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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 30 November 2023

Today is Poetry Friday!  Please visit our wonderful host Anastasia at Small Poems for the story of her first poem sale.  It will make you smile!  You will also find lots of yummy poem goodness from our many Poetry Friday friends.

Recently, I had the opportunity to see Audie Cornish interview of Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker.  This is rather heavy, so brace yourself.

Ken Burns (source: Wikipedia)

Several topics stood out during the conversation for me.  Due to his multi-year research and work on both his Civil War documentary and his WWII documentary, Ken had interesting perspectives on those wars individually as well as their intersections.  Here are my notes on some of Ken’s comments:

Confederate Flags: The origin of what we consider to be the “Confederate Flag” today was not the primary flag used by the Confederacy during the Civil War.  In fact, it was unpopular in many states because of its resemblance to the US flag.  The “Southern Cross” version of the Confederate flag that we see today was a battlefield flag that gained popularity among various states around 1954, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision when the US Supreme Court decided that school segregation violated the fourteenth amendment.  Mississippi and Georgia added the Confederate flag to their state flags as a form of protest.  [Incidentally, the term “Southern Cross” also refers to the “Crux Constellation” visible from the southern hemisphere.]

Reich Citizenship Laws: The Nuremburg Laws, passed by Nazi Germany in 1935 to discriminate against Jewish citizens as a basis for the Holocaust, were modeled after US Jim Crow segregation laws.  For more on this, see here.

Hilter’s Intentions: During an interview for Ken Burns’s WWII documentary, a US soldier from Waterbury, CT, spoke of his discussion with a captured Nazi soldier.  The Nazi soldier, in accent-free English, asked the US soldier where he was from.  He replied, “The United States.”  The German soldier asked, “Where in the United States?” The US soldier replied, “The Northeast.”  During continued questions from the German solider, who nodded understanding throughout, the US soldier told the German soldier that he was from: Connecticut … Waterbury … near the Naugatuck River.  The German soldier asked if he lived near where Naugatuck River met a small steam (the US soldier said that you could practically jump across that stream).  The US solider was amazed that the German soldier had such specific knowledge of the United States, so he asked how the German soldier knew such details.  The German soldier responded that he had been through training, and he assigned to command that region of the United States when Germany took over.

Other Miscellaneous Commentary from Ken Burns:

• Humans communicate best through storytelling.
• Ken Burns quoted Mark Twain, who may have said, “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.”
• Throughout history, people have tended to organize their societies under dictators. Sometimes people favor dictatorship when the dictator shares their opinion, but once power is relinquished to a dictator it cannot be taken back.
• Be involved with government.
• Nothing is binary. Something can be true while its opposite is also true.  It is important to understand the complexities of situations.
• Although people’s attention spans seem to have decreased, there still exists an appetite for deeper understanding. Ken cited binge-watching as an example of this phenomenon.

Here is a poem by Witter Bynner (1881-1968) that feels apropos.

War

Fools, fools, fools,
Your blood is hot to-day.
       It cools
When you are clay.
It joins the very clod
Wherein you look at God,
Wherein at last you see
       The living God
       The loving God,
Which was your enemy.

To quote Ken Burns: There is no "them." There is only "us." 

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 16 November 2023

This week, I had the opportunity to spend a day wandering the streets of Boston with no agenda besides starting at Quincy Market and ending near MIT on the other side of the Charles River before dark.  I salivated at the chance to do some people watching and listening – inspired by Alan Wright’s blog post a couple weeks ago. 

Many people intrigued me, from the man on the park bridge playing a mournful melody on an amplified string instrument, stopping abruptly every thirty measures or so, to nip a bite of sandwich … to the gaggle twenty professional perfume spritzers at Macy’s, each deeply concerned that I take a whiff of a new designer scent.  Do you suppose Macy’s pays by the spritz?  But a man who plunked down next to me at a table in Quincy Market fascinated me the most.

First, I must explain the setting. Quincy Market always delights with vendor after vendor displaying scrumptious treats.  This day, I noticed something new – a vending machine that turns out a stick of cotton candy while you wait. 

