let's rant: pet peeves—a call for submissions from studio b in boyertown, berks county & a berks bards' first thursday writing theme.

initial information here is shared from studio b in boyertown, berks county.

any questions about this call for submissions can be sent to jane e. stahl who serves as this gallery's director of community relations. see below.

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the writer's challenge for 2018:

let's rant: pet peeves

(think of what drives you absolutely batty, and run with it in word-form.)

 

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yup, it’s time for a little venting. we all have pet peeves—persons, places, or things that drive us crazy.

opening and book release: the opening for studio b’s 5th annual exhibit and book release combining visual and literary art is scheduled for march 16, 2018. we hope you will submit several pieces of your work. copies of the books will be available for purchase in addition to artwork.

theme: this year’s challenge is to respond to people, occasions, things, or ideas that “drive you crazy.” perhaps your response will include a piece of advice or insight for those who will follow you. now that you are older and wiser, consider what you might advise your “younger self.”

feel free to let loose with swashbuckling passion…offer a comic’s sharp satiric edge…or consider offering your “bitters” in a softer, gentler tone—the sugar that lets the medicine go down.

writers—submission details: send 1 or 2 your pieces of writing—poetry or prose—to jane e. stahl at janeEstahl@comcast.net as a microsoft word document or inside an email message by friday, december 1, 2017. no PDFs, please. again, the deadline is friday, december 1, 2017. also, be sure to include a short biography about yourself in 3 to 5 sentences. 

EDIT & UPDATE—the deadline for this studio b call for submissions was extended to monday, january 15, 2018. good news, admittedly. 

studio b will also be hosting a prose and poetry reading for this event on sunday, april 8, 2018 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. for those who submit their writing and anyone who wants to be a part of hearing these works read by their authors; the event will be in april to celebrate national poetry month.

and as a way to promote this call for submissions as well as this theme for an even wider reach of writings, berks bards, also in berks county, will have a theme of pet peeve poems for its first thursday event at goggleworks in the city of reading on thursday, february 1, 2018 at 6 p.m. berks bards sometimes has featured poets before these community open mics, but the february event will be all about pet peeves in poem-form from the local community. those who are from farther away are welcome, too. so if you are interested in studio b's call for submissions, you can submit by the december deadline and bring your work to share with berks bards in the likely chilly weather of early february. any questions about the community open mic in february can be sent to berksbards@gmail.com.

dog park poems.

yesterday, my traveling poetry class practiced dog park poems in birdsboro at the the danielle ruiz-murphy center for animal welfare and dog park. 

some notable moments not captured on camera involved one dog humping another dog's face (strangely tolerated by the muscular, semi-large dog taking that hit) and lots of mud water-drinking despite fresh bowls of recently poured clean water sitting a few feet away. oofh.

here is one poem from the day, along with a winter-reminding eye-scene.

Mellow-Drama

By Sam Traten

Chipped, spayed and neutered, we’re at the dog park

today. Parts added, parts taken away. Notably missing is

Forgiveness. Hold on, partner, don’t take that the wrong

way. Here’s the thing:

Our relationship, eons old, dog and person, has discovered

how to bypass the whole you wronged me, I forgive you

you humans, among yourselves, play roughhouse. I, your dog, even

left alone, waiting for you to come home, pour kibble, take a bathroom-break

walk, stroke fur, nuzzle face and ears, romp and fetch –

never bothered to learn forgive and forget. No need, it’s

built in. Today, now and forever, I am happy

to see you. I care for you, you are my sunshine,

my beginning and my end. I’ll leap and spin at your

arrival, crouch the downward dog, look lovingly

in your eyes, doggy-smile at your attention, your approval.

noticing a good line-- hugging poems before they're born.

one night while i prepped dinner in the kitchen, my niece, lillee grace hetrick, busily worked at her art (i love how much she is always creating art in her life) on a nearby counter. she noticed an older sampling of her own art on my fridge, held up by a magnet, and commented about remembering it.

i interjected, telling her that what she voiced about the weathered art flowed as a good line. usually, i simply say, that's a good line! since she's newly into learning how to play the electric guitar (and thus test out lyric-writing), she grabbed a clean sheet of paper and wrote down a lightly revamped version. at first, she said something like, i remember i made these alien frogs holding balloons. 

