What is "True Vogue" ?

Chelsea Bednar blogs at  Artistic Adventures.

I am truly moved by Margaret Bedner's poem "True Vogue" and her daughter's drawings posted under that title on Margaret's blog:  Art Happens 365 - My Photography & Poetry.  Here is the poem's first stanza: 

Designer trends,

make a woman

or so they say

I hope you will go to her site to see the rest.

It is a short poem, about loving our selves and our own poetic souls. The drawings make it especially vivid.  

I, too, have written about this, over and over, but in poems so raw and youthful that they need major revision before I will post them again.  Irony?  

"True Vogue" is a good lens into a never fully-answered question:  Where do we live and create without pretense?  I went through various phases in answer to this question, and when I taught in high school I tried to help my students face the issue.  I wanted them to see they had to make strategic choices. This is a hard lesson to teach and learn as a writer who believes authentic voices are more and more needed.  

When I read "True Vogue," however, I am reminded of our craft as poets.  The need to "re-envision" has occasionally more to do with creating poetry than with trying to hide a creative soul.  The spareness of this free-verse poem that moves forward through images and metaphor--what is buttoned and unbuttoned--shows true art.  The poet does not try to do everything; she does not make the poem comment on itself.  She cuts all but impressions to underline her double-sworded title.  

Vogue means  "a temporary fashion trend." What is truly vogue?  In which phase of our lives--mine and yours--will it be popular to be as naked as our hidden selves?  At which point do we begin to take the real risks that could make our art worthy of being seen and celebrated?  

What is love?

Today's Poem-a-day: Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for    fear I effuse unreturn'd love, But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay    is certain one way or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was    not return'd, Yet out of that I have written these songs.) I wrote a prompt on 13 February 2013 at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads that gave some variety to the traditional Valentine's Day. Some gorgeous poems reside there, including mine.  I am astonished to finally be finding so many positive images in a growing up time that I used to love to hate.  Walt Whitman expresses that, too, in his tiny poem above.  What a switch to learn that love is returned, noted, felt and moved, moving in return.

Historic Day

President Obama’s second inauguration.
The Public one: 1/21/2013

Obama calculates his repetition
to be the jingle we all sing as we
leave and live:   We the People. 
We the People.
We the People.

He was made for this moment,
to stand and to stop “treating
name calling as reasoned debate.”
To reason, remake, reform,
revamp and re-energize.

Obama reminds citizens we must
execute God-given rights, that we
must be equal not only in God’s
eyes, but in our own eyes be
we, the People.


I had forgotten and worked with my poetry correspondance right through his inaugeral address.  I just finished listening to it at the  NYTimes and You Tube.  As impressive as his others, this one stripped away the icing and went straight to his points.  He said words like slave and strap and sword and, in general, made no bones about his agenda.  He never said the word compromise--he said "Do it for your children and grandchildren."  Everyone looked frozen except for Obama who is as if a torch in our midst. 

This is our history, he says. 
This is what we said we believe. 
We, the people, still believe it.



 

Check in for the new year

I have been silent for a while, living in family out there and living in poems in here, mostly posting them at Susan's Poetry and on Facebook.  I answer letters, respond to comments, and sit down for way too many hours in the day.

I have made two decisions based in the past year's experience which some may call New Year's Resolutions:  (1) boldly write about what I have been silent about, and (2) make sure to have an "artist's date" at least once a week.  The latter is from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a book I worked with almost 20 years ago. I plan to combine walking with seeing places in Philadelphia that I haven't seen: museums, parks, stores, riverside sites and more.  I started with a Pendle Hill retreat over New Year's eve and day.

One writing word-shop ended in December and another begins next week. There, my mentor Alison Hicks encourages the growth of my novel The Storyteller and I plan to bring in pages for the other writers in the workshop to read.  No longer shy about writing, liking my chapters, seeing the conflicts and plots grow--I am amazed to be insider to what is for me an extremely slow process.  V e r y  slow.

That's all for now, folks.  


 

Food for thought

Today, on Facebook, I read a posting from Claire, the marvelous Scots poet and bloggist of One Night Stanzas and Read This Magazine, and followed its invitation to read the guest blog: 

Claire Askew

There's a guest post today at One Night Stanzas from poet Mark Antony Owen, on why he never sends his poems out to magazines. Please do have a read and leave him a comment! http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/?p=1609

I found this readable editorial very intriguing.  Mark Anthony Owen believes quite simply that his poems hold up better in collections of his own work, that a reader can get a false impression of his work when they read one poem singly in the context of multiple poets.  

Do you have similar experiences and stories? I would love to know your thoughts,  especially if you have put a collection of your own together or even considered it.

I am in the consideration stages now.  Although I continue to improve with practice and may yet be too raw for serving, I have been playing with a collection of childhood poems to be called "Feeding the child" or something like.  Many of my poems mine my childhood in ways that seem premeditated but that keep surprising me--and feeding me.  Unexpected poems arise prompted with a spark, perhaps, from one of my poetry workshops*.  And while I have a few poems that gloom about the discomforts of being a child, there are an amazing (to me) number of pleasures: a climbing tree, story time, a cold forehead, roasting marshmallows, a table, a dream.  


 *I post with five word-work-shop blogs: I am a member of Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads and Poets United, and participate in dVerse Poets Pub, Theme Thursday and Haiku Heights.  I can recommend others I have participated in as well.  I leave my poems up on my poetry blog only for a few days, keeping them unpublished just in case I want to publish them in other venues.