What’s Up for November 2009

Author: Shari Smothers

Oct 28

I was all set to tell you about my new adventure when something happened! While surfing and tweeting, I came across some great tweets from someone I just started following, @inkyelbows. And I found a new adventure.

What I was going to tell you before my distraction was that I’m going to try NaNoWriMo again this year. Last year I signed up and didn’t get much further than that. Last year, I signed up on November 1, and fell apart shortly thereafter.

This year I gave myself a little more warning, little more time for self-talk, tools and ideas. Time to play around with the endeavor and sort of slide into next month like it was any other November.

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What is it About a Poem?

Author: Shari Smothers

May 18

I sit at my computer and work;
laboring looks like meditation.
I’m just sitting
staring at the screen.
Searching blank space for the thought
the word, the letter that would
speak to each successive one
indicating the keystrokes to make
like a player piano.

I follow the lead to reveal
the message I know is there,
hidden just for me to find.

My alternative execution
is pen and paper
for calling on Inspiration
to whisper in the text
I’ll soon let spill out of me.

The tactile sensation of
my hand scraping a pen across paper
unearths the verses
that will expose parts of me
I may have wanted to hide.

Thank God for editing time
because once my hands get going
no telling what they’ll put out.
As if a poem makes a thing
less poignant, less painful
and easier to share.

A poem will display me naked
and prostrate before my audience;
and I give it space to have its say.

Before I share anything though
sanity and left brain rush in
and cover me properly
in innuendo using shape, simile and metaphor.

Shari Lynne Smothers ©2009

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Poetry Night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Author: Shari Smothers

May 12

White House Poetry Jam 2009

Many are tweeting the news. My mom was talking about it today. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing/hearing James Earl Jones tonight, along with Joshua Bennett, Eric Lewis, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Mayda Del Valle and Esperanza Spalding and the rest of the great personalities scheduled to participate. If you want to see it online, visit The White House Live Stream to watch online.

It’s on tonight at 7:45 Eastern Time, Tuesday, May 12, 2009. I’ll be back tonight with my reflection on this great evening. I do wish I was there!

It was a Refreshing Event

It’s always a pleasure to hear James Earl Jones and tonight was no different. He read Shakespeare and did not dissapoint. The Jazz musicians skills were discernible even through my unclear audio.

While I love poetry, I’m not into all the styles. The style Joshua and Jamaica performed is difficult for me to follow. It’s quite exciting. I don’t know that I have the stuff to deliver that style even if I wrote like that.

Learning new artists is quite the adventure. These poets took me out of my comfort zone, for sure. My tastes generally run along the lines of Maya Angelou, written and performed, Billy Collins and Audre Lorde. It was a refreshing change from the more serious political atmosphere. I for one am really glad they did it and shared it online.

I do wonder what others thought. Please share your thoughts if you have something constructive to say.

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I had a Good Time

Author: Shari Smothers

May 1

This poem is my reaction to all the fun I had eeking out a poem a day for the last ten days of April, National Poetry Month 2009.

I said I would put up
one poem daily for ten days
through the end of April.

I’m relieved I made that happen.

Now for my next trick
I think I’ll put up—
content to be determined.

Thanks for stopping by
and I hope you’ll come again.
for more poems for sure,

plus other random things.

©2009 by Shari Lynne Smothers

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Courage to Join the Club

Author: Shari Smothers

Apr 19

Reading poems
makes me want to
write my own.
Writing them
makes me want to
read from more poets.

It’s a self-sustaining
cycle that could easily
consume me.
I know this because
I’ve let it loose in me
from time to time.

Beautiful timeless verses
of Audre Lorde in
A Litany for Survival;
The insightful, hopeful
message from Alice Walker imparted by
The Same as Gold.

They, the poets and their verses,
inspire in me this intense
longing to share
in their artists’ collective
with my own verses like Broke.
Still, I hesitate.

Through years of exploring poets
contemporary and long dead
I’ve vacillated between
wanting to participate
and keeping hid the way I can fall far short.

Hiding
wins often
until my verses shout to me
demanding to be shared,
and here is one place I let them out.

These words that demand the chance
to have an audience
don’t ask for or require
safety. So I make the effort
to meet their bravery
and stand by them and listen
to what any might want to say
mostly because I have no choice.

©2009 by Shari Lynne Smothers

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