Poetry Sisters Write "In the Style Of" Valerie Worth

The challenge this month was to write "in the style of" Valerie Worth. You can learn more about Valerie Worth and read some of her poems at Spotlight on NCTE Poets: Valerie Worth, with Lee Bennett Hopkins, a post by Renée M. LaTulippe at No Water River. 

Worth's poems are meditations on the little things in world around us. Writing in free verse, her keen sense of observation and economy of language make everyday objects seem extraordinary.

When William was in third grade (2009-2010) his teacher had the class copy and illustrate poems that "spoke" to them in their journals. This poem by Valerie Worth was one of his choices.

In Paul Janeczko's book The Place My Words Are Looking For: What Poets Say About
and Through Their Work, Worth had this to say about poetry.

"One of poetry’s most wonderful features is that it can get beneath the surface of things and explore them not as mere objects but as remarkable phenomena with lively personalities of their own. Articles as coat hangers can take on unexpected dimensions within the realm of a poem; and if this can happen with coat hangers, then the world must be filled with other ‘ordinary’ subjects just waiting for poetry to come along and reveal their extraordinary selves."

Worth's poems are magical, so emulating her was quite a challenge. I used the poem porches as my mentor text.

attic

in the attic
time is fluid

the air thick
with memory

trinkets and photos
recall a lifetime

a rocking horse sways
and gathers dust 

an old teddy bear
welcomes a new friend

holiday boxes wait
expectant and hopeful

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? In December we’re writing in the form of the elfchen, or German cinquain. You can learn about this form at German With Nicole.  Are you in? Good! We are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. If you’re still game, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on December 29th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

Do take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Ruth at There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

A Cento Challenge

This month Every Day Poems offered up a challenge to "craft a Cento from some of your favorite Every Day Poems lines." They also added this extension.

For some extra fun, you’re invited to hand-letter your Cento poem, using a different style or color for each unique line you’ve gathered from another poet. Or, you could put each line on a different slip of paper and collage your poem together.

Challenge accepted!

Here is my untitled cento. (Click to enlarge.)

It reads:

the whole world’s chanting desire

between stars or heartbeats

beyond reach, beyond reckoning 

and in slow-motion

a tide, incoming: vast

when pulled away, return always to me

The lines in this cento come from the following poems:

• Black Dirt by Helen Pruitt Wallace
• Report [an excerpt] by Elizabeth C. Herron
• Grendel In Dawn’s Early Light by Rick Maxson
• Into the Woods by Laurie Klein
• Into the Woods by Laurie Klein
• Juliet’s Aubade by Sara Barkat

Poetry Sisters Write Bouts-rimés

The challenge this month was to write in the form of bouts-rimés. In The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, Ron Padgett describes the form this way:

A bouts-rimés poem is created by one person’s making up a list of rhymed words and giving it to another person, who in turn writes the lines that end with those rhymes, in the same order in which they were given.

This post by Lady in Read Writes has an infographic on the history of the form. What must be mentioned is that the tradition is to write 14 rhymed lines in the form of a sonnet. 

We didn't follow the rules for rhymed word generation exactly, but we came up with a creative variation. As we began to plan for our Sunday Zoom, we started putting pairs of rhymed words in the Slack channel for our October challenge. Mary Lee was gracious enough to create a Google doc that included an outline of different sonnet forms, along with our rhyming words. The word pairs were listed in the order they were submitted and labeled A-G. That means we had 28 words for 14 end rhymes. This meant that the sonnet form you chose largely dictated which worlds you were required to use. For example, Petrachan and Spenserian sonnets would use words only from lists A through E, while Shakespearean would use words from each list.

I decided to try something different, so I went with the terza rima sonnet. This sonnet is named for the terza rima, which is a three-line stanza that uses a chain rhyme. The rhyme scheme of the terza rima sonnet is ABA BCB CDC DED with a final rhyming couplet that usually echoes the first rhyme: AA. The poem Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost is an example of this form. 

Here are the words we suggested. The words I chose to use are in green. 

A: profuse/abtruse
     chartreuse/truce

B: incline/shine
     resign/supine

C: various/gregarious
     hilarious/precarious

D: ceasefire/quagmire
     higher/dryer

E: transform/barnstorm
     uniform/conform

F: humility/futility
     nobility, tranquility

G: perturb/superb
     reverb, disturb

I listed the end words first and then began to write. I did rearrange a few of the lines once I had a sense of where this might be going. I tried so hard to follow the rules, but I really wanted to replace the word hilarious with ridiculous because it makes more sense in the poem. Doing so would mean I'd FAILED to bend this form to my will and make my lines fit the prescribed end words, so I've left a less desirable option to stay within the bounds of the challenge. The misuse of hilarious notwithstanding, I'm pleased with the result.

The World Abstruse

The world amazes even though abstruse
Give up on understanding just resign
yourself to sing its praises most profuse

Blue sky and clouds you ponder while supine
as morning flocks sing most gregarious
You rise to wander up the steep incline

step lightly to the edge precarious
Views sublime soon call you to move higher
what vexed you once now seems hilarious 

compared to all those praying for ceasefire
What will it take to make hard hearts transform?
To pull societies from the quagmire?

