Today I wanted to share Cuyahoga County Library’s last day of Read+Write April, which features my friend Katie Mertz!
I hope that you all had a beautiful and fruitful poetry month! Happy writing and happy warm weather soon.
Another morning shifts into view like frost receding from rooftops, the unexpected cold of April’s end. The sheets are warm with your body, the imprint next to me where your hand pressed the mattress. Now entropy. I have to leave this space and wake the baby. I finger the edge of the comforter will-less to leave. You snort in your sleep. Our parting is the same every morning. In one motion I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and throwing open the curtains–the sun shouts GOOD MORNING on the walls and throws the light across your face. Your eyelids screw up because even in half sleep you can feel the light.
Happy earth day! Let’s talk aubade.
Also known as the dawn song, the aubade greets the morning with joy and grieves the loss of the night. It flows from the darkness into the brightness of dawn, remembering the togetherness of night between lovers.
The poem comes from as earliest as the twelfth century, but the dawn song transcends borders and can be found in many cultures.
Two great examples of aubade are “The Sun Rising” by John Donne and Emily Skaja’s “Aubade with Attention to Pathos“.
When you write an aubade, pay attention to the theme of passing from night to sunrise, and know that you don’t have to use the parting of lovers, just as Philip Larkin chose not to in his poem “Aubade.”
Sliver of the icicle from a clogged gutter in April, wind like a spray // of water, biting raw our cheeks and hands held to pray.
A rolling over in my belly, again. You awaken like spring // should be. Up with the hyacinths and daffodils opening petals to pray.
Sticky fingers in my hair, ringing curls around your index // together we smell like peanut butter, a scent to teach me to pray.
When you climb the stairs alone, my back turned, your smile grows // like spring urgency or crocus bursting among new grass to pray.
Pray for sunshine. Golden hair as you run from me, a shriek as joyful as a prayer. // The robins scatter at your approach and you reach your hands out to pray.
The ghazal! An Arabic poetic form originating from the 7th century that relies on repetition and lingers between the pain of loss and the beauty of love despite the loss. It’s absolutely gorgeous, but incredibly difficult to pull off in English.
ghazals must have at least five rhyming couplets or bayts and can have as many as fifteen. The couplets are linked thematically but not necessarily in situation or story. ghazals thrive in the abstract. Each couplet ends with the same refrain, which rhymes with the first line of the first couplet (AA BA CA, etc.).
There are stringent rules for ghazal forms, but in English, poets often use just those mentioned above as guiding principles.
Agha Shahid Ali is a well known Kashmiri poet whose poem Ghazal can be found here.
A contemporary interpretation of the ghazal appears in Evie Shockley’s poem where you are planted here.
Bright cold sun of April, the northwest winds
whipping your cheeks red and spreading
the first of the season’s pollen. Shock of yellow
Daffodils holding on through sleet and snow cover
reminders of the coming warmth. You pick handfuls
of stems and spread them on the concrete
leaving trails of green against the composite
like the slick a snail leaves behind.
I love you in your discovery. This new world
you find, this bright cold place you embrace
as only a child could. The sky opens blue
and streaks with robins and you pierce
the noisy silence with your laughter. A temporary
moment I will hold onto forever.
The elusive sonnet. Shakespearean, Petrarchan, traditional or modern, love them or hate them. There’s so much scholarship out there about sonnets, but my favorite is definitely Stephen Fry’s section on sonnets from The Ode Less Travelled. Learning about ancient metered poetic forms from a comedian really does it for me! Here’s an excerpt:
So for a prompt, try a sonnet. Whatever that means to you. Could be traditional, metered, rhyming, or not. But keep the Volta! The beautiful turn in line nine (or thereabouts) that shifts the poem. That I think is true embodiment of a sonnet, in whatever form you make it. Oh and 14 lines of course!
So happy to announce that I have been awarded the 2022 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council! I am thrilled to be named among so many talented Ohio artists and so grateful for the recognition of the council for my body of work.
The poems that I submitted represent such a labor of love, trauma, and growth over the past couple of years. I cannot wait to show them to you this year!
Thank you, Ohio Arts Council!
I’m happy to announce that Heights Arts has named me Artist of the Month: Literary for August 2020! Heights Arts is an organization I’ve worked with in the past located in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. This organization offers programming for the community that focuses on the arts and works to bring local literature, music, and art to the Northeast Ohio community.
I am happy to represent Heights Arts and their programming, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
You can find the announcement on Heights Arts’ website here!
In honor of this title, I am getting a reprinting of my chapbook, SPACE SPECTACULAR, and copies will be for sale as soon as they arrive. Stay tuned!
Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro 