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: Donna Hilbert and "Gravity"

One aspect of collected and selected poem editions is that the insight they offer into how a poet grows and develops. I have a 1980 edition (20^th printing, no less) of the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which is something of a personal treasure. On the bookshelf, it sits very close to The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot (Annotated; 2015), which I hauled back from England in my carryon bag and developed new arm muscles in the process. Both works helped me see how the two poets developed over a lifetime of writing poetry.

Collections aren’t only for famous dead poets. Donna Hilbert has been publishing poetry collections for 35 years. A consistent theme in her work has been an exploration of home and family and navigating life within that context. In 2018, she published Gravity: New & Selected Poems, a selection of selected poems from past collections as well as a number of new poems. This winter, her publisher has issued a second edition of Gravity. 

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Translations of New Verse Review 2.1 – Steve Knepper at New Berse Review.

 

“Disobedience,” poem by A.A. Milne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Attic – Poem by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

 

Title poem from The Mother of All Words – Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and “Enormous Blue Umbrella”

You reach a point in your life (notice I said “point,” not “age,” but “age” works, too) when everything reminds you of something. It’s not so much that you realize, in the words from Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun, as much as it is being constantly reminded of something you experienced or someone you knew. It might be the face of the supermarket checker, or the way light and shadow appear on a door, or the smell of flowers. I can smell sweet pea flowers and suddenly I’m eight or nine, sitting by the fence of my friend Paul Brown down the street, playing the Battle card game. 

It was that infusion of memory, childhood, and life that kept coming to mind as I read Enormous Blue Umbrella, the new collection by Donna Hilbert. The poems are not a chronological walk from childhood to adulthood. Instead, they are about present things that have been strongly shaped by the past, about how we view the world has deep roots in our earliest memories.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

Close and Slow: Emily Dickinson’s Poem 599 – Andrew Rycroft at The Sounding Board.

 

“Winter, My Secret,” poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Cold Child – poem by Cora Clark at The New Criterion.

 

“The Duel,” poem by Eugene Field – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and "Threnody"

Poet Donna Hilbert has something to say about the idea of lament. And like the fine poet she is, she says it in poetry.

 

A lament is a poetic type inspired by deep, personal grief. The poetry of lament is as old as poetry itself, cording to the Encyclopedia Britannica, developing alongside the oral tradition of heroic poetry. And it’s found in most languages.

 

Examples of lament poetry have been found in ancient Sumeria, in Homer, in Roman literature, and in Anglo-Saxon England. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Man of Laws Tale” in The Canterbury Tales is a lament, as is John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes.” Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley wrote lament poems, as did Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy (“The Darkling Thrush”). With In Memoriam, Tennyson may have written a lament epic. Dylan Thomas and Pablo Neruda wrote poems of lament.

Hilbert, in Threnody: Poems, her new collection of 62 poems, continues that tradition of lament, demonstrating that the modern lament is as contemporary as its older and ancient predecessors.

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