Daily Prompt Love <3 Extra Sensory
3 September 2019
Make art about a psychic experience.
Posts tagged ‘writers’ life’
Monday Must Read! Raised by Humans by Deborah Miranda
An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of French ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earning a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher’s Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. She teaches at Washington & Lee.
“The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miranda, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it wasn’t a humane childhood.
This poetry collection is also about how indigenous people survive civilization and become readers and writers of the same alphabet that colonized their culture. The complexity of being forced to find her way into relationship with the very people or cultures that have hurt/raised Miranda is a paradox at the heart of her poetry, which pushes language past what Miranda calls the “alphabet of walls.”
Daily Prompt Love <3 What Work Is
2 September 2019
Make art about what work is, about finding joy in work.
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
Daily Prompt Love Catch-Up <3 Shine
1 September 2019art
Make art about what you do to make it brighter.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Did You See That?
31 August 2019
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet black bough”–Ezra Pound
Make art about an apparition.
Image by SuperHerftigGeneral from Pixabay
Daily Prompt Love Catch-Up <3 Get Ready
30 August 2019
Make art about assembling what you need to be ready.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Healing
29 August 2019
Make art about what you do to heal.
Image by Seksak Kerdkanno from Pixabay
Daily Prompt Love <3 Wherever You Go
27 August 2019
“Not all who wander are lost.”–Tolkien
Make art about where you wandered.
Monday Must Read! Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.
Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:
The cowboy grins through the terrible din,
***
And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails
Look like this country done left us for dead.
An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.
Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at http://www.wordwoman.ws.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Um, Nice To Meet Y'all
26 August 2019
New semester starts today. I love teaching so much, but being the performing introvert that I am, those brand new student faces are always an experience.
Make art about how it feels to walk into a room of people you’re meeting for the first time.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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