Confusion with the prefix "bi"

Check it out:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bi-

Well, here's one for the list of English language potentially dangerous confusions: biweekly, bimonthly, biannually. Now, granted, confusion may be averted with the term biannually by using its clearer sister word, biennially, which can only be interpreted as "every two years." But, still, the general confusion may occur with all the other terms. The prefix bi is rooted in the Latin, from bis, which means two or twice. So, biweekly may mean twice a week or every two weeks, bimonthly may mean twice a month or every two months, biannually may mean twice a year or every two years.

I vow to steer clear from all of these terms in my writing unless there is a sure fire way to clarify to the reader exactly which meaning I mean. I suggest the same for writers everywhere. Thoughts?

My first cinquain poem

I just learned about the poetry form of the cinquain via http://dversepoets.com/2013/03/14/form-for-all-the-cinquain. Here is my first effort: 

Definition
Cinquain:
five-line poem;
twenty-two syllables
laid out two, four, six, eight, then two
again.

***

My Belief For Today 

I think

(but do not know)

why things are as they are

may be because of some wisdom

hidden

Poem, "Dusk," by Margo Berdeshevsky

This poem speaks to me very deeply. I love the way Berdeshevsky uses imagery here to create emotion with intuitive understanding that transcends intellectual exactness. So powerful. Dusk by Margo Berdeshevsky This is the place. No chairs. A woman who is choosing has sent a petal from her bloom of conscious closing. The woman who is choosing when -scratches vellum. The rook stands. The woman in the nest of the phoenix hovers nearer her edge like that brood of birthing opal-throated pigeons in an empty flower trough, thirsty, one stair above my sill, breaking their shells one by one. She repeats my words from dusk in a jungle where medicine leaned small against thorn trees. Each poison growing in a forest lives beside its antidote, we said. I am still eager, I said. Or the scent of hyacinth. The woman remembering, who is choosing when to die will curl before leaves have blood-burned September. Surrender by starvation, she doesn't name her illness only how many days. Three more. The woman in worn white cotton washed us in a tide pool, brewed petals, shouted under egrets at the edge of rain. Bon voyage to me & love life as you live it she scribbles blue before her breath ends a night and a day and the broken slant dawn. The woman who was choosing when to die. Too young to be skeletal, skin taken wing. Bone no longer needed. Dove. Fire-eyed. Distant. Opal. The root does not care where her water comes from. Here is another thirsty body. Broken into morning. *NOTE: The poem "Dusk" by Margo Berdeshevsky is copyrighted material taken from The Academy of American Poets website: www. poets.org. This copyrighted material is owned in its entirety by Margo Berdeshevsky and is not meant to be used in any way that may infringe on its copyright.  [For more information regarding Margo Berdeshevsky, visit:  http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Poem-A-Day--Dusk-by-Margo-Berdeshevsky.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=5nezSmkXtP0  and:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23395?utm_source=PAD%3A+Dusk+by+Margo+Berdeshevsky&utm_campaign=poemaday_030813&utm_medium=socialshare]

Poem, "A pillow in the city" by Patricia Spears Jones

I find this poem by Patricia Spears Jones very beautiful and potent. I love how Jones uses the pillow as a metaphor to reveal the tragedy of social inequality and the rage and despair that results from it. "A pillow" brings to mind another poem that uses metaphor very powerfully, "Yellowjackets" by Yusef Komunyakaa (posted below Jones' "A pillow"). Read both and compare the subtle methods each of these brilliant poets uses to illustrate, by focusing on the specific and the concrete, a deeper truth that transcends the specific and reaches into the vast arena of our humanity. Enjoy!  A pillow in the city by Patricia Spears Jones  Ghostly falls from the fifteenth floor Feathers leaking/ the pillow speaking How the sleeper's nightly pounding Made the pillow yelp and moan Poor sleeper heard these comments Angered threw said pillow into An ugly summer night's air The pillow had little choice The sleeper's fists. The sleeper's mouth Not kind, not soft, always angry The sleeper always angry--even Dreaming the sleeper could not Stop rage, so the bed was a battlefield The pillow, an enemy. And now Said enemy slowly plunges towards The courtyard deflated, a feral squirrel Watches the fall, moves on towards The overflowing garbage bins, nose open Time to feast.

Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Spears Jones. Used with permission of the author.

Yellowjackets

BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

When the plowblade struck   

An old stump hiding under   

The soil like a beggar’s   

Rotten tooth, they swarmed up   

& Mister Jackson left the plow   

Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon.   

The horse was midnight   

Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s   

Pocketwatch.  He shivered, but not   

The way women shook their heads   

Before mirrors at the five   

& dime—a deeper connection   

To the low field’s evening star.   

He stood there, in tracechains,   

Lathered in froth, just   

Stopped by a great, goofy   

Calmness.  He whinnied   

Once, & then the whole   

Beautiful, blue-black sky   

Fell on his back.

Poem copyright ©2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa, reprinted from “Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999,” Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2001, by permission.

Happy birthday to Lewis Carroll! Enjoy his poem, "Acrostic."

Acrostic
by Lewis Carroll

 

Little maidens, when you look
On this little story-book,
Reading with attentive eye
Its enticing history,
Never think that hours of play
Are your only HOLIDAY,
And that in a HOUSE of joy
Lessons serve but to annoy:
If in any HOUSE you find
Children of a gentle mind,
Each the others pleasing ever--
Each the others vexing never--
Daily work and pastime daily
In their order taking gaily--
Then be very sure that they
Have a life of HOLIDAY.

The Call of the Open by Shelley

Listen beyond the seemingly archaic form of the language Shelley used to hear what he is actually saying here. This is quite a poem. Enjoy!  The Call of the Open by Percy Bysshe Shelley   Which yet joined not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.

Great interview w/ poet Richard Blanco

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23276?utm_source=News%3A+Richard+Blanco+Interview&utm_campaign=blanco_interview&utm_medium=email

