Elizabeth Bradfield – LaDonnaWitmer

mood: stuck | drinking: lemonade

dandelion

I’m borrowing a poem from Elizabeth Bradfield today, just for you…

Nonnative Invasive

Lupine, gentian, chocolate lily. We’ve been
naming, been exclaiming, been looking up
in our guidebooks the alpine flowers. But
look at these! Amy says, pointing
to bright dandelion at trail edge, heads

like airplane aisle lights. How pretty! Don’t you
want to pick bunches and bunches and bring them
home? A swell of roadside by my house
yellows with them now, excessive petals
turning to excessive seed. Curbside,

I’m glad they are not lawn. But they’ll invade
this meadow, push out with brash cheer
forget-me-not and wooly lousewort. I want
to reconcile them, but I can’t. I hiked up
to see anemones and saxifrage, to get away

from landscaping and what landscaping
weeds out. I think of how they arrived, seeds
embedded in boot-dirt, stuck to our socks and the fur
of our dogs. Praise their tenacity, says Amy.
But she’s just arguing a point. None of us

is glad they’ve hitched a ride up here.
None of us knows how to accept
the way love changes what it’s drawn to
—smudging self across what’s seen—
when what thrilled us first was difference.

-Lo, pondering the inevitability of smudges.

buffysing2
Mood: Revving Up
Drinking: Nada

After 30 days of daily poem posts, I feel all rusty and creaky returning to the status quo of weekly(ish) posts.

But real life cannot sustain daily poems, at least not the kind of life I’m in the habit of living.

It was a brilliant idea, though, wasn’t it? Even though I thought myself insane in the beginning, I found it fairly easy to get into the regular rhythm of writing a poem a day, especially when I gave myself permission to post poems that unapologetically sucked or (this was even harder) poems that had the potential to be so amazing, but needed a few more days or weeks of percolating and editing.

Some of these un-percolated poems (Je t’aime, for instance, which now has a new name) are being re-thought and re-written as I type. Ok, not as I type, but in the general background of the return to real life, they are being revised.

Someday I’ll post them again in their better, shinier, actually finished form.

The best thing about all of this was that I wrote so many things that never would have been explored had I not given myself the daily deadline. Honey, for example, was an amazing accident, and I don’t think I would have thought to explore my personal history with bee stings had I not been wracking my brain for any scrap of story that could be whipped up into a poem.

The second best thing that happened was that I started tearing through several of the poetry collections I purchased back in January at the Associated Writing Programs conference in New York. I don’t make it a regular habit to read lots of poetry books, and it’s completely my loss. I found so much inspiration in the words of other poets, and I’m now simultaneously reading the work of Galway Kinnell, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Elizabeth Bradfield. What a feast!

So farewell, National Poetry Month celebration. Perhaps we’ll meet again next year.

A few bits of newsy things:
1. Michelle and I are editing a new cinepoem called “Yellow”
2. There is a ladonnawitmerdotcom refresh in the works that will include a real RSS blog feed (yay)
3. The Secrets of Falling is reviewed in the May issue of The Other Herald

All good things, all keeping me busy, busy, busy. Seems to be the way I like it… and off I go.

-Lo, with a “Grrrr” and an “Arrrgh”.

Tag: Elizabeth Bradfield

Excessive petals, excessive seed

Cinco de Mayonnaise