Words & Pictures: finding poetry everywhere

It’s April 3rd and we are into National Poetry Month. Tim posted this haiku on Facebook today:

Morning and still,
A little snow sweeping,
Across the deck.

I wrote a previous post about the three simple lines. Now and then I create what I call a “Picture and Word Box,” essentially an image with a haiku. I created this one today:

This photo was taken at a memoir writing retreat I recently attended in San Marcos, Guatemala on Lake Atitlan. I left there just one week ago on a boat at 6am. Then, a couple hours were spent in a van, a drive through mountains, and small towns. This last leg of the journey was poetic. The idea of arriving home began to feel questionable as the experience of hairpin turns, steep drops, magnificent views, third world marketplaces, airport layovers and delays mounted. Here in Western New York, a ten to thirty-minute drive just about anywhere is the norm. This thirty-six-hour trip home became an adventurous ending to the entire journey, but well worth a week in such a peaceful place of beauty.

Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Faraway Nearby:

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

The Write by The Lake retreat was focused on personal memoir, a process of picking out just the right constellations of events to make stories. The author, Joyce Maynard, has had a prolific writing career and shared her intimate teaching style with our small group.

From poetic experience to poetry . . .

Tim had this published in our local newspaper a couple weeks ago:

Just as hats, coats, and pants come together in a poem, a haiku can be simply this . . .

It is snowing here on this spring day, but I am reminded of greener days that will soon arrive.

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