I watched the instructional video, which outlined these steps:

1. Insert cash and stand back.
2. Machine whirs to life and blows sugar webs.
3. Stick on robotic arm pokes out, rotates 90 degrees, and winds a pouf of candy.
4. Arm rotates to vertical and two robotic “hands” pat the candy cloud into a uniform ball.
5. Meanwhile, a new color of candy fluff billows below.
6. Robotic arm swoops down and winds another layer.
7. Robotic hands pat the mass into a uniform shape.
8. Voila! Arm pokes completed treat out through a window where the stick can be snapped free.

While the machine was entertaining, I was not in the mood for cotton candy at 10:30 in the morning.  I moved on, purchased a yogurt parfait, and found a table with my back against the wall where I could set up for some serious people watching.

As if on cue, an older man holding a stick of cotton candy pulled out a stool next to mine and slid in.  First, he admired his candy cloud.  Then he took selfies, smiling and posing with his treat.  I offered to take the picture for him, but he was so engrossed that he did not seem to hear me.  He stuffed his phone in his pocket and got to work.  Skillfully, quickly, he pulled off layer after layer and munched.  There was no lingering, no allowing the sticky sweetness to dissolve into his tongue.  No, he had more to see.  Now the cotton candy stood between him and his next discovery.  He brushed off his hands, grabbed his backpack with his tourist-group tag hanging from its zipper, and hustled away.  Who was waiting, perhaps on the other side of the world, to see him smiling with his fluffy treat?

Exploring Boston

Contraption discovered!
A new-fangled toy
whirs and produces
sugar-spun joy.

Plunk at a table,
send picture to home,
gulp down my treat.
Where next to roam? 

For some Poetry Friday treats, please visit the kind and incomparable Irene Latham at Live Your Poem!

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 09 November 2023

Happy Poetry Friday!  Please visit Karen Edmisten for some fall reflections and to hear from all of the Poetry Friday poets.

Today’s post mixes math and poetry.  First, I made a little origami star out of a book page (Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, if you were wondering what book).

THEN, I wanted to make a BIG origami star.  I started by gluing a bunch of book pages together.

Because the instructions for making this star start with a regular pentagon (regular meaning all sides are the same length), I had to do a quick high school geometry refresher to figure out how to draw a perfect pentagon.  I needed to know what size the interior angles of a pentagon should be:

             The sum of interior angles of a polygon = (n-2) x 180,
                     where n is the number of sides in the polygon (which, for a pentagon = 5), so
                     (5-2) x 180 = 3 x 180 = 540 degrees = the sum of all of the interior angles

             For a regular pentagon (where all sides are of equal length),
                      each interior angle = (the total number of degrees) divided by (the number of angles (or sides)).
                      So, for a pentagon:
                           540 / 5 = 108 degrees = the size of each interior angle.

OK!  Now, to find a protractor, which I have not used in … a while.  Surprisingly, I had three. 

BOOM!  Pentagon (1 foot per side).

(Please ignore the pencil marks from my initial incorrect angle measurement.)

About 25 folds later, VOILA!  Big star.

Now for the poetry!  Turns out, there are a lot of poems that reference origami or use it as a metaphor for life.  Interestingly, of the poems I found, very few were metrical, in spite of origami’s precise, repetitive, dare I say rhyming folds (no, I probably shouldn’t have dared).  But, I get it -- somehow, origami feels like it belongs with free verse.

Thus, here is a poem by B. Sue Johnson.  For more background on this poem, see here.

Folding Paper

origami life
fold, then fold again
your hands persuading paper
to accept the creases and expand
into a bird
or a flower
while each passing day
adds a wrinkle to your skin

This poem by Joyce Sutphen begins:

Origami

It starts
with a blank sheet,
an undanced floor,

air where no sound
erases the silence.
As soon as

you play the first note,
write down a word,
step onto the empty stage,

… for the full poem click here.

