Kortney Garrison

Homeschooling With Ease

Three on Poetry Friday

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Three short takes on poetry for this sunny Friday…

Alan Jacobs writes that both Borges and Neruda considered English the best language for poetry because of the great number of one syllable words. This is fascinating to me! Of course, it sent me back to my own small poems…where there are plenty of one syllable words. I love their weighty heft. Like smooth stones in my hand that just might skip over the surface of a poem.

In a recent newsletter, Jocelyn K. Glei shared Jazz Keys. It’s a simple program that composes music while you type. We’ve been having lots of fun alternating basketball dream teams with character names for a novel. Take a listen to this wee poem of mine about the coming of Spring. Even my typos are melodic!

Finally, I was a guest on a recent episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. The RAR team talked about ALA award winners including a new picture book biography of poet Gwendolyn Brooks called Exquisite as well as Cat Man of Aleppo by Karim Shamsi-Basha and Irene Latham. My copy of Irene’s delightful book This Poem Is a Nest arrived this week, and I am utterly charmed by the idea of creating nestling poems out of a source text.

So much more Poetry Friday goodness at my juicy little universe!

Poet as Citizen

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“Political” poetry by men remains stranded…the enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else. –Adrienne Rich

Open the body to grief, turning your face to your own life, absorbing the failures your parents and your country have suffered. –Robert Bly

The thing to do is grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. –Zora Neale Hurston

One of the most subversive things you can do is spend as much time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like. –Austin Kleon

Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom–poets, visionaries–realists of a larger reality. –Ursula K. LeGuin

Be joyful
though you have considered all the options.
–Wendell Berry

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
–Theodore Roethke

{An accidental collection winnowed out of my journal from the last two months that feels like a reliable pattern to follow for the next two months.}

Meal Planning for Peace

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Nothing can derail a day like not having a plan in place for dinner. Knowing what’s for dinner and reliably having ingredients stocked brings an outsized measure of peace. It means that I can spend my (limited!) mental energy on things like writing and homeschooling.

For a few years now I’ve been taking classes and learning from Jessica Fisher at Good Cheap Eats. Turns out meal planning is a skill, and you can learn how to do it. Here are a few helpful resources.

  • Grocery Savings Challenge this month is all about filling the freezer–just in time for the return to the school routine!
  • Jessica on Instagram so much good info here! Jessica goes live almost every weekday around 10 am. She is funny and smart and ready to help. Talking freezer meal tips all month.
  • Dinner Calendar I use these lovely free printable calendars from A Humble Place (excellent picture study resources too!) I write out our dinner plan and put it on the fridge. And then no one asks me, What’s for dinner?
  • Simplify what’s for dinner! We eat beans and rice every week. It’s good, humble food. Then I use the leftover beans in another meal–nachos, tacos, soup, tostadas. Two meals every week that are already more or less planned.
  • Have a few backups. Our days as home educators hardly ever go exactly as planned. And these exceptional days–that really aren’t the exception–can make it hard to stick to a meal plan. Always having a jar of sauce and some noodles on hand means that we can eat. Add in some meat from the freezer and some garlic bread and it’s a feast!

Poetry Postcards + Publication

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The Thunder Moon came full and it’s not many days till my birthday.

In honor of the day, I’ve been working for the past weeks on sending out 46 postcards of original poetry.

Little hellos from my desk on the sunporch went out today to California, Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Oman, and North Portland!

In other poetry news, Better Than Starbucks published a few of my haiku. I am thrilled to be a part of the same issue that features poetry + an interview with A.M. Juster!

The three poems published are a part of a larger series about Julian of Norwich. I began working on these poems in Spring 2019 as a part of a class with Holly Cornfield Carr about the poetry of place. Julian’s cell–what a place! Then I took them to our Summer writing retreat. And now a few are being published during my birthday month! Pure gift.

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