Published January 7, 2022
Hermit Crab Essay 002
January 19, 2022 By Leave a Comment
Callie Feyen is doing a series about hermit crab essays over at Tweetspeak Poetry. Her first one is titled How to Do a Switch Leap. She describes the essay in this way:
A hermit crab essay, described by Suzanne Paola and Brenda Miller in Tell It Slant, is a lyrical essay that takes the shape of an existing form, such as a recipe, a how-to manual, a sewing pattern. The rationale has to do with the essay’s content — it could be too vulnerable (like a hermit crab), needing a “house” to inhabit, to shelter it and help it makes its way.
Callie Feyen
She’s invited readers to write along, and her second essay is about How to Teach Poetry to Seventh-Graders. Here’s my second attempt.
How to Sing Again After You’ve Lost Your Voice
My freshman year of college, my roommate and I were obsessed with The Little Mermaid. We saw it at the dollar theater more than a dozen times. We were especially obsessed with Ariel’s voice — what it means for her to have it, to have it taken, and to have it restored.
I didn’t make a bad deal with a sea witch, but my life did contain Ursulas, and I did not know how to handle them. They cast spells; I went silent. For a long, long time.
But that wasn’t how I explained my giving up music. I used the universal excuse refuge of all Central Texans: allergies. Here, where freezes are infrequent, every season is allergy season, all the livelong year.
The problem with allergies is that they can take root and grow into other things. Like asthma, which then made me more vulnerable to other viral and bacterial lung ailments. I got sick multiple times a year, every year. Forget singing — there were days I could hardly speak. I saw a doctor, got prescriptions. Saw another doctor, got different prescriptions. When I could talk, I hardly recognized my own voice.
Did I even have anything worthwhile to say?
Not without a pencil and paper, or a laptop. I began to do all my vocalizing silently. Writing allowed me to say things without having to open my mouth. For a long time it was enough.
Then, shortly before my first book, The Joy of Poetry, came out, I found myself auditioning for a community theater production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
Since it was to be my first time holding a musical score since high school, I didn’t aim high. There was a list of Male Roles, a list of Female Roles, and one Bovine Role: Milky White. That’s what I auditioned for, and I shared the role. Friends, I was half a cow. I also got to be Snow White in the finale. The experience resurrected my voice.
I wanted to keep it. Definitely. Maybe.
Because a voice, however practiced, is not universally adored. There will be mistakes. There will be critics. There will be wear and tear. There will be pride and insecurity in equal measure. Some people will compliment. Some will walk out. Some will bar the door. Or the sea witch may appear in disguise and steal your prince after she’s already cut you off from your mer-folk.
Is it worth it, The Little Mermaid asks? If you can’t have it all, what must you have? Can it be true love without your voice? Can you be happy with your golden voice and your glittery home under the sea if you can never leave the land? Is dancing preferable to swimming, especially if you can’t tap out a showtune?
Slowly, I made my choice and found my non-sea-legs. There was a period of recovery time —more fluids (mostly tea), more rest (including yoga). And then, with a deep diaphragmatic breath, yes, I’d like to participate in the singing Christmas Tree. Yes, I’d like to join the chorale in time to learn Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. Yes, I’d like to lead singing at church. Yes, I’d like to be in the chorus for The Sound of Music.
It has been wonderful. It has been exhausting. I have new community. I have old community that did not make the leap to land with me.
Each day when I sit at my piano and open my music, I am connected to first-grader me, learning to play; to high-schooler me, on a choir trip to New York City; to college me, when someone heard me singing and told me to shut up, and I did. Neither of us knew it would last decades.
The Disney version of The Little Mermaid ends with Ariel getting everything she ever wanted — prince, family, and her voice. The original tale by Hans Christian Andersen ends with her losing almost everything — prince and family — but she gets to keep her voice. She becomes a daughter of the air, not immortal but ethereal.
This version feels more accurate. To have my voice and use it is, at times, alienating. The alternative — silence — sickens me. The question isn’t how can I get the prince to kiss me, or how do I keep safe my cavern of thingamabobs, or how can I free my father, it’s what shall I sing today?
Maybe an air.
