This week I spent a morning learning about nonets with Irene Latham. The nonet is a syllabic, 9-line form with each line’s syllable count ascending or descending. Irene’s book Nine: A Book of Nonet Poems is a collection that shows just how thoughtful and sophisticated poetry for children can be.

Here’s one of the poems that came out of the workshop. I was thinking about the revision history of a haiku that will be published next month. I was also playing with the title of Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage Into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. Melissa Wiley said this may be her favorite Goldberg, and I agree! Part travelogue, part historical notes on haiku, altogether enchanting.

Three
simple
lines become
a rectangle.
Doorway, gate, portal,
a pair of slim couplets.
Mirrors, twins, both like and unlike,
still holding the turn, the surprise,
the way through the open door to God.

Here’s one more found poem built from my notes during Irene’s workshop, including the title of one of her forthcoming books!

Visit Jama’s Alphabet Soup for all the Poetry Friday goodness!

“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.}