Kortney Garrison

Homeschooling With Ease

Poetry All Month

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You’ve got to laugh, right? That the first day of National Poetry Month is April Fool’s Day! The foolishness of waking early, pouring coffee, and sitting down to write. But before I could sit down this morning, I had to unearth the food coloring so that I could make some blue Bantha Milk for the Star Wars fans who live at my house!

I’ve got some plans for this month. Writing and reading poems is nothing new though, so I’m adding a few extras to sweeten the month. Because really, where you find sweetness is where you’ll find the poems.

I’ll be meeting the morning with prompts from the 30 Day Haiku Challenge hosted by The Wild Words. Haiku is accessible enough and the prompts are expansive enough that there’s really no reason not to join in! I have been writing poems about Penelope and Demeter. So I will be writing the morning haiku from their perspective.

I’m also going to post a few poetry oracle poems in the Stories on my Instagram. Those are the cards above. They’ve got lines from Basho via Robert Hass on one side. Flip over three…or sometimes four…and you’ve got a poem! It works because the source material is so rich!

Tania Runyan is leading a reading and writing book group through The Great Gatsby. I read the novel as a high school senior, but haven’t returned since. I am utterly intrigued by Tania’s assertion that “writing poetry as we read will help us better understand the novel and reading the novel as we write will help us create inspired poems.” I don’t know quite what to expect, but this could prove a rich vein.

On April 13th Irene Latham is coming to Read-Aloud Revival to teach a workshop on writing nonets based on her lovely book Nine: A Book of Nonet Poems! It’s the generative kind of book–you finish reading and immediately head to the page. I can’t wait to spend time with Irene! You can sign up just for the month–it’s a full one with art and stories!

And I’ll be visiting with Poetry Friday peeps because they are some of the most careful readers + writers around!

How are you celebrating this month?

Here’s a great collection of posts from the archives about celebrating Poetry Every Day if you need some inspiration!

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!

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.

Every Ordinary Thing

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God is ever working on our behalf–St Ignatius

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God’s love–Caryll Houselander

People laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on than we either know or care to know.

Who can say what it is that’s going on? But I suspect that part of it anyway is that every once and so often we hear

a whisper from the wings that goes something like this,

“You’ve turned up at the right place at the right time. You’re doing fine. Don’t ever think you’ve been forgotten.”

Coincidences are God’s way of getting our attention–Fredrick Buechner

We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?–Wendell Berry

I have a blue notebook that I keep on my desk to record the tiny, reliable patterns that emerge from the tangle of days.

One more way to remember what went right.

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