National Poetry Month’s Tour de Tania (Runyan), pt. 5
April 29, 2021 By
Tania Runyan’s book How to Write a Form Poem saves haiku till last. I suspect she does that because haiku is among the simplest and most complicated of poetic forms. She writes: “Haiku are not a mode of travel, roadside attraction, or even a depiction of such. They are the vibrant spaces between.”
Tania also encourages us to “cultivate the daily practice of reading or writing haiku.” I cannot second this recommendation heartily enough. Even when your haiku doesn’t reach the ideal. Write one anyway. It’s a practice I’ve been following since May 11, 2017, almost four years ago.
I write my daily haiku in my One Line a Day: A Five Year Memory Book, along with a note about what tea I’m drinking. Writing my daily haiku is foundational to who I am. Many, if not most of my haiku do not reach purist standards. I don’t care. They are for me, to record what I want to keep from each day. Like this one from The Joy of Poetry.
Winter Sunrise
orange and pink rises
above our snowy cabin
brighter than cancer
– Megan Willome
I’m spending National Poetry Month celebrating Tania’s new book and my old one. To learn how to write a haiku, what Tania’s haiku journey has entailed, and whether your really need to count 5-7-5 syllables, pick up a copy of How to Write a Form Poem.
National Poetry Month’s Tour de Tania (Runyan), pt. 4
April 22, 2021 By
In The Joy of Poetry, I write that as soon as I saw a clump of red poppies at mile 37 of 42 on the Red Poppy (bike) Ride, I knew I had to write a poem about them. But “Each attempt to write the experience failed, until I attempted to follow the form.” Why chose the rondeau form? Because there is a famous rondeau about the red poppies of World War I: “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. I decided to imitate the best.
In How to Write a Form Poem, Tania Runyan includes McCrae’s poem and mine as well (in the More Stops: Examples and Prompts to Inspire Your Journey section at the end).
At Mile 37
At mile 37 red poppies do abide
near fields of what we think will soon be corn,
past horses pale, their hearts held close inside
thin skin. Today is not a day to mourn
though if I say I am not sad I lied.
You’re gone. We rose and took it in our stride.
We pedaled hard and spied white poppies worn
from drought. Until we reached a red clump wide.
At mile 37.
Only then the red blooms promised for our ride,
sought at every pickup truck’s loud horn
that blared at us for forty-two May miles,
to the right, beneath a black mailbox beside
the road we found red poppies newly born.
At mile 37.
– Megan Willome
In chapter 7 Tania writes, “even without a melody, the rondeau sings.” That’s what the form is supposed to do, to sing. She then talks about her own journey with the rondeau, specifically, about one she wrote in college that her professor criticized. She later learned that a classmate “never forgot the poem’s refrain, and even today, more than a quarter century later, quotes it to me.” That’s the power of this song-like form.
We’re spending National Poetry Month celebrating Tania’s new book and my old one. To learn how to write a rondeau, what Tania’s rondeau journey has entailed, and what is the Scrabble-worthy plural form of rondeau, pick up a copy of How to Write a Form Poem.
National Poetry Month’s Tour de Tania (Runyan), pt. 3
April 15, 2021 By
Even poets get to have favorites. For Tania Runyan, author of How to Write a Form Poem, it’s the sestina. She writes, “I’m not even going to try to be unbiased. I adore sestinas. They’re my favorite poetic form, hands down. And they’re kinda nuts.”
Sestinas don’t rhyme — instead, they repeat. The pattern of end-words is a little bonkers, but there is a definite method to the madness. Tania compares the pattern to the spiral staircase in a lighthouse: You wind up, and then you wind down. The steps and words are “never leaving, always changing.” (I really like Tania’s “Seventh Grade Sestina, in chapter 3, because of the way it changes and the way it doesn’t.)
Here is a sestina I wrote in The Joy of Poetry that was entirely built around the word horcrux, of Harry Potter fame. It seemed the only word that could hold the experience of looking in the mirror and seeing my mother in my own face, long after she had passed away. It felt magical, and not in a good way. It deserved nothing less than all 39 lines of a sestina.
Who Am I?
“Let’s go for a walk,”
she’d say, and then my mother
would circle the block. I’d question
why we couldn’t go farther. My body
could handle it. But Merry
Nell’s couldn’t. She needed a horcrux
Or, perhaps, more than one horcrux.
To figure that out, she’d need a longer walk
through the neighborhood. She’d be merry,
as she always was. I am a mother
who likes to push her body.
