So I may have missed my mark by a few hundred years. I believe I belonged in the time of romantic poets. Shelley, Byron. Keats, Dickinson… Today’s successful poets write about social issues in a way I wish I could write. I’ve tried. It mostly (a few exceptions) ends up sounding trite.
But writing love poetry, romance, looking at the moon—that’s my jam, man. lol. (what decade am I actually living in?)
I wrote this little poem yesterday. It was much less good until I wrote it today. Now it’s much gooder. To give you an idea, this is the original ending:
I seek you when I fall asleep at night
but this poem will need a good rewrite.
I was definitely right about that. So here’s another one for my collection of love poetry that is yet to come:
Missing You
By Michelle Garren-Flye
I miss you when I look at the moon
and know you won’t be back soon.
I’ve made loneliness into an art
to which I have devoted my heart.
On the radio, I may hear a tune—
against your charm, I am not immune.
Oh, can’t you rescue me from this plight,
steal me away from all anger and fright?
This love is most inopportune,
painfully made and roughly hewn.
It pokes holes in my soul, leaves me
with a wish I wish most wantonly.
Yesterday’s primrose. Photo and poem copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye
But before we get to that, I saw a few of you joined my live yesterday. It was on my Instagram. It was sideways. Lol. My daughter reassured me that people could turn their phones if they wanted to watch it, so I did save it to my Instagram, so you can go check it out if you want. I was nervous. It was honest-to-god my first-ever live. I’ve posted videos before, but I can stop and redo those if I mess up or whatever. This one’s got me fumbling for words and misreading and everything. All in five minutes! What entertainment.
Anyway, I haven’t gotten any actual questions about poetry to answer yet, so I probably won’t do another live until next Sunday unless something comes up before that I think would make more sense to answer live than here on my blog.
And now, a poem! I actually wrote a poem I kind of like! This morning!
(I’m a bit excited.)
It’s about a primrose.
No, really. A primrose. I took a picture of a Beach Evening Primrose this morning and it turned out super good. Plus, a friend sent me a poetry prompt last night from another poet/writing coach who suggested that we find something in nature that inspires us and write a poem about it. I intend to post this picture with the poem on Instagram and tag her to see what she thinks, hopefully. Her name is Ann Kroeker. She wrote a really nice poem about a pinecone. You should look her up.
Poem and photo copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye
It’s National Poetry Month and I have no idea what to do with it. I’ve come at this for the past few years with a real plan. Haiku, renga, a poem a day.
I’m clueless. I’m clueless because I’ve been fighting writer’s block since my mother passed away. I miss her so much and the last decent poem I wrote was a goodbye to her written a few days before her death because I knew it was coming.
I’m not saying this because I want you to feel sorry for me. I’m just saying it because I truly don’t know what to do this time around. I was in the midst of writing love poems, which was really kind of fun, but now I’m stuck. It’s hard to write about love when the person who probably loved you the most in this world is no longer in it. And I’ve written enough morose stuff. I won’t go back to that but that’s where my heart is right now.
So… This National Poetry Month is a bit different. For me. For anyone who wants to follow, I’ll be doing a bit of everything from live poetry readings on Instagram (I’ll announce when on here) to posting whatever I’ve managed to write that day. Today I’m posting a thought and a picture I took yesterday. I’m already planning a short live poetry reading tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. EST. If you have any questions you want to ask me about poetry, send me an email to mgflye (at) yahoo.com or just comment here.
When I set out to write love poetry, I knew I’d have to find a different angle for it. I am still working on that, and I may have taken it to the extreme with this one. Anyway, Happy Valentine’s Day!
Poem and illustration copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye
Confession time. I am and always have been a fangirl. It has taken various forms over time. Some things have stuck, others have worn off, and some have…grown. For instance, my current obsession with K-Pop has expanded from one or two groups and styles to multiple. As long as I don’t understand more than half of what they say, I’m in. (LOL, it’s not really based on the language, but you get my drift.) Oh, and K-Dramas, too. I’m actually picking up a bit of the Korean language now…thanks to all the subtitles.
I became a fan of David Bowie early in my life thanks to my older brother and Major Tom. Space Oddity actually came out several months before I was even born, but I remember my brother playing it on the jukebox at our local Pizza Hut. I was maybe five or six years old at the time but I remember listening and dancing next to the table with my little brother.
In 1977 I distinctly remember watching the Bing Crosby Christmas special where he sang “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” with Bowie. I was seven years old and had no idea that what I was witnessing was a miracle of negotiation and compromise between two diametrically opposite human beings. I also remember the debut of Bowie’s “Heroes” music video during the commercial break. Again, I was too young to fully comprehend the importance of that music video debuting at that time when people like my parents were the audience, but I now feel certain that bit of strategic marketing contributed heavily to Bowie’s career.
