Start to attach

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
~Plutarch

Happy Poetry Friday! How have you been? I'm getting ready to celebrate my parents' 55th anniversary next week. Today, we have a fun-to-read-aloud poem from the magazine Stone Soup (100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13)

sparks from a bonfire

A lot of nature with a little bit of red
By Ethan Issadore, Age 11

A lot of nature with a little bit of red,
And that is to be said.
Trees and forests for miles on end.
I forget the cityscape, but I try to pretend.
The branches start to bend,
And then there is a crack.
The fire starts to sizzle and glow, like preparing an attack.
We huddle around the fire,
Though we have one more desire.
At least we do not need to “brrr.”
We collect the ingredients and start to stir.
The fire grows higher and higher...

read the rest here

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I'm going to be traveling next week-- to VA to see my parents and to NH to see Ben's mom-- so I will catch you the week after. Marcie Flinchum Atkins has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Marcie!

The Journey

in 1897, [Elizabeth Shippen Green] took up illustration study formally with the venerable Howard Pyle at the Drexel school. Her favorite teachers, Pyle, Anshutz, and Vonnoh, were the same teachers whom influenced Maxfield Parrish at the same august art institutions.
~National Museum of American Illustration

For Art Thursday, an illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green.

The Journey
Illustration for a series of poems by Josephine Preston Peabody entitled "The Little Past," Dec. 1903
by Elizabeth Shippen Green

Never Been Small

We all should get to feel like there's something powerful and beautiful about who we are.
~Shonda Rhimes

For Music Monday, Jennarie with Never Been Small:

Bill Withers

The National Recording Registry is a list of sound recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States." The registry was established by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000.
~Wikipedia

Bill Withers and his daughter Corey

Happy Poetry Friday! I heard recently that the Library of Congress added the latest "Sound Recordings of the Year" to their National Recording Registry, including songwriter and singer Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine.

Mr. Withers was inspired to write Ain't No Sunshine by a movie! (Days of Wine and Roses, I think)

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away

Bill Withers sounded amazing live. Take a listen:



He didn't write very many songs. I can't remember exactly how he put it, but he said he wrote just enough that he had one when he needed it.

Bill Withers also said, upon being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: "What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain't a genre that somebody didn't record them in. I'm not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don't think I've done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia." He thought being from West Virginia encouraged him to write Lean on Me because rural people were more likely to help each other.

About writing Lovely Day:
"The way [co-writer] Skip was, every day was just a lovely day. He was an optimist. If I had sat down with the same music and my collaborator had been somebody else with a different personality, it probably would have caused something else to cross my mind lyrically."



From Just the Two of Us:
We look for love, no time for tears
Wasted water's all that is
And it don't make no flowers grow

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Reflections on the Teche has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Margaret!

The honey harvest

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee—
one clover, and a bee,
and revery.
The revery alone will do,
if bees are few.
– Emily Dickinson

For Art Thursday, The honey harvest by Riccardo Pellegrini. I'm not exactly sure what he's doing here, but it looks like he's not very well-protected!

The honey harvest (1892)
by Riccardo Pellegrini

Make a big wish

May you find what you Need here.
~Mon Rovîa

For Music Monday, songs from Mon Rovîa and John Prine. Mon Rovîa says that when he writes songs, "he dials into something within, a process he calls 'downloading from the source,' and song springs out." (Teen Vogue)



John Prine, Fish and Whistle:

Dew dresses

From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer.
~Poetry Foundation

Happy Poetry Friday! How was your week?

An inspiring found poem today. Doesn't Elinor Ann Walker do a lovely job of stitching these lines together?

A Cento of Serene Length
by Elinor Ann Walker
title after Gertrude Stein

My body craves dresses, a single seam falling,
flowers swirling in a pattern,
a coral neck scarf. A hand (not mine)
restless under each buffeting layer,

so I alter the pattern to fit a phantom of me,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths.
I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.

I have spread my dreams under your feet,
folded my sorrows. I have. I have...


read the rest here

Sources: Kim Addonizio, Mary Jo Bang, Andrea Blancas Beltran, Victoria Chang, Toi Derricotte, Rachel Hadas, Hazel Hall (more than one line), Saeed Jones, Deborah Paredez, Linda Pastan, Angela Shaw, Anya Silver, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, May Swenson, Chase Twichell, William Butler Yeats (more than one line).

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Robyn Hood Black is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Robyn!