You hope beyond all hope for peace—a truce
This world you love amazes while abstruse 

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month, we’re writing in the style of Valerie Worth. You can learn more about Valerie Worth and read some of her poems at Spotlight on NCTE Poets: Valerie Worth, with Lee Bennett Hopkins, a post by Renée M. LaTulippe at No Water River. Are you in? Good! We are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. If you’re still game, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on November 24th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

Do take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Carol Labuzzetta at The Apples in My Orchard. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

Poetry Sisters Write Diminishing Verse

The challenge this month was to write in the form of diminishing verse. You can learn more about this form at Writer's Digest. You can also find helpful information at Astra Poetica, Word Wool, and YeahWrite. Wikipedia calls these Pruning Poems. Basically, the last word in each line is reduced in diminishing (pruning) fashion, by removing the initial letter of the last word in the line without any other changes to spelling. One example might be trout/rout/out. 

I'm grateful I didn't need to think about addressing the theme of transformation in my writing, because the form is transformational in itself. I really had no idea how to start this challenge, so I googled "3-letter words that start with a." I looked at that list and started adding letters to try and make longer words that shared letters. I did this for all 5 vowels (sorry y). When I found that difficult, I went to thefreedictionary.com and entered 3-letter words, like art, and selected "ends with." This got me a very long list of words. From playing around with this I generated a page of word lists.

The problem with this approach was that it generated words that didn't seem to fit very well together. I also took some liberty with 3-letter words, including ack and ick. While all these sets of words rhymed, I had no idea how to make sense of them. When I began working on a poem in earnest, I tried to find a story to tell. Given that I find this form annoying and contrived, I'm pretty pleased with this little poem.

Ode to the Carolina Wren

Faithful companions a mated pair cleaves
raises brood after brood that fledges and leaves
here in the rundown farmhouse eaves

Daily I hear the male whistle and scold
his tweedle-tweedle-tweedle rings out in the cold
the song of the wren never gets old

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

Since I've been playing around with Canva, here's the photographic version of this poem.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month, we’re writing in the form of bouts-rimé (pronounced Boo-ReeMay). Bouts-rimés "is a method of poetry composition where the author writes down the rhyming end words of each line first, and then fills in the rest of the poem. It is sometimes approached as a game, with one participant challenged to create coherent verse from absurdly incongruent end-words." You can learn more about this form at Bouts-Rimé: A Rhyming Word Game Popular During the Georgian Era. Are you in? Good! We are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. If you’re still game, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on October 27th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

Do take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Jama Rattigan at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

Poetry Sisters Play with an Exquisite Corpse

This month's challenge was writing a poem from the lines generated as we played with an exquisite corpse. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about this form.

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

In terms of process, Tanita started us off by writing one line of poetry and selecting a clunker from Linda Mitchell's collection. She DM'd her lines to Sara and we were off, each poet sending an original line and a clunker to someone else in the group. When Kelly wrote her lines, she sent them to Tanita, who wrote one more to finish this thing. We only shared our lines with one other person, so it wasn't until we met Sunday on Zoom that we shared the original lines we wrote and the clunkers we selected. Surprisingly, the lines hung together well. Here's the poem our blind exchange generated. The clunker lines appear in red. 

They say the mind is garden-like, with thoughts as sprouting seeds (Tanita)
but I'm left holding cuttings I'm not sure where to plant
Weedy-thick, the prickly buds of odd logic bloom: (Sara)
You don't cry anymore, but you sing all the words.
Each line in a different language as the light shifts, (Liz)
trees turned so orange the road looked blue.
Words tangle, colors muddy in the palette. (Mary Lee)
I am no longer winsome to the sun.
a whole sun’s rise to share
there goes the one that got away (Tricia)
found a bit of sunflower
and plucked every petal (by the way, he loves me) (Laura)
and then I remembered (Kelly)
that’s what you wrote about the green beans
Stockpile, then, that snap and sass to sweeten your September. (Tanita)

I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to approach this challenge, so while we were each wrestling with the lines we generated, I decided to try crafting a poem from only the words and phrases listed in the poem. I normally write all my poems by hand, but this time around, I pasted the poem in one column and wrote in the adjacent column. As I selected words or phrases, I highlighted them to mark which I'd used. If I repeated a word, I made it bold. I gave myself the freedom to change word endings and tenses and even cut words into parts. This gave me even more words to choose from. In the end, I did add the words she and her to the poem, but otherwise stuck to the constraint I gave myself. Here's what the Word doc looked like when I finished.

And here is the poem that emerged from our collective lines.