Bowie songs came and went and got stuck in my head over the years. I really became a true fangirl in 1986 when I saw Labyrinth. I fell head over heels in love with Bowie’s mysterious, sinister portrayal of the regal Jareth, but the songs were what captivated me. “Underground” in particular. I fairly ran to the store to snatch up the cassette tape, lol. And I was done for after that. A fangirl of Bowie’s for life.
The obsession faded, of course. I was distracted by other 80s hair bands like Bon Jovi and Ratt for a time. I even fangirled over them a bit. As an adult, I had a beach music/Jimmy Buffett phase. But I still listened to Bowie. And then the word came that he had died.
That news hit me pretty hard. I’d never really gotten over Bowie. In fact, although I hadn’t listened to him regularly in a long time, I immediately pulled out all my old Bowie music, downloaded even more and spent more than a year listening to him exclusively.
Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of Bowie’s death. I saw all sorts of tributes to him on the internet. I heard his songs again, sometimes just playing on repeat in my head and echoing in my heart. And I wrote a little something. Because, I guess, that’s what fangirls do.
Echoes in a Fangirl Heart
By Michelle Garren-Flye
Hello, Starman.
Where have you been?
Admiring the sky I caught sight
of you quite by accident,
pale shadow.
Welcome back, Hero.
Where did you go?
The sun came up, the curtain fell…
I never gave up though,
Astronaut.
Insane lads leave me distraught…
How come they can’t be caught?
Image distorted, I can’t see your face,
going against all I was taught…
…Alien.
Greetings, my long-lost friend.
Just on the other side of the moon
is where I find you now,
even though it all ends too soon,
Spaceboy.
Full moon at sunset. Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye Copyright 2023 Michelle Garren-Flye
Yesterday was an important day that often goes unnoticed. In the Northern Hemisphere, it was the darkest day of the year. Winter Solstice.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved the idea of the Winter Solstice. I remember my mother always marked it. She was one of those people whose mood is affected by the light. The darkness of winter depressed her, so the Winter Solstice was a time of change for the good. Because every day after would be brighter. The days are getting longer now, she’d say in the hopeful voice I loved to hear.
Yesterday was a good day for me. I almost forgot it was the shortest day of the year because it seemed bright. Good news, new music, a great day at my store and time with my kids…when I looked at my watch and saw it was almost time for the solstice, though, I knew I needed to mark it. Because every chance I get to make things brighter, I need to take it.
So at 4:48 p.m. I lit a candle. I burned it until midnight and I tried to picture my life…brighter. I came up with two resolutions.
I will hope without reason.
I will love without expectation.
I think if I can hold onto these two resolutions, I can live a brighter life. Too often we wait for life to give us a reason to hope. If we can just hold hope in our hearts, we can live in the light more often. I don’t know what you hope for. I’m sometimes not even certain what I hope for. But I know without hope for something, we might as well curl up and die. So hope.
And loving without expectation is something we all struggle with, I think. I’ve always found it easy to love…things, people, places, pets, food. But in loving, I too often expect something in return. I have a plan in mind for my love, a path it should follow, rewards I should get in return for it, whatever. But I don’t control the object of my love, so I cannot control the results of my love and am often disappointed. Love itself has to be the reward, and if I can achieve that, I will surely live brightly.
I’m sure these two resolutions are not unique. Buddha or Gandhi probably came up with them long ago. Perhaps this is what they tried to teach me in Sunday School when I was a child. Is this what faith is? Or is it just the ramblings of a middle-aged would-be poet? You decide. It won’t matter to me. I’ll be over here hoping for a brighter future and loving you.
It’s cold here today. Yesterday it was mid 60s. This morning? In the 30s. That’s why it wasn’t really surprising to see a dead butterfly on the sidewalk. Poor insect is as confused as I am about the weather. Yesterday, shirtsleeves, today, winter coat. But he didn’t have a winter coat. He was frozen but still beautiful.
It reminded me of poetry. Is that morbid? Definitely dark. But then, I’m one of the best poets you’ve never heard of, and I’m thinking it might be difficult for many people to name ten living poets off the top of their head, anyway. Because poets don’t become household names anymore.
Robert Frost said, “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
Carl Sandburg said, “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
Considering the competition between these two poets, sometimes one-sided, it’s not surprising that these two poets had very different views of poetry. What has always intrigued me was that people paid attention to that rivalry. It was a different time, I suppose. These days, poetry is a hard sale. I see it every day in my store. I have shelves of used poetry—some modern, some classic—in my bookstore. I also have a section of local poetry, including my own.
