Today is Poetry Friday, and Mary Lee Hahn has the roundup with a GoGo’s song, Nancy Kuhl, Sandra Cisneros, secrets and more.
I have enjoyed taking part in The Stafford Challenge, writing a poem a day. A nice benefit of this challenge is I have been reading more poetry as well. This week it felt a little like August, as if I was in my own Mini Sealey Challenge. I’ve read William Stafford (reading a poem or two a day), Ada Limón, Margaret Gibson Simon, and Karah-Jo Procak, a young adult woman who pours her heart out in this, her first book.
Have you read the poem “Sacred Objects” by Ada Limon? Here is a video of her reading this powerful poem. I chose this one today because I love it, and, also in honor of the Inklings, for the phrase “in this secret shadowed place.”
Secret
In holds of shame,
this is true, an unshared
secret binds a heart,
shadowed and pinched in a
place of cruel captivity.
Has reading more poetry helped my writing? I definitely get ideas; that’s good. I hope I will learn to write better poetry during this year-long experiment writing a daily poem, but I’m not counting on it. I’ll keep writing nonetheless, like Stafford said, “Lower your standards and keep writing.”
