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My Poems on The Ravens Perch

February 7, 2025

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The Ravens Perch has published four of my poems this past week.  You can find the first of them, “The Plural of Albatross” at https://theravensperch.com/the-plural-of-albatross-by-ellen-roberts-young/

Then page forward to “Night Flight” an experiment at capturing the experience of not sleeping/sleeping on an overnight flight.

Next is “Absence” which evolved from a prompt at the Napa Writers Conference in 2023: many drafts before and after comments by our workshop leader, Ilya Kominsky and fellow students.

At the end of the set, but perhaps most meaningful to share, is “Cry for the Earth””

            Old earth,
your home, is creaking.
Can you hear how much
too fast the hidden heart is
beating?

Find the rest of this one here.

Thanks to Ravens Perch for accepting these efforts.  Each poem has a comments block below it.  They like to get responses, so oblige if you can.

Out in the World

November 18, 2021

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Two of my poems have recently appeared in public.  Aji has printed “Cosmos,” a short poem about the shrinking, darkening world of a caregiver, opposite a splendid picture of dark sky: See pages 106 and 107 of their latest issue: http://www.ajimagazine.com/uploads/2/2/2/8/22289112/ajimagazinefall2021issue15-final.pdf

Spectrum has published “The Moon Demoted” in Issue 64.  The issue theme is “Perseverance.”  “The Moon Demoted” is about calendars and time. subjects I keep coming back to.  Why do we try to measure the spinning of the round earth and moon in little boxes?  Have you noticed how many wall calendars don’t even bother to put the phases of the moon into those little squares?  Spectrum is a student run print journal out of UC Santa Barbara.

Night, whether long or short
is reduced to a bar, straight
as a sidewalk . . .

I’m pleased to have my poems in the company of many other good pieces in both publications.

Sharing My Poetry

October 25, 2020

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I had the pleasure of an interview with Lynn Moorer this week about my poetry book Made and Remade on KTAL, the Las Cruces Community Radio station. The interview is now on their website at:

https://www.lccommunityradio.org/archives

It was fun to return to this book published in 2014 and feel that the poems still resonate. As I read “Shared Ground” it occurred to me that the end has current relevance:

If the universe has a maker
is it made less lonely?
My legs being made for walking
their notion settles my spirit.

I thought of how many are frustrated in their isolation these days. I hope all have, as I do, the release of something like walking to keep yourselves in balance.

Check out the link to hear that and six more poems.

Thanks to Lynn for this opportunity.

My new chapbook TRANSPORTED is open for pre-orders at Finishing Line Press!

October 5, 2020

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England, Paris, Greece, Rome: a European grand tour at age 12?

Evacuation from Egypt was the pivot point of a two-year adventure during my childhood when my father got a Fulbright grant to teach English abroad.  The poems in TRANSPORTED describe and reflect on that experience and how it shaped the person I became.

TRANSPORTED is listed on the Finishing Line Press website at:
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/transported-by-ellen-roberts-young/.

Preorders are what make the publication happen. The period for preorders closes November 28.

The cost is $14.99 plus $2.99 shipping.
The intended ship date is January 22, 2021.

I invite all my friends and relations and readers to have a look, and place an order if you like what you see.

Booklover: That’s Me

June 24, 2019

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In a “one of these days we’ll have to move” mood recently, I began sorting through some folders of old poems.

I found early drafts of poems which ended up in Made and Remade, some of which I didn’t recognize until I looked up the final version.

Some of the poems in Made and Remade originally appeared in Ascent, the book I and four colleagues put together as “Five Southwestern Women Poets”  (Both of these books can be obtained from me through contact on this blog, by the way).

One poem in Ascent did not make it into the later book.  It says more about me than was fitting for the material in the book, the writing of William Paley..  It was fun to find the poem again.  It was even more fun to tighten it up – my sense of craft is stronger now than it was when this was first published.

Here’s a poet’s self-image:

Booklover

First editions, clean and jacketed?
I prefer those lived with,
lived in, a note card
slipped between pages.

I see myself in a used bookstore,
on a back shelf, loose cover,
yellow pages, among books not
classified: is it history, is it

romance, is it worth the paper
it’s printed on? The bookseller
does not come to dust.

I lean against another
volume, convinced there are
worse ends than this.

 

Poems On Line

July 22, 2015

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I’ve had three poems accepted so far this year, and they all showed up on the internet this month. Here’s something about them.

First to “go live” was “Thickening” at 3 Elements Review:  http://3elementsreview.com/current-journal. 3 Elements puts out a prompt each quarter. I’ve been trying them for almost a year, now.   This was my first success. The prompt was “miasma, simmer, whimsy.” Unfortunately, they seem to have decided their prompts were too easy. This quarter’s prompts are two word phrases. Ouch! They’ve gone over my head.