soon, i explained that unique phrasings, very specific and visual, are often poetic. and sometimes dissimilar words just sound good together, in a fresh approach. they can be unexpectedly, oddly, and whimsically beautiful. and especially when detailed imagery is involved.

i also gave an example of poetry-teaching through asking her what she thought sounded better, to say she made a piece of art or that she drew it, since she did technically draw these creatures and their sky-reaching reminders of glee. since drew is so much more specific, it is not only better and more accurate writing but also more poetic. so her revised line is below, in her then eight-year-old handwriting.

we talked about how sometimes you just hear a good line, and it's something hopeful for the future, good to write down, capturing it to save to stand on its own or to use in a more lengthy patch of poem or song later.

my traveling poetry class students are used to hearing me say, that's a good line. write it down. and sometimes they don't act, so i say, i mean it! i think a lot of us have the self-bias of not realizing our own value sometimes, and that can certainly happen with a good line. but if you train yourself into listening for good lines from within you and from those around you, like anything else, with practice, you pick up on stirring quality more and more easily.

and the prospect of just writing a single line here or there, to save for later or just let carry itself on the page, is something i highly recommend. it also teaches you to plant more poetry in the world by giving it the vibrancy of simply letting it be noticed versus anything less.

so let yourself just be a spy for good lines sometimes. it is a benefit for the heart and for the page. and in our world today, it seems poetry will have continually more value in difficult times when we need beauty, hope, and the chance to believe the blurry complexities of our culture can get and be better-- across more people standing up for the greater good and supporting each other through newfound compassion through our evolving bumps upward in consciousness. awareness is everything, and that plays into poetry very directly. onward with poems.

traveling poetry classes in august 2017 at the dog park in birdsboro & the schuylkill river in pottstown.

EDIT: this post was updated on the 14th of august.

we're possibly switching to one evening class each month, and we're in the process of considering a date/time/location for that likely starting in september.

early august is a focus on dog parks and fur kids of the canine variety. anyone is welcome to bring their dogs, but some of us will just be gladly observing what we see in the park, sans our own fur kids during this trip.

although as usual, students are welcome to join us with poems or other creative writing on non-dog-related topics or with no writing to share at all, if just discussing writing (or listening, if you're in a more quiet mood) is easier for certain brains. and that's true of us all, sometimes.

next classes–

when: sunday, august 13 @ 1 p.m. & sunday, august 27 @ 1 p.m.

where: for august 13, the danielle ruiz-murphy center for animal welfare and dog park–the address of its location is 503 center road, birdsboro, pa 19508, and it is also technically route 345 south just off of route 422 west; for august 27, the schuylkill river in pottstown, with a meeting place as the parking lot at riverfront park at 140 college drive, pottstown, pa 19464

optional themes of focus:

• sunday, august 13– dog park poems; dog poems
• sunday, august 27– river poems (but any other subject is always welcome)

if we have oddly inconvenient weather before or during set classes, i will update those who RSVPed to classes in advance to let them know if we are canceling, rescheduling, or relocating to some place indoors.  

cost: $20 per student, per class (we usually meet for 2 hours or more)

if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at poetrywithjenniferhetrick at yahoo dot com. 

and if you know anyone who may be interested in our class, feel free to share this blog content onward.

also, if there is anyone who may want to join our class but lives in another area across berks, chester, and montgomery counties, we sometimes travel to a good variety of different places, so let us know, and we can see about planning classes closer to you.

river poems and a plenty full river in mont clare at lock 60 in late july.

our traveling poetry class in late july by the river in mont clare, montgomery county, right next to phoenixville, chester county, stood to be the most busy we've seen in terms of noticing others out appreciating the water and its nearby canal. but as much as we like having the banks to ourselves, we were so happy to see people out in the water in kayaks and fishing, not just glued eye-wise to televisions, computers, tablets, and cell phones in these modern days of a technology-everything world. it is wonderful to glimpse people literally soaking up the goodness of the natural environment.

and i'd never seen people literally in the canal before, at least not that i can recall. so there are some scenes of that below.

we also ate some of my heirloom sungold tomatoes and enjoyed a blend of people and cultures to observe in their outings. and that includes some music not native to this country. there's also a bag of wishes below, little seedpods from thistle to blow on for what we hope for in the world. very childhood memory-stirring, at least for me.

