friday feast: a Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations breakfast (+ a giveaway!)

August 21, 2015September 1, 2017 ~ jama ~ 77 Comments

Good Morning! Hungry?

Today we’re serving up a delicious five-course breakfast celebrating the most recent title in the totally faboo Poetry Friday Anthology series created by the incredibly brilliant and uncommonly good-looking poetry goddesses Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations (Pomelo Books, 2015) is the perfect way to greet the new school year. Just think of all the glorious Fridays to come, each brimming with oodles of opportunities to read, write, share, and yes, even eat poems! The collection contains over 150 poems by 115 poets, a toothsome smorgasbord of holiday poems written in both English and Spanish grouped by calendar month.

*Poetry Friday Anthology series creators Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong*

What better way to celebrate special occasions like Easter, Rosh Hashanah/Tashlich, Earth Day, Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year, Flag Day, Juneteenth, and National Soup Month (!!!!) than with poems that come with fun Take 5! mini-lessons to help teachers, librarians, and parents share the poems in ways that will engage and delight, facilitate discussion, and encourage further reading?

In addition to poems for widely observed holidays like Christmas, Halloween and Mother’s Day, kids will also enjoy learning about many quirky, lesser-known events (National Dump the Pump Day, Halfway Day, Band-Aid Day, World Laughter Day). Diversity also flavors this poetic feast (Gay Pride Day, Ramadan, Obon, Dashain Festival, Diwali, Day of the Dead), and there are birthday/ baby poems for each month!

I love that each poem is paired with a relevant picture book recommendation and also linked to another poem in the anthology with a similar theme or subject. If you’re hungry for even more, check out the referenced poetry books. Sylvia and Janet have thought of everything! This rich, wholly accessible and versatile resource, which features a gold mine of contemporary children’s poets (Jane Yolen, Eileen Spinelli, Douglas Florian, Janet Wong, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Marilyn Singer, Michael J. Rosen), simply belongs in every home, preK-6 classroom, school and public library. 🙂

Continue reading →

friday feast: two poems from Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse (+ recipes)

June 19, 2015August 31, 2017 ~ jama ~ 32 Comments

“The joys of the table belong equally to all ages, conditions, countries and times; they mix with all other pleasures, and remain the last to console us for their loss.” (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin)

Talk about a kid in a candy store. As soon as my copy of Joys of the Table arrived, I polished my silver soup spoon, donned my nattiest bib (velvet trim, don’t you know), licked my chops, then ever so intently sipped, munched, chewed, relished and savored each and every poem in this tasty tome.

What a marvelous feast! The 100 or so poems (some with recipes) by 75 poets from around the country are served up in six courses: Amuse Bouche, What We Eat, Food and Love, Geography of Food, Kitchen Memories, and Food and Mortality. It was nice to see quite a few familiar favorites (Diane Lockward, Sharon Auberle, Barbara Crooker, Andrea Potos, Jacqueline Jules, Susan Rich, Annelies Zijderveld), as well as discover many new-to-me poets whose delicious verses left me craving more of their work (Lisa Kosow, Eric Forsbergh, Katharyn Howd Machan, Dianne Silvestri, Anne Meek, and Christie Grimes to name a few).

*“Interior with Phonograph” by Henri Matisse (1924)*

In a publisher’s interview, Editor Sally Zakariya was asked why she decided to put together an anthology of food poems:

I wondered that myself more than once! But really, food in its many aspects—personal, sentimental, sensual, universal—is a natural subject for poetry. I realized I had written a number of poems about remembered meals, nurturing cooks, and food as a symbol of communion and contentment, and I found that other poets I know had, too. And because food is so basic to our relationships with family and friends and lovers, I thought many poets would like to have such an anthology on their own shelves—and perhaps to give copies to their favorite cooks.

There certainly was no shortage of submissions — Sally received hundreds of additional poems worthy of being included — but ultimately her criteria for selection was subjective. I do like her taste in poems, noting that there was a higher percentage of poems that resonated with me in this anthology than in others. Continue reading →

Poetry Friday Roundup is here!