There’s no question
about it. But every day I question
why I am her horcrux.
Why everybody seems to think I am walking her walk,
that I am mothering like my mother.
It’s true. My name is also Merry,
and I also chose to marry
at 21. That is not the question.
I need to know how to mother
without one. All I have is a horcrux,
one I bring with me each morning I take a walk:
my own body.
But it’s acting strange, my body.
It’s give me signs, as yours did, Merry
Nell. Oh, it can still walk
up actual mountains. But I do question
because it doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like a horcrux.
I feel like I am you, my dear, dead mother.
And I’m not, am I? Holy Mary, Mother
Of God. Pray. You’re not here in body.
Neither is my mom. She’s only a horcrux.
She wasn’t into you, Mary. She didn’t even have a question
about you. Not even when she couldn’t walk.
Like Harry, I am the horcrux. I am not my mother.
I can still walk, and I still dwell in this body.
But I am Merry Megan. No question.
– (Merry) Megan Willome
I’m spending National Poetry Month celebrating Tania’s new book and my old one. To learn how to write a sestina, what Tania’s sestina journey has entailed, and a little bit about lighthouses, pick up a copy of How to Write a Form Poem.
National Poetry Month’s Tour de Tania (Runyan), pt. 2
April 8, 2021 By
Like Tania Runyan, I would not describe myself as a sonneteer. But in How to Write a Form Poem, she writes this:
“Until this year, I’d probably written ten sonnets at most. That may sound like a lot if you’re just starting out, but remember, I’ve been at this poetry thing for decades. The majority of these sonnets were required for my prosody classes in college and grad school. While I’ve liked some of them okay, I haven’t bonded with them …. But as I’ve increased my attention to form in recent years, I’ve learned that limitations are my freedom. Structure is my muse.”
My own sonnet education came from reading Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s poetry collection titled Still Pilgrim, from which she read selections at the TS Poetry Retreat in 2019. I soon realized she was playing with form, which let me know I could play with it too. I journaled through the whole collection, then wrote my own sonnets, each one modeled after hers in form. That practice imparted a bit of the sonnet’s structure muse-like power. Now when a poem isn’t going well, I’ll experiment with sonnetizing it.
I wrote more about Tania’s sonnet chapter over at Tweetspeak Poetry).
Here is a sonnet by Helena Nelson from The Joy of Poetry, which turns five years old this month. Although the mother in the poem is nothing like mine, I love both her and the speaker/daughter. Reading it again, I am struck by the desire to “make the great train wait.” I’ve always read that line simply as a big train — and maybe it is — but this time I read it as if death were a train that takes people away. That’s the thing about a good poem: Each time you read it, it offers up new gifts.
With My Mother, Missing the Train
She was always late. At the final minute
we’d run for the city train, which roared right past,
its line of faces scanning us not in it.
The world was turned to terror by the blast
of hot departing wheels. Air seized my mother,
crushing her flustered skirts into a flurry
with me there clinging. Hush, there’ll be another,
she’d say to keep me calm. No need to worry.
But there was a need. The speed of things was true
and rushing traffic urged us both ahead.
I wanted to race again, to burst right through
and make the great train wait. She never said
that missing things was serious, till I grew.
She held my hand more tightly than I knew.
– Helena Nelson
To learn how to write a sonnet, what Tania’s sonnet journey has entailed, and what the heck is an iamb, pick up a copy of How to Write a Form Poem.
National Poetry Month’s Tour de Tania (Runyan), pt. 1
April 1, 2021 By
Five years ago this month — National Poetry Month — TS Poetry Press released The Joy of Poetry. That means my little book is off to kindergarten! And its new sibling on the library shelf? Tania Runyan’s How to Write a Form Poem.
Tania has shown us How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem. Now in her new book she shows us How to Write a Form Poem: A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Forms: includes anthology & prompts!
Most of the poems in my book are free verse, but there is a bit of form poetry, some of it written by yours truly. In fact, Tania chose one of my form poems to include in her new book.
I got to meet Tania Runyan at a TS Poetry retreat back in 2019. She’s a poet, a musician, and an expert navigator (not something she mentions among her accomplishments, but I am living proof of her skill). Her new book is just like her — welcoming and wise.
