother’s friend, is a little too friendly with his hands. Her friend’s father, a professor who seems so sweet, drives his daughter to attempted suicide. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Twwwtspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings 

 

“The Toys,” poem by Coventry Patmore – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Marriage – poem by David Whyte.

 

Excerpt from The Portal to the Mystery of Hope by Charles Peguy – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Poet Laura: Summer’s End – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Trish Hopkinson and “A Godless Ascends”

Poets, and writers in general, write from their own lives, their own experiences. How we are shaped as individuals is reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in what we write.  A Godless Ascends, the 2024 collection by Trish Hopkinson, kept punching that home in my head as I read. 

Shew rites about her family, her childhood, and herself. She writes about her mother and her father. She says this about her father: “Truth is, / my dad’s book closed before he learned / to read, so he bult a burning house instead / & when a thief offered him gold, he didn’t fight or turn to run / but swallowed it whole, carried it like lead in his throat.” That may at first sound cruel or uncharitable, but it is precise, a daughter weighing what she finally understands. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Bathing – poem by Sonja Bnskin Mesher.

 

“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Kelly Keller at On the Common.

 

Waiting at Life’s Window: R.S. Thomas’s “The Word” – Alexander Fayne.

 

Blankets & Boston Terriers: Interview with Tania Runyan – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Under the Harvest Moon – poem by Carl Sandburg at Every Day Poems.

Poets and Poems: Sarah Dickinson Snyder and “To Eve”

The Book of Genesis says that Eve was created from a rib of Adam, to provide a helpmate and companion. Many have pointed out that it was a rib that was used to create her, implying equality or, more pointedly, “equalness” in the eyes of God. The story of the fall is familiar – Eve is convinced by the serpent to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she convinces Adam, and they’re both thrown out of Eden. For their disobedience, Adam has to work the soil, and Eve gets pain in childbirth. And we know the names and stories of her first two sons, Cain and Abel, and the name of her third, Seth, whom she recognizes as a gift. 

Beyond those basic facts, there’s no further mention of Eve in the Bible. In To Eve: A Book-Length Poem, Sarah Dickinson Snyder doesn’t envision what Eve’s life was like so much as she considers Eve’s mind, her thoughts, her feelings, her hopes and dreams. And she uses Eve as a kind of lens to consider some of her own life and the life of women more generally. The poem is less an imagined biography and more of a reflection.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Ballad of Zebulon Pike – poem by M.D. Skeen at The Society of Classical Poets.

 

“Jordan,” poem by George Herbert – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Tina Kelley and "Field Guide to North American Words"

Poet Tina Kelley seems fascinated with words, unusual often obscure words. Have you met an aeolist (a person who claims to be inspired), or been blessed by one? Have you experienced a diapause (a period of suspended development? Have you discovered that you might, at least on occasion, be a prosopagnosic (one who suffers face blindness), or that you can practice steganography (a form of writing that obscures, like invisible ink)? 

In Field Guide to Noth American Words, Kelley takes those unusual words and others and creates poems, poems that are not obscure or unusual, vivid poems about life, birthdays, aging, hacked passwords, birthdays, the future (as seen through birds), an old doll in an attic, all those rooms that the hallways of unusual words can lead you to. Like any proper field guide, the words are arranged alphabetically.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Words – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Beachy Poem Challenge – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Here in This Room – poem by Larua Wifler at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

The Land of Childhood – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Every Day Poems.

 

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” poem by John Donne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Arlene Demaris and “Instructions for Use”

I’ve read poems that are filled with tenderness. I’ve read poems that have an edge. But I can’t think of a collection I’ve read that have both tenderness and an edge. 

That is, until I read Instructions for Use: Poems by Arlene Demaris. Not only does she write poems that are tender with understanding, she also drops any idea of rose-colored glasses and smacks you with often-shocking reality. And what you realize is that this is life, with the good and the bad mixing together into one lump of what it means to be human. Or as Demaris writes, we forget “how much of us is salt water, how much of us is music.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” poem by Mina Loy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: One Fine July Day – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Lifetime Lease – poem by Seth Lewis.

 

“Song of Marion’s Men,” poem by Wiliam Cullen Byant – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“Omaha Beach” and “Common Sense” – poems by Bradford Skow at Society of Classical Poets.

Poets and Poems: Bradford Skow and “American Independence in Verse”

Before the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, there was at least some 15 years of growing American disenchantment with Britain. The roots of the American Revolution lie in the French and Indian War (1756-1763), but it’s often said that the American Declaration of Independence has its roots in the Magna Carta.  

Fortunately, the historical landscape is littered with documentation of what was happening in the American colonies: statements, declarations, letters, newspaper reports, speeches, and more. The 15 years before the Declaration was a ferment of ideas, debates, and arguments that grew with every new event, every new action by the British government.

