Announcement: An Unknown Road

Thought I'd point you to an award-winning haiku collection that's available through Amazon Kindle: An Unknown Road by Adelaide B. Shaw, poet/writer and fellow blogger. Travel with Adelaide on a journey through the seasons—across farmland, along railroad tracks, by hills and streams, in the garden, and at the shore. Enjoy her truthful, down-to-earth style. Also see Potpourri, Volume 1, a short story collection.

Announcement: All Things Tanka, etc.

Tanka Poets:
Please be sure to stop by Ken Slaughter's blog, All Things Tanka, where everything he talks about is…tanka. You'll find news and submission deadlines for journals and contests—all in one place.

Also, congratulations to poet/editor Beverley George of Pearl Beach, Australia, who won the Tanka Society of America's recent giveaway. Her prize, a 2015 TSA membership (which includes a subscription to Ribbons, the TSA journal)!

E-mail subscription issue

Well, it seems my FeedBurner e-mail subscriptions aren't working. I know I'm not the only Blogger experiencing this problem. I assume all twigs&stones e-mail subscribers haven't received my posts for several weeks. Sorry about that! If I knew how to fix the problem (and if it were quick to fix), I would. I'll continue to attempt to check into things as I find the time. Of course, if you're reading this notice, that probably means you're not an e-mail-only subscriber!

Guest Poet: message in a bottle?

Fellow poet-blogger Wendy Bourke has a clear, distinct voice, her work ranging from light and humorous to poignant and wise—all of it relatable and with vivid details. Thought you might enjoy reading a poem she posted recently at Words and Words and Whatnot, one of her three blogs:

message in a bottle?

there’s a shelf 

near my tub,

piled with baffling mixtures 

of potions and oils,

extracts and elixirs –

to renew  

and restore, 

reinvent and refine: 

olive butter my body 

and  . . . 

mint julep my mind.

there are masks for my eyes  

and cheeks . . . 
chin, neck and nose . . .

and a bottle that offers me: 

strawberry toes.

little gifts, through the years,  

from my dear ones to me  –

selected, and given with thought, lovingly.

a shiny assortment of jars, tubes and bling – 

all, to boost and diminish, 

define, hide and cling.

a magnificent, fine, alchemistic array.

  

though, I wonder:  

what is it, they’re trying to say.

“A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.”  - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Essays, Volume III:  de Feneficiis.

—copyright Wendy Bourke, 2013; reposted here with permission from author

Back home ... and a thank you

I'm back home from Tanka Sunday in Long Beach, California, followed by a whirlwind personal vacation trip up the coast. The Tanka Society of America (TSA) held its gathering, only the second in the organization's history, on The Queen Mary immediately after the Haiku North America conference. It was a relatively small group, and the time was short, but the experience was exhilarating all the same: discussion, various tanka readings, and an informative talk by Stephen D. Carter of Stanford University. We also spent a bit of time writing new tanka. I'm glad to finally have met some fellow tanka writers (and editors) in person. Many thanks to all involved in organizing this event. 

Near the end of Tanka Sunday, TSA president Margaret Chula announced the winners of the annual international contest; the TSA website will be updated soon to include the information. Deserving poems for sure!












On an altogether different note: A special thank you to Ellen Roberts Young at freethoughtandmetaphor for her recent blog post devoted to tanka—and also for kindly presenting three of my poems I'd previously posted here. I hope she continues her newly embarked-upon tanka journey! 

iwritemyself: guest blog

Today please follow me on a visit to another poetry blog: iwritemyself, by Maurine Killough. Her blog is like a colorful, hip museum/gallery or boutique: bold original poems plus an eclectic mixture of poetry by guests (I was honored to be included there a while back), all accompanied by lively artwork.

Hope you enjoy it!

A year of poetry blogging

A while back, I read a post at Book of Kells by poet-writer-editor Kelli Russell Agodon, where she posed the question: "Do you still have a blog?" Recently, she followed up with another post: ".... To  Blog or Not to Blog?"

Do I still have a blog? Several years ago, when blogging was hipper than it is now, I was a contributing member of a group poetry blog created, managed, and owned by someone else (and that blog later morphed into a print literary journal). But I only started my own blog a year ago this month.

I'm often slow to follow trends, quite slow. I could give various examples of how late to the party I tend to be in my life, but maybe I'll save them for a future post. I suppose I eventually could get into tweeting—compressed, quick communication—though probably only after it has become passé.

I like Ms. Agodon's term "online shy," which is how I sometimes feel. (Actually, for most of my lifetime, I've been just plain shy in general.) So at times I wonder what I'm doing here. 

I obviously don't have a large blog readership: I have a tiny handful of visible members and, I gather, another small handful of e-mail and other invisible subscribers. Based on the patterns of my stats, I may have an additional handful of onlookers from around the world—primarily, North America, Europe, and Asia. And, from time to time, I also have many spammers, though not nearly as many as when I started out. 

I think it must take quite a bit of work to attract a sizable following (unless, maybe, you're pretty well-known), particularly these days with the apparently waning popularity of blogging and the great migration of poets and poetry lovers, along with half of humanity, to Tweeterland—though a gazillion miscellaneous blogs do still exist. 

I don't know who all of my visitors are, or exactly how many of you there are, but I'm grateful for you! Sincerely. I'm not sure how long I'll keep this blog, but for now, I do plan to continue.

Now, why I "still blog":
- I hope it's not because I like to "hear myself speak," though hearing ourselves speak can be revealing. And I know it's not because I like to be the center of attention.
- Maintaining a blog is another creative outlet for me; in my opinion, we all need ways to express ourselves creatively. 
- Blogs, to me, can be warmer places than certain other social media outlets, and a person also can say more. "...blogs offer us the opportunity to expand our thought," says Ms. Agodon.
- Since I can be a ridiculously practical person, I feel I must do something with my barely used poetry—e.g., work that has been published a time or two and then otherwise would disappear into the ether—so I don't "waste it." I suppose this blog is my "book."
- I'm a bit afraid to blog: am blog shy. At this stage in my life, it's time to not be quite so afraid. Yes, maybe that's the most important reason why I have this blog—to plod on despite my inclination to withdraw, if that makes any sense.

What about you? Do you still have a blog? Why do you blog? Or have you never had a blog of your own? Even if you're not up to posting an answer, I congratulate you for making it clear through to the bottom of this post! And, again, I thank you for the support: for commenting to me or just quietly checking out twigs&stones. 

I'll keep the deadbolt unlocked and the porch light on for you (unless, of course, the bulb burns out and I forget to replace it—smile).

*******

Smooth stones

smooth stones

so sensual
we must not only
touch them softly
but write about them also

—Simply Haiku, Autumn 2005

twigs&stones: A title I've had in my head for a long time, though it's not necessarily as unique as I'd hoped. E.g., when I Google, I find there's a similarly named viral video, a catchy folk-rock song (see link below), a gemstone hairpin company, etc. Ah, well. . .

We writers seem to love stones and mention them not infrequently in our poems and blogs. Is that how we think of our short poems, our realized moments, as stones both sturdy and delicate, anchoring us, delivering us from a tenuous world? Packed with an intensity of feeling we ourselves cannot easily contain?

The above entry was one of the first two tanka, or "tanka-like poems," I ever wrote. Admittedly, it's a little different (odd?); surely it violates a few "rules" and might not pass muster with some critics. Yet I had no problem getting it published originally, and someone else (a haiku editor at the time) once wrote me a very nice message about it. Above all, it said what it needed to say for me, and still does, so I guess I still kinda like it. ;)

*Check out the Twigs and Stones video by Canadian band Siskiyou.*