Tuesday Complaints

/2 Comments/in /by

image borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotor_effects_of_shoes

Here’s a poem by my friend Kathryn Johnson. It first appeared in the 2014 Crosscurrents, which is published annually by the Washington Community College Humanities Association (WCCHA).

Tuesday Complaints

“This is a first world problem.” -Reader quote from Real Simple

No shoes
To match this skirt,
Half a day spent
Packing away summer shorts and ironing winter wool blazers,
A grocery cart with just a few items
Drifting downhill, making me run after it,
Molding applesauce
Exhumed from the back of our too-small fridge,
Thick dust
On the ceiling fan, requiring I haul in a ladder,
No antenna
Tuning professional football into our out-of-range TV,
Crows excreting blackberries on my clean, white car,
Too-weak coffee,
Too-stale bread,
Too-ripe bananas,
Leftover chicken for dinner, again.

A young friend’s three-pound baby sleeping in an incubator,
An older friend sleeping on the floor beside her cancer-weak sister,
One day’s worth of problems here in the first world
Where I count
Too much to eat,
Too many clothes,
Too full a life
My blessings.

Louise Glück Wins National Book Award for Poetry

/0 Comments/in /by

Poet Louise Glück

Click on this link for the Poetry Foundation review of her Poems: 1962-2012, a book I happen to have in my collection (thank you, Priscilla).

You’re Invited! Poems and Stories about Animals at Good Shepherd Center, Seattle: Tuesday, Nov. 18, 7:00 p.m.

/3 Comments/in /by

Can’t wait to read with you again!

“How do I revise?”

/1 Comment/in , /by

This is for Louise.

1. Type and print out your work. Reread it with a pen in your hand. You don’t have to give anything up, at least not at first. Just jot down your notes. Underline words that you’re not sure about.

2. Read your work aloud, just to yourself. Listen to yourself. (You can add movement, pacing can help with tempo. Standing up can change your perspective.)

3. Try doing something on the page to make the words more visible. You can use highlighters to pick out patterns. You can circle all of the adjectives, or all of the verbs. (Do one at a go, then the next.)

4. Cut some of the adjectives (and adverbs, too, those -ly words). Decide which ones your reader really needs, and which ones you used out of habit.

5. If you have a lot of was and is or have verbs, see if you can spice them up. Sometimes this is easy: change was sitting to sat. Instant fix!

6. Make a decision to ADD something. Maybe just concrete nouns one time; the next, maybe color; maybe sounds.

7. When I feel myself getting far away from something, I reverse the advice of #1 and write it out in longhand. (I think this is a right brain / left brain trick.)

8. Remember, above all, that it’s YOURS. And it’s not written in stone.