This National Poetry Month I’ll be celebrating my book and Tania’s together. If you’re new to poetry and aren’t sure it’s for you, The Joy of Poetry is a good place to start. I wrote it for never-poetry people. If you’re already a convert and want some guidance on how to write poetry (as well as the opportunity to try some fun prompts), then check out How to Write a Form Poem. I’m using it this month as my own private poetry workshop, experimenting with each of the ten forms Tania shares: sonnets, sestinas, haiku, villanelles, pantoums, ghazals, rondeaux, odes, acrostics, and found poems.
Happy Book Birthday, Tania! The tour and the party lasts all month, each Thursday in April.
P.S. If you’ve ever considered becoming a patron of Tweetspeak Poetry, there are often discounts on the digital versions of the titles. This month Tania Runyan is guiding us through a poetry-filled book club discussion of The Great Gatsby, and the normally patron-exclusive book club is open to the public. Learn more about Patreon membership levels here:
Searching with Shelly Miller, part 3
December 16, 2020 By
I said in part 1 that I took Shelly Miller’s new book Searching for Certainty with me to the beach.
I had lost my father only a month before and was worn out from caregiving. I don’t often write in books, but I couldn’t stop writing in Shelly’s. About halfway through, I flipped to the Acknowledgments and read this:
“Mom, even though we haven’t talked in more than twenty years, I’m thankful that you raised me to love beauty, express creativity, and be resilient despite adversity. Our shared struggles in the early years made me who I am today.” Acknowledgments, Searching for Certainty
I was stunned. The book had already covered some painful memories, but I assumed there would be some reconciliation between Shelly and her mother before the last page. But no.
Shelly is the best person I’ve ever known — period. I believe she was in the center of God’s will. Yet, there was this broken relationship. And that gave me hope.
I have broken relationships in my family too. I have grieved and prayed and schemed and questioned. Maybe all will not be repaired before my last day. Maybe God already knows this.
If I had gotten the chance to interview Shelly about her new book, I would have asked her how she ever managed to get through my book, which is all about my mostly-good-but-sometimes-hard relationship with my mother. How did she not throw the book across the room? I’m ashamed to admit I might have done exactly that.
I suspect Shelly had dealt with her pain. I suspect friendship and a desire to learn more about poetry overcame any parts of my book that might have stung.
As open and teachable as Shelly was to my poetry feedback, I want to be open and teachable to her book’s challenging lessons.
In chapter 3 of Searching for Certainty, she explores still life photography and invites us to “allow God to reframe what you are currently experiencing with the lens of Truth and being known by him. That same chapter includes my favorite sentence from the book: “Resurrection is free and it costs you something.”
When I read those words, I thought about a teapot I brought along on my beach trip. It was my mom’s, and it looks like Drummond plaid (my maiden name). I used to have my own teapot just like it, but it broke. My dad let me have this one when he moved next door, since he mostly drank coffee.
Reframing looked like this: Some things break; new things come.
The teapot was free to me. It cost breaking the other to receive a new one — one that is not just a cute vessel but a reminder of the last three years with my dad. I’m certain my mother would be very happy to know about the teapot’s new life.
I only wish Shelly were still here too, so I could tell her.
Searching with Shelly Miller, part 2
December 9, 2020 By
I am privileged to be in the Acknowledgements for Shelly Miller’s Searching for Certainty. She writes, “Thanks to Megan Willome for your stellar poetry critiques on the poems I included.”
Oh, Shelly, it was all joy.
She contacted me this spring:
“My editor is allowing me to include some short poems as epigraphs for chapters in the new book I’m releasing in October. To be honest, I read them and think are they even well written? I know that sounds funny but I really have no clue as to what I’m doing, just following my instincts when it comes to poetry.“
Of course I said yes. She responded:
“I’m totally open and teachable. This is helpful for me and I want to get better. Honored to have your help!I’m sitting outside, resting in my walled garden, sipping tea. It’s our first sunny warm day in London—feels heavenly.“
Shelly brought her photographer’s eye and her writer’s heart to her poems. And she was as open and teachable as she claimed.
After I sent my feedback, she asked great questions:
I would love to learn why you broke up verses as you did on each of them. And how did you decide to break it up into three stanzas? I don’t have the poetry intelligence to create architecture in that way but want to learn. No rush. Just my random thoughts. I’m wondering if this is something intuitive for poets or learned by experience.
