Two sides of one mind
November 21, 2023
Uncategorized poetry, publication 1 Comment
I came home from a wonderful trip to learn that a poem of mine is out on line.
The editors really like it – they don’t recommend reading aloud or rereading for every poem. I’m very pleased to have it published. Here’s the link:
https://www.abandonedmine.org/crossing-texas-ellen-roberts-young
Do you think it’s a fair representation of Texas?
As for my wonderful trip, I hope to have pictures soon.
November 3, 2023
Uncategorized Acrostic, Paperclips, play, poetry 1 Comment
With words, with the acrostic form, about something you can play with at the desk.
But I’ve been getting into old storage, and there are too many.
Oversupply
Pins that make no holes
Abundant in every file and folder
Part of a writer’s detritus.
Each once necessary for
Responsible sorting, but now
Cupboards and drawers are full, as are
Long unopened boxes.
I discard the few rusty ones,
Pile the rest in loose piles.
Save me! I’m drowning in paperclips!
September 4, 2023
Uncategorized poems on line, poetry 1 Comment
It’s a rare thing for me to send out a batch of poems and have them all accepted. The Raven’s Perch has done just that and I’m thrilled.
You can find one of four here: https://theravensperch.com/displaced-by-ellen-roberts-young/ It’s one of several recent efforts to address the condition of our one precious earth.
Page forward to find the others: “Linear Thinking” came from a Two Sylvias prompt to focus on something from the past. “After Lives” was part of my healing after my husband died. “Unpacking the Groceries” is more complex, following a wandering mind, centering on family.
Have a look. I hope you enjoy them.
June 15, 2023
Uncategorized poetry, revision, then and now 3 Comments
Like many poets who write because they can’t not write, I started in my youth writing poems of my feelings or ideas and was very literal, using I when I meant myself and the past tense when I was writing of what had been. Having no poetry courses, it took me a long while to grasp that the person of the poem is not necessarily the writer, and the time of the poem is what fits the poem, not some external reality. This poem, another from the old workshop files, is one where a major part of revision was putting that second realization into the service of the story:
Desire
When Billy Joel sings
“You may be
right, I may be crazy,”
I sing along,
off key longing,
not for him.
I ache for
the caged creature
mooning
under the mask
that shapes my
good behavior.
Come on, I say,
crash my party,
leave a great hole
I can walk through,
to go riding,
if I want to,
in the rain.
The mask does not tear.
May 2, 2023
Uncategorized interview, Las Cruces, poetry, writing Leave a comment
In which I read two poems from my chapbook “Transported” and three new pieces and talk about the process of poetry and about language.
Thanks to my friend and poetry colleague Alice Wallace, who invited me to join her in an interview with Randy Harris on the local community radio station, KTAL, where we shared our poetry and our thoughts about writing and words.
https://www.lccommunityradio.org/archives/think-again-poetry-alice-wallace-and-ellen-roberts-young
Two different poets with different styles. Thanks to Randy and KTAL, and Cindy in the control booth, we had a great time.
January 11, 2023
Uncategorized book, poetry, recommendation 1 Comment
Those of our readers who live in Las Cruces, or who were contributors to Sin Fronteras Journal may remember Joanne Townsend, an active poet in our circle since she and her husband Dan moved down from Alaska in 2005, with several poems in the Journal. She hoped to produce a collection of her poems in her later years, but when she died two years ago, she left a pile of poems in hard copy with no indication of a possible order.
Thanks to Joe Somoza for his ordering skills and Ellen Young and Christine Eber for following up with the details, a manuscript was created and has now been published by Cirque Press.
Sample, from “Ponder, Partake”
On the church grounds, a single white iris,
its velvet petals calling
wind from the west.
Speak, Memory Nabokov insisted.
Crimson spilling into parched throats –
Wine. Poetry.
Poetry was central to Joanne’s life. Between Promise and Sadness” is available on Amazon via the Cirque Press website: From Promise to Sadness
October 2, 2022
Uncategorized Mary Ellen Talley, poetry, recommendation 2 Comments
Every part of the country has things everyone knows if you live there, but comes as a surprise to outsiders. Like White Sands in southern New Mexico. I had been to Seattle several times but had no idea that Spokane was known as the Lilac City. If I hadn’t read Talley’s chapbook, I still wouldn’t know that. But you don’t need to know that to read this book; all is soon explained. And the poems here do many good things besides giving information.
