Poetry Friday: Unraveling the Ovillejo

Poetry maven and Writer Extraordinaire Tanita Davis shared the Poetry Peeps’ March challenge here. The mission? Knit together an Ovillejo: 

Here’s the scoop: we’re writing tight little bundles of poetry called Ovillejos! That’s exactly what the word means – a bundle of yarn. This Spanish form bundles together ten lines, made up of 3 rhyming couplets interspersed with three verrrry short lines, and a quatrain. The last line is a “redondilla,” a “little round” that collects all three of the short lines and casts off the poem, as it were. 

I wrote my ovillejo about a concert we — Atticus, me, Ramona, her boyfriend — went to last weekend. My Christmas gift to Atticus was tickets for Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. We'd never seen him live before, but know this: the man is determined not to be photographed or recorded. (A few years ago he blew up at an audience over their phone use and asked if they wanted him to play or to pose. The subject of phones in public spaces is a big one and I have so many thoughts but that’s a post for another time.) Phones were locked up in Yondr pouches as soon as we entered the venue. Low lighting, a permanent perch behind his keyboard, and a hoodie pulled far down over his head (practically over his face) helped Bob keep his distance from us. 

The night before the concert I had the funniest dream: we arrived at the theater and almost no one was there. Bob looked over all the empty seats, sighed, sat down a couple of rows ahead of us, and pouted. I woke up wondering what had prompted that, but maybe it was a premonition? Because, while in real life the theater was full, Bob did seem a tad pouty. Microphone malfunctions didn’t help. Dylan kept picking the mic up and plopping it down in different positions, prompting reverberative booms every time. (Is the mic person still employed? I have my doubts.) Despite Bob’s aloof performance, we had a good time, and I think Ramona and her boyfriend did too. As we talked about him the next day, I said, “Dylan’s such a … character? Distinct ... personality?” and Ramona said, “Weirdo?” He is, indeed, all the things, daughter. 

Yes, it’s all true. I have a love/hate relationship with that weirdo-genius-pouty-bratty-talented-rebellious-creative-Nobel-prize-winner who likes his hoodies more than he likes us. 

But hey, now that I ponder it, I think the best Dylan concert I’ve ever been to was a couple of years ago in our living room. Ramona taught herself three songs (“It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “The Times They Are a-Changing,” and “Don’t Think Twice”) on the guitar she inherited from my father, then she played and sang them for Atticus on his birthday. And she didn’t even wear a hoodie or turn off the lights! What an un-aloof performer! 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, leads us to my Ovillejo, which actually came to me surprisingly quickly. 

Ovillejo for a Temperamental Legend 

Karen Edmisten 

Who is a legend named Dylan?
Bob. Thrillin’!
Who saw him sing on Saturday?
Us. Yay!
He is known for a stunning show?
(Well, um, no.)

He doesn’t like his face to show.
Sloppy hoodie hides his features.
(Fans are such annoying creatures.)
Bob! Thrillin’ us? (Well, um, both “yea" and no.)

Final take: Don’t think twice, Bob, it’s all right (not that you’re worried.) We rolled with what was blowin’ in the wind, and now we can say we’ve seen Dylan. Also, brunch the next day was excellent and I really like Ramona’s boyfriend. All in all, a great weekend and I got a new poem out of it. 

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The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being hosted by Marcie Flinchum Atkins, who is celebrating the beauty of twilight and her newest, soon-to-be-released book, When Twilight Comes. 

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

Poetry Friday: "Why I Need the Birds" by Lisel Mueller

When I was young, I didn't think much about birds, know much about birds, or care much about birds. They were part of the landscape, obviously. They were around, I was around, live and let live, blah-blah-blah. I suppose we co-existed blithely, in that way creatures who don't have an urgent need for one another can do. We each — robins, wrens, and I — went about our business, conducting it admirably without caring that the other was nearby. 

I remember once, sometime in my twenties, I think, when I was out for a walk with my friend Jack. We heard a bird with an intriguing call, and I said, "I wonder what kind of bird that is?" A beat, and he said, "Holly would know," at the precise time I was saying, "Atticus would know." Our respective spouses, you see, were the bird people. They were the ones with a knowledge of and a love for nature. They were the Dickon Sowerbys who would know what was growing in a secret garden and what a robin was trying to say. They knew the magic. 