June 11, 2015September 11, 2017 ~ jama ~ 53 Comments

Welcome to Poetry Friday at Alphabet Soup!

Please help yourself to a mug of coffee, tea or milk and a blueberry crumb bar — just the thing for hopping from blog to blog and reading some good poems. 🙂

To set you on your way, thought I’d share a poem from Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. I like the intersection between the temporal and the spiritual, the dissolution of will and ego while singing praise for the divine glory of the world. And, too, in this day and age of blatant self aggrandizement, it is humbling to contemplate Mother Nature’s largesse as well as her indifference to our inconsequential and fleeting existences, our infinitesimal obsessions.

*“Blueberries’ Great Escape” via Dogwood Studio Alaska*

HERE, THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES
by Mary Szybist

When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.

Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?

Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets.
Here in this meadow, we open our baskets

to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them,
berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers.

what taste the bright world has, whole fields
without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds

swelling at the edges of the meadow. And for this,
I did nothing, not even wonder.

You must live for something, they say.
People don’t live just to keep on living.

But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.

~ from Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013).

This poem appears near the end of the book, a sort of benediction. The entire collection is luminous and deeply thought provoking, with inventive explorations of the divine in everyday life. The National Book Award judges citation reads in part: “This is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful.” Definitely worth a look — Szybist is a poet’s poet.

Speaking of which, Heartfelt Congratulations to Juan Felipe Herrera, our new U.S. Poet Laureate, and Jacqueline Woodson, our new Young People’s Poet Laureate! Way cool! 🙂

Now, please leave your links with Mr. Linky below. Don’t forget to include the title of the poem you’re sharing or book you’re reviewing in parentheses after your name. The links page will stay up indefinitely and can be accessed at any time for your reading convenience.

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Thanks for joining us today. If you’d like the Blueberry Crumb Bars recipe, click over to Smitten Kitchen. Cool thoroughly before slicing and enjoy with a side of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. 🙂

Have a wonderful weekend!
(Here there are blueberries, here there are poems.)

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friday feast: ♥my darling, my tortilla♥

May 29, 2015September 11, 2017 ~ jama ~ 67 Comments

Today we sing the praises of the Mexican tortilla.

O tlaxcalli, ancient flatbread, little round cake, pride of the Aztecs! Delicioso!

*“Woman Grinding Maize” by Diego Rivera (1924)*

ODE TO TORTILLAS
by Fernando Esteban Flores

O
what delicacies
hide between the folds
of my tortillas
soft
& warm
ready to be deposited
in a place where hunger knows no boundaries

O
how this flat, round
speckled world
invites me to discover
its buttery terrain
of uncharted appetites

O
edible plate
uncurled to my intestinal delights
will you be
my gordita tonight
decked out in your
green & red petticoats

O(r)
might you tease me
with a red strapless
enchilada wrap?

in a country of brown hands
in fellowship with tlaili, ehecatl, y atl
(earth, wind & water)

O
Tlaxcalli
i repeat the cosmic cycle
i break you
& i receive the wafer of survival
on my tongue:

Bless the golden maíz that brought you forth
Bless the bronze hands that kneaded you
Bless the stone pallets that rolled out
the perfect faces of my people

~ from Ragged Borders: Poems (Hijo del Sol Pub, 1996).

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How I love this poem — the sense of reverence, the nod to roots, beginnings, of coming full circle in such beautifully spare verse. There is a wonderful feeling of wholeness, as if the poet wrapped the heart of his culture in that “flat, round speckled world.”

Speaking of the “perfect faces of my people,” enjoy this mini gallery of tortilla art by California native Joe Bravo, who began painting on tortillas because he couldn’t afford canvases back in his college days.

I use the Tortilla as a Canvas because it is an integral part of the Hispanic Culture and my heritage. For the subject matter of my tortilla paintings, I use imagery that is representative of Latinos, conveying their hopes, art, beliefs and history. As the tortilla has given us life, I give it new life by using it as an art medium.

JOE BRAVO TORTILLA ART