Writer@ 9600 ft
You can find it on Amazon now, or Finishing Line Press. I’ll do a few events around it, beginning Tuesday at 6 p.m., February 15, at the Gallery R and Wine Bar in Boulder with Poet Jeffrey Franklin. Thanks, Colorado Poets Center!
Other upcoming events posted here.
Thanks to everyone who has supported me and this book!
Given that my entire upcoming chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic, came from using the NaPoWriMo poetry prompts during National Poetry Month, I do have a few things to share about using the poetry prompt. And Split Rock Review has just published a new poem, Octopus on a Sea Dock, that uses a whole mix of made-up poetry prompts like “use something from the day’s National Geographic” post, among others. . .
It’s a useful tool, so I took Split Rock Review up on its offer to publish On Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs: Using the Poetry Prompt. You can read it at Split Rock! And, yes, I had fun with it!
Doing the month long NaPoWriMo poetry prompts with my poet friend Marty McGovern. If you’re a poet and aren’t doin’ it, try it. It’s fun and you never know what you are going to end up with.
Here’s my stab for Day Five, using Stanley Kunitz’s poem, End of Summer, for my prompt, using the same first letters in each line (okay, I cheated in the last line) and following loosely the line length. (okay, I cheated there too!) (oh, and I didn’t rhyme . . . whoops!)
The Sandhill Cranes of San Luis Valley
to Lucy
A half-thermal of air
and a left off Highway 160
arrested the cold of glacial farm fields
we passed, shaken by a year of such frost
we will not forget. We stand in a rutted drive
amid winter refuse and ditches, unready to be
awoke, to go glittering beneath the half-fences,
the dark of our cameras we uncap
blown with such light we had forgot.
A crane flies out of a wind block of marsh,
then wave after wave of rose-tipped cranes plow
the winter sky, the cold we’ve owned.
Already what we prayed for
craters us into unimaginable spring: a volcano’s
old mouth, we dared to enter, enflamed
by cranes, thousands in old potato fields, and leaping.
Late Snow on an Easter Morning
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
rosy finch, nuthatch and house wren quibbling at the copper feeder I hung just a day ago
before the late frost air drifted through.
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
so I dry dishes at the sink, forget the days’ count since the last pink moon.
The wood stove burns and unquiet sparrows gather in the gathering snow.
I am learning the solitude of black tea citrus rinds and licorice roots,
rosy finch, nuthatch, and house wren quibbling at the copper feeder I hung just a day ago.
Kathryn Winograd