It’s the classic poetry people still want. Byron, Dickinson…Frost, Sandburg. I understand that want. Those poets wrote about things that aren’t our reality. They’re a higher brow type of escapism than bestselling fiction. I myself have two poetry books sitting on my desk right now. One is The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Basho and the other is A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (published in 1950). I study haiku, so that’s my excuse for that one, but I love the pastoral themes of past poets. I adore reading about love and beauty and passion as if I hadn’t a care in the world.
But I know modern poets are important. We are dreamers and truth speakers, but when we put those dreams of truth out into the cold December mornings, there’s the danger that they may die of the cold.
Well, not quite. I’m a bookmaker, not just a writer. Now I am entering the phase of putting the book together. In some ways it’s more fun. In others, I miss the constant search for rhyme, the debate about rhythm, thinking in verse.
I’m trying something different with the illustrations this time. I’ll still have them. This is going to be a black and white book, though, so it will be less expensive. And I sort of felt like the color in my other books sort of interfered with the poetry. Maybe not quite as much with 100 Days as Hypercreativity, but some. And villanelle, man. Villanelle needs to be admired for what it is.
I had never heard of villanelle before July 16 of last year. I had just written Far & wee, my book of 20 sonnets. I felt fairly confident I had a good grasp of sonnet writing and I wanted to try something new. I asked on Facebook what kind of poetry I should try next and a friend suggested villanelle.
The more I researched villanelle and tried to write it, the more it became obvious that I’d have to write much more than twenty to come close to mastering the form. There’s so much to think about. Not only rhyme, but placement of the rhyme. And finding new rhymes. I mean, you could write ten to twenty villanelles with rhymes ending in -ay and -ate but it would get old. (Trust me.)
So this book is going to be a bit different, even, than the other two in my poetry diaries series. It documents what was going on in my life somewhat, but it’s also a literary journey for me. I’m learning how to write something new and hopefully you’ll be able to see that I get better.
I know some of my favorite poetry that I’ve written thus far is in this book. I won’t tell you which ones they are. I’m also kind of fond of some of the illustrations, even though I don’t imagine I’ve improved that much in that respect. (That is not false modesty. I have improved, but only so far.)
So, I’m off to make a book. Hopefully I can have it done soon. Maybe even in a week or so.
I have sold literally dozens of a certain book recently. Great news, right? (Keep in mind I don’t sell dozens of books usually.)
Except I don’t actually like this particular book…
It’s not a badly written book. I don’t write bad. It’s even got a more complex plot than some of my simpler romances. It’s just that I tried an experiment with this one and I don’t think it worked. At the time I wrote it I’d been writing romances with the typical sweet, likable, strong female protagonists who had faced down challenges in their lives and come out the better for it. (huh) So I decided to write a less likable female protagonist for this one. She’s supposed to be brittle on the outside with a soft core. She’s a bit bitchy, to be honest. And while she was sort of fun to write, I never really connected with her.
I recently heard a word that I relate to. A friend posted it on Facebook. The word is meraki. It is Greek for leaving something of yourself in everything you do. Every artist strives to do this, I think. It’s a risk, though. When you leave something of yourself in your work and it’s rejected, that’s a part of you that suffers. Maybe at the time I chose to write a romance with less of me in it than usual without thinking I’d be less likely to connect to it? Maybe that’s why I am loving poetry so much now. Because it’s easier to leave me in my poetry because if I’m writing it right, I’m lost in it anyway.
Whatever the reason I wrote that way then and this way now, every time I see the numbers tick up on this particular book, I think, No, not that one! Because there’s no meraki to it. There’s not enough me.
From Learning Curve, coming soon! Copyright 2022 Michelle Garren-Flye
Everyone who knows me as a poet knows my feelings about poetry being nonfiction. Poetry is a much more personal form of writing (to me) than novels or short stories. I can write about anything in a novel or short story. I once wrote a flash fiction about a woman who’d lost both legs in an accident. I used to write horror. And yes, romance. All fiction.
Nothing personal.
Poetry, on the other hand, is almost never fiction to me. I can’t really put myself in someone else’s shoes when I write poetry. The few times I have, it’s because I’m able to empathize for one reason or another. And I almost never think those poems are as good as my others.
So poetry is very personal. It’s my thoughts and feelings. And when I put together a poetry book, it’s almost like a diary. I tend to share a bit about what and why I wrote different poems. Like a diary.
I noticed this trend in my work after Hypercreativity. Both Hypercreativity and 100 Warm Days of Haiku fit this concept I had for poetry diaries. So I decided to make them part of a series. The Poetry Diaries was born. The third in this series is coming soon. Well, hopefully. I’m hoping it will be fifty villanelle, but I haven’t even hit forty yet and may stop there, honestly. I’ve discovered a new type of poetry I really want to try. In the meantime, however, I did design the cover to the next poetry diary. And it’s pretty good!
BREATHE: Michelle Garren-Flye 