No, it’s not intuitive. We all learn by doing. And Shelly learned quickly.
I have taught several workshops and helped many people with poetry, but I always enter with trepidation. Poetry is such a personal art. Shelly was taking a big risk, sharing with me. How would she respond to my feedback?
“I had to laugh when I read your sweet encouragement about coming into my voice and shorter being what I need to lean into. Laughing with God because your words were a sacred echo.I feel like being concise and clear has been God’s choice of spiritual discipline for me for at least a decade. It’s all leading somewhere and I’m grateful to be a student, but sometimes it can also be frustrating. Thanks for being part of that process. I am learning a lot each time we have these exchanges.“
I learned a lot too. Writing about spiritual topics is hard to do well and definitely not my area of expertise. Shelly showed me how it might be done with full faith and love and without sentimentality.
She came later to poetry, but after reading my book, The Joy of Poetry, she began incorporating it into her life, especially on her Sunday sabbaths. She deeply loved the poems of Wendell Berry.
When Shelly told me my book helped get her into poetry, I started sending her poems. She always responded.
But when she was diagnosed with a massive sarcoma, I debated what poem to send her. Finally I chose one from John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us, “For a Friend, on the Arrival of Illness.” At Chronic Joy, I wrote about choosing the poem and Shelly’s response. (Although I didn’t say it was Shelly. Somehow I hoped she’d get better.)
There is one stanza of O’Donohue’s poem that makes me think of Shelly’s brief and intense journey with illness:
May you find in yourself A courageous hospitality Toward what is difficult, Painful, and unknown.
Shelly found that “courageous hospitality” and shared it with everyone she knew. Yes, the news that her cancer was terminal hit her hard. But when asked for prayer requests, she asked for simple things, like to be able to enjoy her food, to sleep well, to share good moments with family and friends. She went quickly. She went in peace.
Shelly Miller — our rest mentor — is now at rest.
Next week, what Shelly’s book meant to me. And to read last week’s post on my visits from a Shelly-bird, click here.
Searching with Shelly Miller, part 1
December 2, 2020 By
This is not how a book review is supposed to go.
The day I joined Shelly Miller’s launch team for Searching for Certainty, my father passed away. I did what I could to help promote the book over the next few weeks, but didn’t have the mental space to read more than the first couple of chapters.
Shortly after publication, I took her book with me on vacation and started again at the beginning. I did nothing that week but walk and read and rest. I was searching for answers, or at least direction. Shelly delivered.
Back at home, I sent her an email to thank her and broach the idea of doing an interview, but she never responded. She passed away only days later, on November 1, All Saints Day.
That Sunday I was cantoring at church and both excited and nervous to sing the Litany of the Saints. I’d recorded my pianist playing the first minute of the song and then drove to a secluded street where I could park and practice. Normally I drive while I warm up, but I needed stillness to hit replay while reading from the long list of saints.
Enter: Disruption.
A small bird, possible a titmouse, accosted my parked car. I wish I could say what kind, but I wasn’t paying attention. I had holy work to do.
The bird dropped from nowhere and started pecking at my side mirror. Then it pecked at my passenger window. Then back to the side mirror, and so on. I sang on, and it pecked on, almost violently: Look at me! Let me in to your Litany!
I ignored it. When I drove off, it finally flew away.
When I learned that Shelly had died that very day, I felt sure that the bird was somehow sent from her, trying desperately to get my attention. Look at me! Let me in to your Litany!
That Sunday was not the first time I’d encountered a Shelly-bird. On the day of her massive surgery to address her sarcoma, I went to a garden to pray for her, because Shelly loved gardens. In between the sanctuary and the Holy Family Center at St. Mary’s is Cynthia’s garden, named for Cynthia Collins Pedregon, who passed away from cancer. She and my mother were friends, so I feel close to both of them when I am in that garden. It was May, and the magnolia tree was in bloom. And an unseen bird, maybe a titmouse, was singing.
I sent a recording of the bird to Shelly, so she could listen while she was in the hospital, secluded from chirpy things. When she redid her website, in preparation for Searching for Certainty, she added a robin. In our interview, I planned to ask why.
Because poets don’t just post random birds. And Shelly was a poet.
More about her journey into poetry and how I got to be part of it, next week.