Lastly, here is one that I wrote:

        Origami Swan

                            your
                           t
                              i
                                n
                                 y
     origami criticisms
      will never fold me
           into a swan

© 2023, Tracey Kiff-Judson

So ... "origami criticisms" made perfect sense to me when I wrote it (criticisms that are like origami, i.e. repetitive little creases/folds/digs), but upon rereading, it sounds like criticisms of origami, which is not what I meant.  Ah well, an imperfect poem --

and to go with the imperfect poem, my imperfect origami swan that went horribly wrong somewhere around fold 24.   : )

If you’d like to give the origami star a try, click here for instructions.  For the swan, click here (just don't look at my swan for reference!).  Most likely, you will make one much better than mine!

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 02 November 2023

Welcome to November and to Poetry Friday! 

Please visit our Poetry Friday host Buffy Silverman, who shares some pre-winter wonders and this week's roundup!

From me, just a short video and commentary about a millipede that I met on the street ...

Millipede

Millipede struts, and she’s

never a klutz with her

toes ticking lightly in time.

Thinks she’s von Furstenberg –

more like "the Worst-enberg!”

Vanity should be a crime.

© 2023 Tracey Kiff-Judson

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 27 October 2023

Happy Poetry Friday! 

For this week's roundup and some batty fun, visit Carol Labuzzetta at The Apples in My Orchard and wish Carol a Happy Birthday!

It’s That Time of Year

Last night a troll rap-tapped my door,

holding out an empty sack.

I shooed him off and said, “Goodnight!”

A minute later he was back.

This time he brought a Pikachu.

They stared at me, their bags outstretched.

I tossed in candy, and they left.

What’s going on?  Is this far-fetched?

BING-BONG-BING!  My doorbell chimed.

Again, I schlepped to my front door.

A mermaid and a rubber duck

threw stubby shadows on my floor.

These strangers only left in peace

when plied with full-sized candy bars.

Again, again the doorbell BONGED.

They started pulling up in cars.

Turtles, ninjas, ninja turtles,

Barbie, Ken, The Joker, Hook,

Elivs, Woody, Cousin It,

a lipstick in a pocketbook...

Alice and the Queen of Hearts,

a sumo wrestler, Pete The Cat,

Uncle Sam, a witch, a shrew,

a dragon, and a toothy bat…

Spiderman and Peter Pan,

a blow-up beach ball on a beach,

Coraline and Frankenstein,

Mario and Princess Peach.

At nine, the last bunch rang my bell –

a gaggle of racoon-eyed ghouls.

I bet you think it’s Halloween.

Well, it’s not. 

                      It’s …

            APRIL FOOLS'!

© 2023 Draft Tracey Kiff-Judson

(Perhaps this would have been better timed in APRIL?!)

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 17 October 2023

Happy Poetry Friday! 

Thank you to Bridget at wee words for wee ones for hosting this week’s roundup, where you will find a dance party going down!

This week, I was playing around with sounds and meter in an attempt to come up with a nonsense poem, and I wondered …

• What makes something nonsense verse?
• Who are the most well-known nonsense poets?
• Is there a poet who was well-known, but so terrible at writing poetry that people considered his/her work to be nonsense?

Let's discuss! 

After poking around, it became clear to me that there are different interpretations of what qualifies as nonsense verse.  I found multiple descriptions:

• Comical rhyming poetry (in general),
• Silly rhyming verse where some of the content doesn’t make sense, such as many nursery rhymes (e.g. Hey-Diddle-Diddle), and
• Verse where most of the words are made up, and although the overall construct sounds right to the ear, the verse may or may not make sense literally.