Postcards from the Lilac City begins with stories of growing up in a certain place, Spokane, Washington, with change over time: a carousel taken down and later restored, bike riding before helmets were worn, the time when bikes are replaced by a brother’s old car. Already there is good language and some experiment in form; in the later sections the experiments are bolder. In the middle section, “Spokane Postcards,” a stanza of description is followed by a letter from the author to someone from back home – never mind that many of these missives have too many words to fit on a typical postcard. The last section, “After Vietnam” does not return to a historical approach, as one might expect, but presents various moments in a variety of forms from an adult perspective. The whole makes a satisfying read, sharing specifics of experience in poems carefully crafted.
June 29, 2022
Uncategorized Online, poetry, The RavensPerch 3 Comments
The RavensPerch has published three of my poems this week. You can find the first, “Over the Dam” at https://theravensperch.com/over-the-dam-by-ellen-roberts-young/
Does anyone else remember singing as a child, “Swim, said the mama fishie, swim if you can”? I don’t recall what brought that old song to mind, but it evolved into this little poem.
Then click on next to see my others. Extended family will recognize the locale of “Formation.” The poem began at the cottage I visit each year in June—not this year or last, but the year before. Some of my poems take a long time to reach their proper form.
The third poem, “Evening” is one that began last year in a poetry webinar with Marj Hahne. “What are you feeling now?” she asked. “What color is it?” Beige is a color I think of as neutral, but as the poem developed it came to represent something definitely on the down side. Perhaps one could say that “blah” became “the blahs.”
The RavensPerch is not the easiest site to browse in, at least for me, but the curious reader will find quite a variety of interesting material in the current batch. They publish a set of works twice a month. They invite readers to leave comments.
February 10, 2022
Uncategorized Lost in the Greenwood, poetry, reading 1 Comment
I am about to do my first reading for my new book which came out a year ago.
Omicron permitting, I will be the featured reader at the Sin Fronteras Open Reading at Palacio Bar in Mesilla on February 16, sharing poems from Lost in the Greenwood. The poems describe and respond to 500-year-old tapestries and the world that created them, combined with personal reactions and reflections. (That’s one of the unicorn tapestries from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the cover.) Gather at 7:30 p.m. Reading begins at 8:00. Open reading follows.
Here’s a brief sample poem from the collection:
Tapestries
Unlocking the past is
No simple matter when it’s wrapped
In thick carpets of color that
Combine the daily and the dreamed.
Of the joys and sorrows of the
Renaissance there is in fact
Nothing left but threads.
More about the book at http://www.ellenrobertsyoung.com
December 31, 2021
Uncategorized Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, poetry, Review Leave a comment
The first poems in Danger Days by Catherine Pierce (Saturnalia Press, 2020) lead one to expect that this book will be all about end times and apocalypse. The fourth poem dispels this idea: “High Dangerous” is the name her young sons give to hydrangeas. But there is danger there too: the bees in the flowers.
Pierce finds danger in many supposedly ordinary places. In motherhood, for instance, in “How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel.” (Both find themselves rearranged.) “Abecedarian for the Dangerous Animals” covers five kinds of animal: bees, bats, the cassowary, the golden dart frog, and humans.
She juxtaposes mundane and more serious dangers, as in the opening of:
I Spend My Days Putting Away,
the small blue car here, the skipped
heartbeat there, everything
stowed and safe. I don’t want
anyone tripping, or slipping
into that world that isn’t this one.
One set of poems addresses the history of words, in a series she calls “From the Compendium of Romantic Words.” In each poem she explores, deconstructs and plays with a particular word. My favorite is “delicatessen” which begins:
Noun. Notable for a sibilant elegance heightened
by the suggestion of cured meats. Not deli,
a vulgar nickname, a fly-den, a swing-by, but
a long sigh of syllables, a time machine. Inside
its languid hiss: flannel suits, stenographer glamour.
When the word is uttered, a skyline materializes.
Two others in this series can be found via Pierce’s website, https://catherinepiercepoet.com/poems/ by clicking on Two Poems (Kenyon Review). Several other poems from the book are listed there, including “High Dangerous” and the Abecedarian. For other samples, check out “Enough” and “Tether Me.”
Pierce lifts up for examination the fragility of relationships, of the human experiment, of a world in which there is always a chance of losing one’s bearings. A world which delights, even while the speaker is frightened for it or for her own balance in it.
I would not have known of Catherine Pierce’s work if a friend hadn’t sent me this book. It is definitely a keeper. I’ll be eager to see what she does next.
freethoughtandmetaphor 