I can't say I consciously sought to increase my knowledge of birds over the years of our marriage, but somehow birds have become a part of it. (I wrote about the laudable stubbornness of our swallows here, and mentioned the return of the swallows to Edmistrano here. And, ummm, somewhere along the way I started calling them "our" swallows?) When I was very young and very stupid, I thought an interest in birds was a thing for old people. But last year, when Atticus got excited about the Merlin Bird ID app, I got kind of excited about it too. (I mean, honestly, it's really, really cool. Open the app, it records every sound it hears, and then it tells you what birds you're eavesdropping on. Cool.) 

"But Karen," you might say, "you have proven your theory about birds and old people, because you are old now." Ummm, just go check out the Merlin app! You'll thank your elders! 

Oh, and read this poem too! It's by Lisel Mueller, a Pulitzer-winning poet whom I've only just discovered. 

Lisel understood. And while it's likely that Mueller wrote "Why I Need the Birds" when she was not-young (and unlike some of us, she was never stupid), I have a feeling that she — like Holly, like Atticus —  simply knew her whole life that birds were a miracle of creation worth every moment of attention we pay them. 

Why I Need the Birds
by Lisel Mueller

(1924-2020) 

When I hear them call
in the morning, before
I am quite awake,
my bed is already traveling
the daily rainbow,
the arc toward evening;
and the birds, leading
their own discreet lives
of hunger and watchfulness,
are with me all the way,
always a little ahead of me
in the long-practiced manner
of unobtrusive guides.

(Read the rest here.) 

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The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being hosted by the ever-wonderful Linda Baie of TeacherDance.

Photo thanks to Pixabay.

Poetry Friday: I’m hosting! (and a new poem)

Welcome to the Poetry Friday round-up! 

Last week, the Poetry Peeps shared pieces inspired by the work of U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. The challenge was flexible. (Read: “Pick a poem, any poem! Write in his style, or don’t! Focus on a line, a stanza, a theme, the ghost of an idea. Whatever you want!”) I love a wide-open challenge … until I don’t. But the fault, dear reader, was with me, not with the peeps posing the challenge. As I’m wont to do, I allowed procrastination and choice-paralysis to defeat me. I wrote nothing for last weeks’s round-up, so I decided to tackle it this week. Here’s how it unfolded:

I tinkered with one of my favorite Sze poems, "The Shapes of Leaves.” I played around with the shapes of houses, I experimented with the shapes of hands (as the objects that "our emotions resemble”) but I wasn’t satisfied with what was flowing. (Because it wasn’t flowing.) I still liked those ideas, but set them aside.

Then I bumped up against another of Sze’s poems, one that, serendipitously and in that lovely, winding way of poetry, happens to reference “The Shapes of Leaves.” Eureka! 

In “Residence on Earth,” Sze recounts a gathering of poets and a reading of his work. I did a little digging and it seems he’s referring to the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín. (Here's a video of his reading.) 

“Residence on Earth” ends with:  

I understood how poets from all over the world

had come for peace, solidarity, justice—
and when my host, and reader of my poems

in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw
one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.

I took the words “one way to live” and ran with them. Here’s my draft: 

One Way to Live
(after “Residence on Earth” by Arthur Sue)

One way to live on this earth

is in stunned observation. 

You see chaos before you,
but are paralyzed, inert,
a terrified deer.

One way to live on this earth

is in constant bellicosity. 

You howl at the lunacy 
until your throat 

is raw and torn.  

One way to live on this earth

is in quiet service. 

You see gaping needs; 

you fill one, meet another, 

walk toward the next. 

One way to live on this earth 

is in the 

shimmering 

rainfall 

of 

words. 

You shine light,

reflect truths:

chaos, lunacy, 

desperate need, yes,

but also beauty, tenderness, 

the shape of a leaf.  

 

A band of poets become 

one voice, create one home, 

fashion a refuge.  

Together, 

while in residence on earth, 

they have found 

one way to live. 

~ Karen Edmisten 

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