Heron Tree accepted “Green”: http://herontree.com/young1/. This poem also came from an exercise, though it is far removed. There is a poetry exercise in wide circulation by Jim Simmerman called “Twenty Little Poetry Projects.” His claim is that if you follow his instructions to write 20 lines according to his criteria, you’ll end up with the basis of a poem. I never got all 20 items in, and half of them fell out in the revision process. But I do have the poem to suggest his system works.

The third poem developed from no prompts but my own ideas. “American Dreaming” is included in Kind of a Hurricane Press’s anthology titled “Objects in the Rear View Mirror.” This piece is not very accessible; you have to download the ebook version of the anthology and go to page 143: http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com/p/bookstore.html.  All the pieces are about driving. My piece is mostly about maps, including the colors of roads (see my post of July 7). I also brought Route 66 into the poem. I didn’t realize until I moved to New Mexico that Route 66 nostalgia is much older and broader than the television show. As a teenager I was a fan of that show, but I could never see why, of the buddy heroes, the dark one (George Maharis) got all the press in the magazines. I liked the tall blond (Martin Milner) better.

It was evidence that I was not in the main stream. If you’ve read my poems or some of my blog posts, you know there are still ways I don’t fit in. Now I like it that way.

Vowel Sounds

January 10, 2015

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We’ve all been taught that there are five vowels, “and sometimes “y.”  But those five vowels make many more sounds, fourteen or fifteen, depending on which internet source you consult.  (Apparently this is not yet an exact science.)  The value of the sounds – which is important to poetry – ranges from the high of key, cane or kite (or bee, bay and by) to the low “oh” and “oo” sounds (coat, cool, or bone and boo).

The echo of vowel sounds from one word to another is called assonance.  I’ve been playing with that feature.  The trick, for me, is keep to assonance and not get stuck in rhyme.  I haven’t succeeded yet with the “eh” sound, because there are so many words ending in -ed: bed, bread, fed, red . . . .  Rhyming is not the point of this exercise.  The long “I” has similar problems.  Too much fine wine.

Here are a few experiments:

Evening: sense
and  sound calm us down,
which is why we say
Hallowe’en,
that shriek, a keen.

Sums hum
in the air. Money
troubles the bed.
Love
comes to shove.

Flash, dash, fat cat!
Clap for all that’s
under your hat,
in your stash.
What’s after?  Ash.

You don’t have to be a poet to play this game, but I think it’s good practice if you’d like to become one.

Word Play

December 6, 2014

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I have been learning a lot about tanka from Ribbons, the journal of the Tanka Society of America – too bad the acronym is in such heavy use elsewhere – and I have been experimenting with the form.  Sometimes, I know all I’ve got is a five line poem.  In the following two short pieces, the play of homonyms took over.

 

My thoughts coast toward
the California coast; others
shore up the Jersey shore.
Is it a fault to lie by omission
about where the fault lies?

 

My brother wanted
to coast down the mountain,
returning from the coast.
Papa said no, of course,
the road no sled or ski course.

Have fun with words.  You never know what might come of some word play.

 

My Book is Out!

June 2, 2014

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Paley front coverAnd it is in my hands.  Due to a miscommunication with the publisher, the books had to chase me across the country, but I now have a batch to offer.  You can buy the book on the WordTech website, http://www.wordtechweb.com/order.htm

or you can contact me for a signed copy at a slight discount ($15 instead of $18, and mailing is included, as a special hot-off-the-press offer).

The poems in Made and Remade respond to William Paley’s book, Natural Theology, published in 1802.  Famous for his analogy, “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground . . . the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker . . . .,” the book presents Paley’s case for creation by design.  As cracks developed in a once coherent world view, we have been left with patches and pieces – the material of poetry – with which to make meaning.  The poems move in many directions, reflecting on how much has changed in 200 years.

Musings on the solstice

December 21, 2013

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It has been cloudy the past two mornings, making the start of the day seem even later than it is.  As the solstice approached I began thinking about what the next quarter of the year would bring.  I like winter as a time to clean things out and make more order to my domestic world.  It is also a nice season outdoors here.  I may be ready for spring in February, but not now:

Thank the heavens
winter follows solstice.
How could we turn
to blooming
in the blink of a day?

I’m not sure “the heavens” are really the source of our season of winter, but having turned my mind to them, I reflect on this question:

Where’s Ison?  Did it melt
like Icarus” wings?  With no comet
will our days be calmer?

Christmas and New Year’s will be over too soon.  I wish everyone a happy winter (or summer for my few readers in Australia) season.

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