insect poems during a summer camp for little ones at nockamixon state park in quakertown.

yesterday, i taught my new insect poems workshop during a summer camp about bugs and butterflies at nockamixon state park in quakertown for kids who are in kindergarten through second grade, a group called little sprouts. although some of the creatures we discussed were not technically insects, but they were more related to insects than not and of course fell accurately enough into the category of bug-speak.

after some collective running around in the grass and in between trees by these fun kids, mid-hunting for bugs, i blew bubbles on our way to the education center to work on poems. the bubbles were a big hit in brief minutes as we walked. but that's because bubbles are just plain fun and whimsical.

below are eye-scenes of our excursions, some critters, and the poems crafted from the afternoon's inspirations. and hearing kids read their own freshly written poems is a great way to end a day.

(photograph above: credit to rebekah sheeler)

labyrinth poems.

this afternoon, my traveling poetry class sat under the shade of a young tree, maybe an ornamental pear, after walking the labyrinth at ursinus college. 

we all wrote poems we didn't quite expect, compared to our original intentions before we began to craft them, and ones mostly unlike what you'll find upon googling labyrinth poems. you can see some eye-scenes of a few of them below (followed by what-is-a-labyrinth words).

i hope my students may visit the labyrinth and other ones around the region again on their own in the future, for slower walks of their own kind, as these are valuable places to walk and sit in the middle of in the stressful blur of living today. and so few people know and understand their purpose and value (at least within my circles of chatting, i've noticed), so i hope to nudge others to develop a penchant for labyrinths, too, as talk of them comes up in conversations.

thankfully, a site called www.labyrinthlocator.com is a great resource as a start for finding local labyrinths, but it does not list all existing labyrinths. so sometimes it's helpful to ask around to find out who in your days may know of more around the area, and a new one is now a part of one of my student's churches, too, so that is a nice perk for the future as another local labyrinth. it is at first presbyterian church in pottstown. i can't wait to visit it. this new labyrinth is apparently made from poured concrete. materials used and style of design often vary, and that's one nice aspect of labyrinths. they have the same shared idea of origin but can look a variety of different ways.

and thank you to arline christ for the photographs of us walking, since she'd walked the labyrinth yesterday during an early trip there.

and here is a re-posting of my excerpt in the original post to promote this class, just so anyone who doesn't know much about labyrinths can read about them here.

labyrinth-speak

a labyrinth is sometimes confused with a maze, which can be a stressful challenge for the brain; instead, a labyrinth is a set of paths usually in a circle, geared toward helping people find footfalls that relax and bring them to a more pensive yet peaceful place.

“it’s not a maze where the intention is to get you lost,” said dave bushnell, pastor of epler’s church of christ in leesport. “it leads you to a center point for meditation.”

and it doesn’t necessarily have to be precise meditation; those who venture to labyrinths can sit and have their own quiet and use the opportunity for time away in whatever way they need.

“you walk out the way you came in, but in reverse,” bushnell said. “it’s great to see children in it. and some people walk straight to the middle because they can’t walk the full length.”

bushnell noted that he’s seen regional nurses taking slow walks through the labyrinth as they are thinking caringly about their patients who can’t easily visit the reflective resource of a spot on their own.

and there is no right or wrong way to walk through a labyrinth. some will move at faster paces, but slower ones are usually helpful for the busier minds of so many today who never get much of a chance to slow down because of so much on their proverbial plates in life.

“as you follow the path to the center, you let go of things as you walk, and you’re leaving the world and entering a space,” he said.

this sense of letting go is a lot of why people who visit the labyrinth from across the berks county community find so much relief while inching their way to the benches at the center.

“it’s pretty countercultural to walk around in a circle,” bushnell pointed out about how this endeavor is out of the norm but a benefit to the heart and mind.

labyrinths are incredibly historical, too. they can be traced to more than 4,000 years ago; the most ancient one officially on record is a cretan classical seven-circuit labyrinth from more than 3,500 years ago.

a good number of the labyrinths that are searchable across the globe on www.labyrinthlocator.com (where labyrinths can be discovered by zip code) are modeled after this ancient labyrinth.