The Bells

From Part IV

Hear the tolling of the bells
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people – ah, the people
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone

–Edgar Allan Poe

You can read the complete poem here (scroll down to second poem).

I don’t know why, when I’m feeling like a stone has steamrolled my own heart, I enjoy this so much. But I do. My favorite bit is For every sound that floats / From the rust within their throats / Is a groan. So gorgeous.

Jone at Check It Out has The Poetry Friday Roundup today.

I shared a poem or three from this charming collection here. If you haven’t already put your paws on Won Ton, now’s the time!

The kids at storytimes are generally toddlers/preschoolers, a bit young for my books. I read a poem or two from Stampede and BookSpeak, and I read the whole text of A Leaf Can Be…. I tried to bring everything to the audience’s level. We did monkey noises for the Stampede poem. We did a group poem, A Kid Can Be…, for A Leaf Can Be…. And we did the little mini-accordion book as a group for BookSpeak. Everything went pretty well, and The Red Balloon, as always, did a terrific job of setting things up.

One highlight was that someone was buying A Leaf Can Be… as I was setting up, and she had no idea I was there. An un-coerced sale–so exciting!

And they gave me a lovely thank you gift certificate to the store, so of course I had to shop. Ignoring the amount of my certificate, I picked three books, two I already know and love, and one new one:

Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village (I can’t lay my hands on my copy)

In the Sea (David Elliott’s brand-new companion to On the Farm and In the Wild)

Meanwhile, I’m here in Minnesota feeling useless. I’d rather go visit once she’s conscious and I can be supportive and useful to her. So I’m waiting to decide when to go down until she’s out of the coma and the doctors can make a diagnosis/prognosis. But it feels awful to just go about my daily life–doing storytimes, watching t.v., meeting writing deadlines–while she’s in ICU.

I am both grateful and guilty about the time that goes by when I’m able to forget momentarily that she’s vulnerable and helpless and struggling. It’s awful not knowing what’s going on and what the future will look like for her.

I’m going to see about starting a CaringBridge page for her, but I’ll also do very brief updates every so often here.

Ironically, I had been reading a few poems from Good Poems for Hard Times. I think this qualifies. Here’s one of the poems I read and loved:

On a Night of Snow

Cat, if you go outdoors, you must walk in the snow.
You will come back with little white shoes on your feet,
little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet.
Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go.
See how the flames are leaping and hissing low,
I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite,
so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet–
stay with me, Cat. Outdoors the wild winds blow.

Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night,
strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore,
and more than cats move, lit by our eyes’ green light,
on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar–
Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might,
and things that are yet to be done. Open the door!

–Elizabeth Coatsworth

Going. Staying. The choices we make all our lives. JP, stay here, by the fire.

Myra at Gathering Books has The Poetry Friday Roundup today.

I don’t think I told her that my Annabelle was 19, but I knew Annabelle would be tickled to see this book. (She still hasn’t recovered from never being able to get personalized bike license plates at tourist shops!)

So when the book arrived, Annabelle and I were having drinks and brownies and I read the picture book out loud to both of us. Fun! And even more fun? Annabelle in the book gets a red-and-white polka-dotted dress (though some tragedy befalls it!), and my Annabelle loves red-and-white polka-dotted anything!

My Annabelle in her dress for 9th-grade formal

Thanks, Kate, for a lovely read-aloud with my daughter and a new picture book for her collection. She loves signed books and was thrilled to see a kindred, polka-dotted spirit in your book. Best of luck with Big Birthday!

Photo: Midori

Happy Valentine’s Day!

We had lots of lively discussions, and we awarded the prize to Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto, by Paul B. Janeczko. It’s a grim, haunting, stunning poetry collection, one that showcases horror and love in the worst of situations. (I shared a poem from it on a Poetry Friday here.)

I submitted a bunch of ideas and a few proposals to the editors over a couple of months. They really liked a superhero-related idea I proposed in September. So I was off–again–to write an adventurous very short novel for 6th-grade reluctant readers.

There followed two months of encouragement and guidance from the editors while I wrote and rewrote my superhero story. I have only written a few short stories for this age range, when it comes to fiction. And though this is a set of readers for schools to buy, the editors want top-notch, trade-quality writing and plotting. And the set reviewers want very specific qualities to allow reluctant readers to get the entire story.

It was humbling to need SO much guidance. The editors gave me almost a course in this kind of writing, for which I was very grateful.

Then email glitches and holiday breaks slowed down the process, so that getting approval/rejection took much longer than normal. But finally, early this month:

“The reviewers approved Stanley today and didn’t ask for one single word change.”

Yay! I’m swamped and don’t know whether I’ll be able to write anything else for this set, which is ending very soon. But I’m glad I stuck with it, despite how time-consuming and at times embarrassing it was. I’ve expanded my repertoire a bit and learned a few new things about writing.

We all fail. It’s embarrassing. But, despite how hokey this sounds, the real failure would have been to quit after that first rejection. If the second book, Stanley, had also been rejected, then I would have been disappointed, of course. But I would have known I had really given it my best shot, and that perhaps this type/length/age of writing just wasn’t for me. As it is, I know it’s a reach for me, but that with enough work and feedback, I can do it.