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Love
Why don't people take love sereosly
It's nothing to play with at all
If you love someone that means you want to spend the rest of your life with them
Not a month or 2 days or even a week the rest of your life
As...

MY GRANDPA
I love my grandpa he's nice and sweet
He gives me nice...

My occasional visitor
My intermittent friend
How may I beckon you
to move in?
 
Listen, You...

 
Ting, ting, ting. Scott Spencer stood in the center of the ballroom, clinking a knife on his champagne glass. His father, Peter, had just married for the third time. About a tenth of the town’s population had shown up for the reception—Telluride, Colorado, is not very big, after all, and Peter was known for throwing a great party. Plus, there was much to celebrate. Peter and Becky were wildly in love. It had taken them six decades to find each other, but at last, they had found their soul mates. It was as if their late-in-life love gave everyone else permission to believe in happily ever after.
 
Ting, ting, ting. Scott raised his crystal flute and the lilting murmur of the crowd hushed. “Here’s to Viagra,” he said, with an overly broad smile and a guffaw lurking beneath his words.
 
No one laughed. The bride’s face lost its glow. The rest of us froze, our glasses still raised, unsure whether or not to bring the champagne to our lips.
 
Then Peter raised his glass higher and took a step nearer to Becky. Not taking his eyes off of her he said, “My luve for you is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June, My luve is like a melody that’s sweetly played in tune …” He recited the first three stanzas of Robert Burns’ famous poem, and when he was done, at least half the room had tears in our eyes. It felt like a joining of spirits again. We tipped back our glasses and drank to the love-giddy pair.
 
That day was the day poetry leapt off the page for me—it leapt off the page and into my ear. Poems went from things to be studied to things to be lived. I began memorizing...

What? You still have not celebrated National Poetry Month?
There is still time for lots of great events. If you are in the Puget Sound area, you should especially consider this closing weekend one of the best times to celebrate.
On Saturday, April 25 at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, the Washington Poetry Association Spring Festival, "Around the World in Poetry," will offer a full day of writing workshops, an open mic, a reading and panel discussion, a showcase of international poetry, and experiments in translation....

When I first tried writing haiku, my attempts were based on very limited information. The quality and effectiveness was poor as a result. My schoolteachers meant well, but often presented only a superficial and sometimes misguided notion of haiku. If you’re new to haiku, you may be in the same situation—without knowing it. While too much information can also impede the poetic impulse, with haiku, as with other genres of poetry, it’s worthwhile to move beyond superficialities to gain a more substantial knowledge of the genre. So what is haiku, and how does one become a haiku poet?
      The most important characteristic of haiku is how it conveys, through implication and suggestion, a moment of keen perception and perhaps insight into nature or human nature. Haiku does not state this insight, however, but implies it. In the last hundred years—in Japanese and English-language haiku—implication has been achieved most successfully through the use of objective imagery. This means you avoid words that interpret what you experience, such as saying something is “beautiful” or “mysterious,” and stick to words that objectively convey the facts of what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Instead of writing about your reactions to stimuli, in a good haiku you write about those things that cause your reactions. This way your readers can experience the same feelings you felt, without your having to explain them.

      spring breeze—      the pull of her hand      as we near the pet store
            —Michael Dylan Welch, Sammamish, Wash.

      A haiku also centers structurally on a pause or caesura (“kire” in Japanese). By juxtaposing two elements or parts (with one of the elements spanning over two of the poem’s three lines), the two parts create a spark of energy, like the gap in a spark plug. The two elements of a good haiku may seem unrelated at first glance, but if the reader lingers on them sufficiently, he or she may notice a reverberation. When you realize the connection between the two parts (sometimes called an “internal comparison”), you have a “spark” of realization, an “aha” moment. As a writer of haiku, it’s your job to allow the poem to have that spark—and not to spell it out for the reader. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to do with haiku, as well as its most important—yet often least understood—structural characteristic.

      new moon . . .      curve of the steeple bell      in winter twilight
            —Ebba Story, San Francisco, California

      Another key strategy in haiku is the seasonal reference. Traditional Japanese haiku use a season word (“kigo”) to anchor the...

Days go on and on and it seems as if everything is so wound up
Around everything else
The coming and going the movement and flowing
Around the center a pulse beats
BOOM BOO BOOM
The rhythm of your life so different from anyone else’s
So sacred
Every minute a celebration
Tapestry paths and turns with pitfalls
Quicksand
And monsters of every sort
So ill equipped to slay a Dragon
So wonderful to have the chance
The only way to die:
Knowing that...