In other words, there seems to be a spectrum of nonsense verse ranging from:

              Humorous Verse ------------------------------------------------- Jibberish with rhyme and meter

Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake, Edward Gorey, Colin West, Dr. Seuss, and Spike Milligan are all listed by Wikipedia as well-known nonsense verse writers.  You may have heard of them all, but if you’d like a refresher, this article has poetry samples from most of them. 

sketch by Edward Lear

This brings me to Lewis Carroll.  “Jabberwocky” is what started me thinking about nonsense.  Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass pack a whole lot of nonsense, and on the surface, “Jabberwocky” sounds like total nonsense.  Here is the first stanza:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The Jabberwock, illustrated by John Tenniel, 1871

To me, Jabberwocky, feels like reading words in another language.  When strung together, the words feel like they should make sense.  It has a satisfying mouthfeel and flow.  One senses that there is a story line just beyond reach, and indeed there is.  Upon closer inspection, many of the words are blends of two words (portmanteaus), and the story seems to follow a typical hero’s journey.  For an analysis of the poem, look here.  For my taste, nonsense needs to flow and make enough sense to not be completely frustrating.

On to my last question: who is widely regarded as the worst poet of all time?  Several internet articles give that inauspicious honor to William Topaz McGonagall.  How does one become the worst poet?  Well, in McGonagall’s case, he wrote a poem about a bridge collapse and train wreck called “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (and other similarly-crafted works). 

Tay Bridge Disaster, a contemporary rendition, Wikipedia

 “The Tay Bridge Disaster” by William McGonagall starts:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

‘Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”

If you feel so inclined, you can read the rest of the poem here and more about McGonagall here.  I like the article’s reference to his “ill-advised imagery.”

All of the above, led me to write the following …

The Lonestie Wolfree and the Fervile Fletch

A lonestie wolfree hibbed by the swersh,
and foofed per dreebs devay.
She vonged for a titch and a frick-frack-frock,
but her bargle strowed reblay.

One day, she gloamed on a fervile fletch,
and beesh she mooged him sown.
Her mooging varged on the mincey fletch
and tetch belarved him floan.

Yes, agreed – utter nonsense!

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 12 October 2023

Happy Poetry Friday!  Continuing with my macabre October theme…

We’re on a camping trip in Transyl … er … PENNsylvania, and we’re staying at a campground where gnomes outnumber campers by a solid fifty to one. After what happened last night … I am not a fan of these diminutive dudes.

 

Opposite of an Ode to Gnomes

While walking on a woodland trail,
wee elfin creatures made of stone
appear and grin their winsome smiles…
I wish that I were not alone.

Oh, silly me!  They’re innocent.
They joke and pose in pointed hats!
Frozen with their vacant stares …
it not as if they’re vampire bats!

The sun has fallen from the sky.
I hope that I can make it home.
I’m think I’m on the safest path.
Oh, look – a darling, helpful gnome!

Morning dawns, and I awake.
My mind is dizzy, vision blurred.
I think I may have cut my head.
I feel confused; my speech is slurred.

I stumble weakly from the woods.
It's coming back … the memories flood.
Hey, there’s the gnome I met last night!
What’s on his lips?  Is that my … BLOOD?

Bwa-ha-happy Poetry Friday the 13^th! 

Ok, after this clunker, you might be better off checking out Catherine's lovely poem

and review of Irene Latham's The Museum on the Moon,

at Poetry Friday: The Roundup is Here! – Reading to the Core

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Written by: Tracey Kiff-Judson

Category: Blog

Published: 27 September 2023

October

October is the treasurer of the year,
    And all the months pay bounty to her store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
    And fill her brimming coffers more and more
But she, with youthful lavishness,
    Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
    Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.

~Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872 – 1906

     See the rest of the poem here.

Now that October has arrived, ‘tis open season on all things creepy and macabre.  As an aside, I’ve noticed a pattern -- my posts seem to rotate among: nonsensical, terrifying, and disgusting.  Somehow, this week, I have managed to combine all three.

A few days ago, I saw a ring of turkey vultures hanging in the murky, evening sky.  They usually circle lazily in a group of twenty or so, and they always stir a tiny pool of dread in the pit of my stomach.

Undertakers

          Turkey vultures circle death,

ring around a broken beast

          whispering its final breath.

Now begins the evening feast.

© Tracey Kiff-Judson 2023

You can enjoy a less gloomy Poetry Friday with Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme! Stop by and learn The Thing to Know About Stargazing!