Poetry Friday: The Poet Pencil

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Poetry FridayPoetry Friday is here to enchant our eyes and ears!… In anticipation of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15 – Oct 15), I am currently re-reading The Tree is Older Than You Are, an incredible anthology of bilingual poems from Mexico, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. And I’d like to share one of its many gems with you all:

The Poet Pencil
by Jesús Carlos Soto Morfín, translated by Judith Infante

Once upon a time a pencil wanted to write
poetry but it didn’t have a point. One day a boy
put it into the sharpener, and in place of a point,
a river appeared.

Wild Rose Reader is brimming with poetic activity as host of this week’s Poetry Friday round-up. Check it out.

Poetry Friday: Waking Up on the Right Side of the Poetry Bed

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Poetry FridayIt’s Poetry Friday and I could not find the time to blog about a poem or poetry book. And since I didn’t want the day to end without my contributing something to this beautiful, collective blog effort to promote poetry, I decided to go back to a piece I wrote for PaperTigers in celebration of Poetry Month (back in April), inspired by an interview I read with poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The piece, called “Waking Up on the Right Side of The Poetry Bed,” is a tribute to poetry and reading aloud.

Poetry Friday’s lovely round-up this week is at Charlotte’s Reading. Enjoy!