The One That Got Away

She was snap and sass
not prickly bud, but sprouting seed
winsome as sweet September
she loved sunflowers
stockpiled green beans
sang to the sun
her thoughts bloomed in different languages
words all weedy and tangled

I remember each word she said
in the blue of the sun’s rise
the way she held that flower
plucked every petal
she looked to the road
orange and thick with trees
then turned and left

holding cuttings found
about her garden
I’m not sure where to plant them
I don’t cry anymore
but I am no longer whole

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read my Poetry Sisters' pieces at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month, we’re writing in the form of diminishing verse. You can learn more about this form at Writer's Digest. You can also find helpful information at Astra Poetica, Word Wool, and YeahWrite. Wikipedia calls these Pruning Poems. Are you in? Good! The Poetry Sisters are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION. If you’re still game, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on September 29th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.We look forward to reading your poems!  

Do take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Linda Baie at Teacher Dance. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

Poetry Sisters Write Monotetra Poems

The challenge this month was to write a poem in the form of monotetra. You can learn more about it at Writer's Digest. I believe I suggested this one when we were mapping out the year. It looked interesting and I'm always a sucker for form. This form includes any number of quatrains written in tetrameter (8 syllables in each line), with each quatrain using a single rhyme (mono-rhymed). The last line in each stanza repeats the same four syllables.

This was a lot harder than I imagined. I found the single rhyme hard to work with. I much prefer AB rhyme patterns. I wrote two really bad poems before I remembered our theme of transformation, so I started again. I'll admit to cheating a bit, as this poem has 3 lines with 9 syllables. I tried but couldn't find synonyms with the "right" number of syllables to make the lines 8 syllables. Oh well. I do have a poem to share, even though it feels unfinished. I think it needs one more stanza, perhaps something more hopeful. This is definitely a draft I will revisit.

Cast of Uintatherium anceps skull, French National Museum of Natural History, Paris

Photo by Jebulon, Public Domain

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11978564

Monotetra for a World Changed

The summit view is worth the climb

back to nature our paradigm

enter a world still and sublime

Step back in time, step back in time

Picture this place in the Eocene

modern mammals arrive on the scene

now most are gone, what does this mean?

Sight now unseen, sight now unseen

Rivers polluted, trees cut away

towns have replaced the fields and the hay

oysters dying in Chesapeake Bay

We've lost our way, we've lost our way

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon
• Andi Sibley

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month, we’re creating an Exquisite Corpse poem. These collaborative poems necessarily involve yourself and at least one other poet, passing lines or stanzas forward, so now’s the time to choose poetry compatriots. Are you in? Good! The Poetry Sisters are continuing with our 2023 theme of TRANSFORMATION – and we’re going to also sneak in a few of Linda Mitchell’s clunkers to give us more to play with. If you’re still game, you have a month to craft your creation and share it on August 25th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.We look forward to reading your poems!  

I hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Jan at BookSeedStudio. Happy poetry Friday, friends!  

Poetry Sisters Write to a Quote

The challenge this month was to write a poem in response to a quote. Initially, I thought we would be writing to the same quote, but several examples were shared, so I decided to use one that spoke to me. Over the last few weeks, the calendar was looming large for me as the month of June and the second anniversary of my mother's death approached. That anniversary is today. Knowing that we would be sharing our poems at this time, and because she's been much on my mind, I decided I wanted to write a poem for or about her. 

The second challenge was to include the theme of transformation, which informs all of our writing this year. I couldn't figure out how to do that, though death is a form of transformation, and surely my life has been transformed by this loss. 

I decided I wanted to write to a form and chose the villanelle. I like the repeating lines and the need for only two rhymes. I wrote with this photo of my mother beside me. It was taken in May of 2021 when I visited with her for the last time.

A few weeks ago, I read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. It's an amazing novel with beautiful prose. I copied several quotes from it into my commonplace journal. One stuck with me and ultimately became the inspiration for my poem. It rings true because I am both missing and remembering my mother, today and every day.

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ.”
-Ocean Vuong in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Villanelle for My Mother

Some days it’s hard to bear that you are dead

I talk to you each morning when I pray

And often hear your voice inside my head

“Put on something bright. Why not wear red?”

You were never at a loss for what to say

Some days it’s hard to bear that you are dead

I follow your advice and make my bed

“Straighten up your room before you play.”

I often hear your voice inside my head

Loose buttons? Reach for needle and some thread

Your smallest lessons stuck, won’t fade away

Some days it’s hard to bear that you are dead

On my last visit you forlornly said

“Our time has been so short, I wish you’d stay.”

I often hear your voice inside my head

It’s been two years since those first tears were shed

Yet still I carry grief each waking day

Most days it’s hard to bear that you are dead

Thank God I hear your voice inside my head

Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2023. All rights reserved.

You can read the pieces written by my Poetry Sisters at the links below. 

• Tanita Davis
• Mary Lee Hahn
• Sara Lewis Holmes
• Kelly Ramsdell
• Laura Purdie Salas
• Liz Garton Scanlon
• Andi Sibley

Would you like to try the next challenge? Next month we are writing in the form of monotetra. You can learn more about it at Writer's Digest. We hope you'll join us. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on July 28th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We look forward to reading your poems!  

I hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem. Happy poetry Friday, friends!