Making a Life with Poetry, Together

we can draw a precious circle...

(This post by L.L. Barkat is a reprint from Tweetspeak Poetry, © 2019; *Ten years is now 15.)

* * *

Long ago in Internet time, four friends wrote poems together one night on Twitter, well before friends wrote poetry together, at any hour of the day, on Twitter (the platform was young, and people were still trying to figure out: what in the world do you do with Twitter?).

In a burst of creative inspiration they didn’t intend would “go anywhere” in particular, these friends were doing what they’ve continued to do for almost ten years* now: they were making a life with poetry, together.

Ten years.*

That’s how long it’s been since Tweetspeak Poetry was born after an off-the-cuff Twitter party where we had so much fun writing poems together in real-time that we couldn’t dream of stopping without trying it out a few more times. And a few more. And then we realized that the parties were resulting in beautiful poetry we’d like to provide some kind of virtual scrapbook for, and so tweetspeakpoetry.com was created as a Twitter poem archive site. (In 2012, that changed, and we began to develop into the broader site we’ve now become—complete with full-scale articles and public days, and, and, and…)

The official anniversary date of Tweetspeak is October 3rd, and that was not purposeful, but it turns out that October 3rd is also my mother’s birthday. And it was my mother who first taught me to make a life with poetry, together, decades before I knew that poetry would, in a very significant way be my life.

Every day before the school bus came, my mom would open a big book of poems and read to my sister and me. The book was, to my recollection, the only poetry we had in the house. I don’t know where the book came from or why we owned it. You can still buy a copy today: The Best Loved Poems of the American People. Ours had a purple cover. I have the edition in my attic, where it’s gathering dust.

But I still remember…

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out—
      Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
      We drew a circle that took him in!

I always liked the title of that little poem, which was a bit mischievous even though the poem itself was addressing the topic of serious love—the kind of love that doesn’t give up easily.

And though I don’t particularly like framing the topic of love as something that has to do with winning, I like the poem anyway, because the winning is not really a competition so much as a stance: we can draw a precious circle that takes people in, even when they’re feeling out of sorts (and maybe shutting us out in the process).

The key in life, which the poem doesn’t address, is how to draw those circles in a way that still feels like there’s necessary space and flexibility. But poems don’t have to do it all. They don’t have to be treatises. They can be glimpses. Or they can just raise questions. They are their own kind of gentle circle-drawing.

In the “Outwitted” poem, I also like the word wit, which combines the quality of being both smart and fun. That’s not easy to do. And I realize that, when you put together all the things I like about the poem, it pretty well describes how we make a life with poetry together at Tweetspeak. A little wit, a bit of mischief, a lot of love.

There are plenty of ways to make a life with poetry, together, but some of the ways I know I personally do it still hearken back to Tweetspeak’s party roots. Maureen Doallas is the master at this. Someone will type something in a comment box here or on Facebook, and she’ll generously lift and turn and place those words in a new order, with new phrasing, and suddenly you feel that she’s drawn that loving circle or curved everything into a bow: you said something offhand, or you said something unexpectedly touching, and she placed her poet’s hands around what you said, and before you knew it a poem was born from your very own words.

So, while we are talking about mothers, I think it might be fair to say that Maureen is my poem-angel mother. Somebody asked me the other day how I describe myself to people. “You do so many things,” she said. “Which of those things do you say are who you are and what you do?”

“If I’m talking to a writer,” I told her, “I might say I’m a writer. But I’m mostly a publisher.”

“How about editor?” she said.

I told her that while I need to do some editing to make Tweetspeak and

T. S. Poetry Press

keep going, I don’t much go for calling myself an editor. Then, in my own burst of creative inspiration, I told her, “I’m a poem angel.”

For that, I have Maureen to thank. I love what she does. And I’ve learned her ways.

Just the other day, I had two occasions to be a poem angel, but I want to share a particular one with you that involves Laurie Klein. Laurie acquired, and brought to print, the very first poem I ever had published, when she was a journal editor. Today she’s a Tweetspeak patron and a dear poet friend of mine. And she has been suffering greatly since early 2019. (I asked her if I could share this with you, and she’s good with that, which seems important for you to know.)

The other day I wrote to Laurie and told her I miss her poetic voice and that I am thinking of her often. She wrote back and shared how completely disheartened she’s been, and how that includes the inability to write poems. If you know Laurie, you know that even when she’s telling you how disheartened she is and how she can’t write a single poem, her prose words are themselves a gift of poeticness. I took a small risk and wove her words into the poem below (the Manuka is a kind of honey I’d told her about, that has deep healing properties. She’s been stirring it into her tea, as she tries to coax her body to rebound):

Manuka 3 x 5

My life,
a box

of cards that God has

dumped.

Gentle heart
stirs ideas, exotic

spoons

of golden
tea selves

hidden in
honey

I cannot write.
 

Within minutes, Laurie wrote back to me: Dear Bard Whisperer, how could I resist?

Learning to Write

The cannier rabbi
brushes each slate
with wild honey. He knows

small Hebrew boys
pause, to touch
styli to chapped lips
as they form
the beautiful letters—

each life, as is,
even mine, perhaps,
already a poem.

For so many reasons, I just about cried when that poem dropped into my inbox. Laurie’s life is a poem. And she was gracious enough to let me, just for a moment, draw my poet’s circle around her present life’s words in a way that helped her remember her poem-ness and then helped her write again. I wasn’t trying to do that. And I’m not sure she was trying to be gracious, per se. The whole exchange grew very simply and beautifully out of the trust that poems can create between two people.

If I had the choice to do it again, I’d still go to that very first crazy fun Twitter party almost ten years ago*, to set us on the path I didn’t know I was helping to set us on: to become a poetry place where people can find fun and they can find life—where poem angels are born, and made. And hearts find themselves at the center of a loving circle, poetically drawn.

Photo by Braedon McLeod, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.