 

What is striking about all this is what a literate ferment it was. Menand women argued literately on both sides of the governance and independence question. You can read only some of these documents before you realize how articulate and passionate they are.

 

And poetic.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

4^th Sunday of Each Month – poem by J.A. Gilbert at Frivolous Quill.

 

New Video! – Brookhaven | Civil War Novel – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Seeing Slant in the Company of Others – Eric Malczewski at Front Porch Republic.

 

“The Men That Don’t Fit In,” poem by Robert Service – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Crème Brulee -- poem by Toby Alfier at Every Day Poems.

Poets and Poems: David Livewell and “Pass and Stow”

It was the title that attracted me to David Livewell’s new poetry collection, Pass and Stow: Poems. It sounded like something related to transportation or hauling freight. It turned out to be people’s last names. 

As Livewell explains, John Pass and John Stow worked in the foundry in Philadelphia that recast the Liberty Bell in 1753. The foundry was in the same neighborhood where Livewell grew up in the 1970s. In his words, the two men “serve as reminders about the city’s layered past and what outward and inward repair can achieve.”

 

In the collection, Livewell applies the idea of layered past and repair to tell a story through poetry. And he is a grand storyteller. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

10 Things Poets & Writers Can Do in the Small Moments – TS Poetry at The Write to Poetry.

 

“The Fairies,” poem by William Allingham – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“A tailor-bird’s song of triumph,” from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“Redcar Collector,” a short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free to download today at Amazon.com. 

Poets and Poems: Fanny Howe and "This Poor Book"

Fanny Howe (1940-2025) was the author of some 13 poetry collections, five novels, and numerous short stories and essays. Her collection Second Childhood: Poems (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.  

Shortly before her death in 2025, Howe completed another manuscript, This Poor Book: A Poem. It is and isn’t a poem. It is and isn’t a poetry collection. It is and isn’t a memoir, an autobiography, a poetic essay. It is one of the most unusual works I’ve read.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Bringing Characters to Life – 1 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Erin Murphy and "Swoon"

I’ve read a considerable number of poetry collections subtitled “New and Selected Poems” or “Collected Poems.” But it was only reading “Swoon: New & Selected Poems” by Erin Murphy that I realized that such a collection could also be a biography. 

Murphy has assembled poems from 11 previously published collections plus a few new ones. The result is a collective story of a life, from childhood memories, through young adulthood, the arrival of children, changes in relationships, the deaths of friends, the music enjoyed, travel, vacations, worries about physical appearance, observations about celebrities. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The chain ferry – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Emily Dickinson, buttercups, and death – Padraig O Tuana at Poetry Unbound.

 

“The Waste Land,” poem by T.S. Eliot – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Uncharted – poem by Bethany Lee at Every Day Poems.

 

Crossing the Trestle – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Diana Lockward and “The Color Wheel”

I don’t recall where I read it, but some blogger or publication or Substack posted a poetry prompt: write about a color without ever mentioning the name of it. It’s both easier and harder than it looks. To make it more difficult, try writing a poem about a color with mentioning the color or an associated feeling or emotion. 

An exercise like that does make you immediately aware of the importance color can have in poetry and even in everyday conversation. We feel blue. We see red. We’re in the pink. That potato salad made me feel green. His mood was black. 

 

Poet, editor, and publisher Diana Lockward says she’s long had an attraction to poems that use color. Over the years, she kept a folder of poems that did exactly that. And then, she had an idea – an anthology of poems that make strategic use of color. She put out a call for submissions. 

 

And poets responded. At least 117 of them did, and likely more, each by a different poet. And The Color Wheel: Poems was born. And the result is, well, more diverse and colorful than you might expect.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

“The Ballad of the Dead Ladies,” poem by Dante Gabirel Rossetti – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“The Cottage on the Ridge” and “The Garden Hermit’s Confession” – poems at Martin Rizley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“And if I Did, What Then?”, poem by George Gascoigne – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Joanne Esser and "Nothing Is Stationary"

Something happens when you read a poetry collection, while you watch soft rainfall outside the kitchen window, raindrops making tiny splashes in the birdbath. The birds have taken cover somewhere. So have the squirrels, especially the one who likes to dig up the zinnias. The young rabbit who finds the rose bush – with all its thorns! – delicious is missing. And you find yourself slipping into reflection.  

If the poetry collection is one like Nothing Is Stationary, the new publication by Joanne Esser, your reflections are not only sharpened but also take you down paths you didn’t expect to go. Esser is realizing that most of her life is behind her, and she’s thinking about where she came from and where she is. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Sowers – poem by Gabriele D’Annunzio.

 

Mr. Pope – Poem by Allen Tate at Academy of American Poets.

 

“Dover Beach,” poem by Matthew Arnold – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Dark Green, Forest Green – poem by Linda Nemec Foster at Every Day Poems.

 

Stern Shoots Marilyn – poem by Mauren Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

“Sheep,” poem by W.H. Davies – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient an Modern.

 

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “The View from Childhood”

We all have childhood and family stories, good ones, bad ones, and usually some of each. Childhood shapes us, helping us be the adults we eventually become. We learn things, directly and indirectly, by living in the families we have. 

In The View from Childhood: Poems, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell takes both a candid and loving look at her Italian Catholic immigrant family. It’s a loving look, one that includes thankfulness to her elder siblings for introducing her to serious poetry (she says she originally wanted to be an opera singer). But like all families, there are things you don’t want to learn and prefer not to see. But they’re there, and you learn to come to terms with them. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Orthodoxy – poem by Scott Cairns at The Rabbit Room.

 

Praise Song for My Mother – Andrea Potos at Every Day Poems.

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade – poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson at Every Day Poems.

Poets and Poems: Ayala Zarfijian and “A Corner in the World”

“The war endures in you,” writes poet Ayala Zarfjian, “It lingers in your capillaries, / in your arteries, / in your veins. / The war is a river that bridges the past to the present.”  The war she’s speaking about is World War II and the part of the war that made it unlike any other – the Holocaust. If you’re Jewish, the Holocaust is not something that’s ever over. 

That’s the theme that threads through every poem in Zarfjian’s collection A Corner in the World. She wrote the poems specifically for her father, who survived the Holocaust while most of the family perished. Zarfjian has written them so that the stories they tell, and the people they’re about, will not be forgotten, that the Holocaust itself will not be written off as someone’s crazy conspiracy theory but the real destruction of people, millions of people, that tragically, horribly happened.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

An Overness – poem by Anna Friedrich at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Eve Letter: Home Economics – poem by Kathryn Weld at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Vogue exploring – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Poets and Poems: Julia Alvarez and :Visitations

Have you ever read a poetry collection that catapults you back three decades? 

Another lifetime ago (35 years, to be exact), I wrote book reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was an offshoot from a graduate seminar on the Latin American novel. I had more than liked the assigned readings; I’d discovered a world that went beyond the one Latin American novel I’d previously read, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

At the time I started writing book reviews, publishing was in the midst of a Latin American boomlet, an echo of the original “boom” in the 1960s and 1970s. After an introductory conversation, the newspaper’s book editor began routing any book relating to Latin America, Spain, and Hispanic culture in the United States. 

 

One of the books I reviewed was How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by writer and poet Julia Alvarez. It’s a story about four sisters in the Dominican Republic whose father is forced to flee the Trujillo regime. Her parents return to New York City, becoming with their children people of two cultures. It’s a novel, but it’s drawn from Alvarez’s own family history.

 

Thirty-five years later, I picked up her new poetry collection, Visitations: Poems. And, suddenly, I was back in 1991, reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Shakespeare,” poem by Matthew Arnold – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Blue sky – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“Properties of a Good Greyhound,” poem by Dame Juliana Berners – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Fred Chappell at "Ever After"

I came to the writing of Fred Chappell (1936-2024) through his novels. A friend at work, who’d grown up in the mountains of West Virginia, recommended I read I Am One of You Forever. It’s set where most of Chappell’s novels are set – the mountains of western North Carolina. And it’s a wonder. Over the years, I read several of his other novels and story collections. Superficially, Chappell might sound like North Carolina’s answer to Kentucky’s Wendell Berry. Even though they’re approximate contemporaries writing about family, heritage, and place, they’re very different kinds of writers. 

 

It was only in 2015 that I discovered how Chappell had first made his name – through poetry. I happened across a used copy of his 2000 collection, River: A Poem. It’s one poem with 11 divisions, and it tells a story, the story of his grandparents. It’s aptly named; reading it is like wading through a river of memory and family history. 

 

As it turns out that River is one of some 18 collections of poetry that Chappell published between 1971 and 2009. In fact, he published more poetry volumes than works of fiction. In 2024, the year of his death, LSU Press published his last collection, Ever After: Poems.

To continue reading, pease see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Fray Alonso in La Florida, A.D. 1587 – Coldy Ilardo at Power & Glory.

 

Morning sticks – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“Alice in the Looking Glass,” poem by A.E. Stallings – Joseph Bottum and Adam Roberts at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Apple of Granada – Hedy Habra at Every Day Poems. 

Around Three in the After – Laura Wifler at Rabbit Room Poetry.