Our People, Our Future: Richard Blanco in Conversation
by Richard Blanco
Academy of American Poets staff spoke with Richard Blanco in the days leading up to his delivering a poem at President Obama's Inauguration on January 21, 2013. Poets.org: To prepare for your writing the inaugural poem, have you studied the inaugural poems by Robert Frost, Miller Williams, Maya Angelou or Elizabeth Alexander? Or, have you reached out to any of those poets (still living) for advice? Richard Blanco: Yes, I have looked mostly at Angelou's poem, and then Alexander's poem, too. I see this position as not only being about writing my own poem for the nation, but also keeping a certain sense of continuity, and so their poems were some of the first places I went to—looking at how they quote/unquote solved the occasional poem. But I also went back to a poem by a friend and colleague of mine, Nikki Moustaki, that has always stayed in my memory: "How To Write A Poem After September 11th," which was published in the New York Times on its own page (and included in the anthology Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, Melville House, 2002). It was also, in some sense, an occasional poem, and very inspiring to me. And, I went back to some of my old favorites just for language, to reinspire myself. My Elizabeth Bishops and my Robert Frosts. So, the whole gang came out. Poets.org: What is it about poetry that makes it the art form we turn to so often to mark or understand significant events? Blanco: In terms of my personal aesthetic or take on poetry, I would say that poetry is the place we go to when we don't have any more words: that place that is so emotionally centered. It is the place we go to when we have something that we can't quite put a finger on, that we can't explain away, that we can't easily understand with the mind. It's the reason I come to poetry as well. As I love to say in my writing classes: If you sit down totally convinced of what the poem is going to be, don't even sit down. Because writing a poem is a discovery process. I've been working on a memoir, which is more about storytelling. I've learned to recognize that when I sit down to write a poem, I have something to figure out, and I have to do it on the page. And I hope that my inaugural poem will do that, in some ways, for the nation. That it will work towards making sense of—all the din of the day—all that we hear in the news. Poets.org: The theme of this Inauguration is "Our People, Our Future." How might the poem you will offer help explore or speak to this theme? Blanco: The theme was something I immediately connected with. In my writing I focus mostly on my immediate family, but because I'm Cuban, that means a lot of people. My family is big. There's plenty to write about. I grew up around very Salt-of-the-Earth people—my mother working in my uncle's grocery store. We were a struggling, working-class family. I connected with the theme because so much of my even being asked to present a poem is what the American Dream tastes of—that sense of coming to life. And when I first heard the news of my being chosen to read, the first people I thought of were my parents and my grandparents. How do we ensure our future? It's through the work we do, through the art we produce. I think about my parents and my family, what they had to sacrifice, how hard they worked, and how much they loved this country—in that sense, they are "our people." Poets.org: So many individuals in the LGBT and Latino communities are proud that you were selected by the President to read. How does your identity inform your poetry? Blanco: Well, I'll tell you something that might be a little more interesting. In my first two books, I focused more on the cultural negotiation of being from an exiled community. I grew up between two imaginary worlds. One was the Cuba that my community always talked about, the place that we left that some day we were going back to, the stories, the pictures, the photographs, the letters. The other imaginary place was America. I grew up in Miami, which was a culturally isolated community back in the 1970s. You know, I really believed in those houses and households on the sitcoms, on Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch. I really thought America existed outside of where I lived. Being in Miami was somewhere in between, a purgatory or a waiting ground, waiting to get to America. I negotiated that in my writing, as soon as I started writing. My very first writing class was taught by Campbell McGrath, and my very first writing assignment was to "Write a poem about America." And that became the very first poem in my very first book, "América." I immediately found a reason for writing beyond the love of the words. I had something that I wanted to discover. All of a sudden I was twenty-something thinking: Wait a minute, I'm not as Cuban as I thought and I'm not as American either. That kind of trumped a lot of sexual identity questions. My third book is sort of the book in which I came out of the literary closet. Its theme and topic was the intersection of these identities, or how they collided. What does it mean to be a gay Cuban man? Asking that really opened the door. It piqued my interest in that sense. And now I've been with my partner for twelve years, and I'm 44. It's almost like my mind couldn't handle negotiating both things at the same time, until this third book. My work has to do with searching—searching within myself, but searching for what the universal experience is that poetry taps into as well. Poets.org: When were you first interested in poetry? Blanco: Since I grew up in an immigrant, very working-class family, Picasso and T.S. Eliot were not exactly dinner conversation. Being a poet was outside of my realm of possibilities in a way. And like many children from immigrant, working-class families, my parents wanted their kids to do better. So I wasn't guided toward poetry; I was guided to be a lawyer, doctor, engineer. I was really good at math—which I guess is a double-edged sword—so I chose engineering, with the idea of going on and getting a Master's in Architecture. As they say, life is what happens in between the things that you plan. But there was always, since I was a kid, a creative spirit that wouldn't silence itself. So after I graduated with an engineering degree, I began, as I say, fooling around with poetry. Poetry, or at least writing, is something that we're used to. You can pick up a piece of paper and a pen and write. You don't have to go buy brushes and a can of paint to express your creativity. I was about 23 or 24 then, and, of course, I wrote pretty bad poems. But I was never afraid to show them to people. I would show a poem to a friend who was an English major, and he or she would say, "Oh, you know, this is pretty good. I like this." Then someone said, "Have you ever thought of taking a creative writing class at a community college?" And finally someone said, "Why don't you go and get an MFA?" I came to writing poetry late in life. (Although, I do remember looking at poetry in my older brother's textbooks, specifically "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.") But I'm grateful for that. I've had a whole other realm of experiences. At the same time, sometimes I feel somewhere in the middle. That's been the arc or theme of my life: always in a middle. Living the life of a straight man until age 25 (in the middle), living between the ideal of American culture and the Cuban heritage, living between engineering and poetry. It seems to be this kind of economy I have going on, which somehow makes me happy. Poets.org: You are the youngest poet to present an Inaugural poem. Does it feel to you like there is a shift to a new generation of leaders and voices? Blanco: I like that. Yes, it reminds me of a conversation I had with Natasha Trethewey, our U. S. Poet Laureate, who I saw at the Dodge Poetry Festival. She's the youngest Poet Laureate ever, and she has gone through an MFA program and participated in the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference. Our whole world of poetry has changed so much in one generation. It's great that Natasha has a real grasp on that and what our challenges are as poets, and what the challenges of poetry are in America, in this generation. I think sometimes there's a divide. But I think everyone in the poetry world has been working subconsciously to connect poetry to more people. And it's working. Because of my background, I hope I can bring other things to the table as well.