A Thought and a Half | Southern Food & Lifestyle Blog

The Haiku Project {guest post}

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Today marks two things: one, National Haiku Day, and two, my first ever guest post on A Thought and a Half! I’m so excited to welcome Kayla Hollatz on the blog today to talk about a really neat form of poetry as part of my National Poetry Month series!
 


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Thank you Kate for allowing me to have a chance to connect with your readers in honor of National Poetry Month! I’m Kayla Hollatz, a twenty-something writer from Minnesota with a fierce passion for poetry. I’ve been writing ever since I could pick up a pen. I’ve been posting my poetry online for about two years on Tumblr. Many of my readers there know me by my pseudonym The Tall Twig. While I adore the writing community on Tumblr, I wanted to find a way to mix poetry into my personal brand on Twitter because it’s such a huge part of who I am. That’s when #thehaikuproject was born. 
 
Haikus are quite possibly my favorite form of poetry. I’m a short form poet, so I love saying a lot in as few words as possible. With haikus, you only have 17 syllables to pack a punch and convey your message. That’s even harder to do than the 140 character limit Twitter already has! Because of this syllable restriction, I thought Twitter would be the  perfect place to share haikus. 
 
In the first week of tweeting my haikus with the hashtag #thehaikuproject, I had dozens of followers asking for more information on how to join in. Every week, hundreds of haikus started flooding into the hashtag from people all over the world. Some participants were poets, others writers, and some were just experimenting with the form and writing. It’s been a really fun community and with April being National Poetry Month, it’s a great time to join. There are no rules beyond what the form dictates. Simply write a haiku (3 lines with the pattern of 5-7-5 syllables) and include #thehaikuproject. Then press send and take a peek at the other haikus others are posting on Twitter through tracking the hashtag. 
 
For an example of haikus, here are a few of mine that I’ve tweeted:

 
Want to try writing your own? We’d love for you to join us! 
You can follow Kayla on Twitter and on her blog. 

 

Poetry Friday: Sandra Beasley

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Welcome to week 2 of my National Poetry Month series! 

Today I’m featuring an awesome poet that I met in college at VT. As an English major, I was required to attend a certain number of readings for my classes each semester. The English department always did a great job of scheduling some wonderful writers to give craft talks and readings. One poet that I remember quite vividly is Sandra Beasley.
Beasley came to VT in the fall of my junior year. We’d just read her book I Was the Jukebox in my poetry class that semester. At the time I wasn’t very keen on poetry in general, and I’ll admit most of the poems in her book confused me (a lot) at first. But after rereading several of the poems, several times, and talking about them in class, they started to make more sense and I realized what a poetic genius Beasley is. Listening to her read was also amazing. She’s so animated and expressive!
This video isn’t from her reading at VT, but it was what I could find online. In it, she’s reading one of my favorite poems from I Was the Jukebox, called “You Were You.”

Beasley stayed around after her reading for a little while to sign books and chat with some of us. When I asked her to sign my book, she asked if I was a poet. I chuckled a little and said that I preferred prose, but wanted to explore poetry more. Her note in my book was just what I needed to read, and sometimes I go back to it when I need a little boost. Words of wisdom, right there! 

I haven’t written any poetry of my own since my last poetry class at VT, but the prose is still coming. 
Thank you, Sandra Beasley, for being awesome and inspiring. If you’re interested in learning more, visit Beasley’s website and check out her other books. There are also a few of her poems on PoetryFoundation.org.
Do you have a favorite contemporary poet or writer? Who is it? Share your favorites below! 
 

Poetry Friday: The Waste Land

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Here’s my first poetry feature for National Poetry Month! 
Somehow I made it through high school without reading T.S. Eliot’s famous work The Waste Land. In fact, I didn’t read it until my senior year of college in a modern poetry class. At first I dreaded it; my friends who went to other high schools who read it always complained about how difficult and dense it is.

Then I read it, guided by one of the best professors I ever had in college, and oh my goodness, y’all. My eyes were opened.

Sure, parts of it were really dense and difficult. But there were sections that I absolutely loved and still read every now and then. One such section comes in part V, “What the Thunder Said.”

 

That whole section spoke to me so much. In life, we all experience moments of surrender when we realize or embrace something or someone new. Those moments may require us to give up certain things or to step out of our comfort zones and face an unfamiliar situation. Moments like…moving in with a romantic partner. Saying “yes” to a new job and having to relocate. Realizing that an old relationship wasn’t safe and that maybe it’s affected you more than you thought. Facing your fear head on. Going skydiving. Riding a rollercoaster.
But, as Eliot says a line later, we are defined by these moments, and I believe we are even further defined by how we respond to them and carry ourselves going forward. Only you can decide how such moments affect your life.

I could say so much more about this passage, but I will leave it there and for y’all to interpret, too. The Waste Land is truly one of the most beautiful and captivating pieces of literature in our cannon and I can’t believe it took me until I was 21 to read it.

Want to read the whole Waste Land poem? Check it out here. Be warned, though – it is long! 

April is National Poetry Month!

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First of all, I can’t believe it’s already April. In about a month and a half I will graduate with my Master of Arts degree and I’ll be done with school forever. Just have to make it through these next eight weeks.

Anyway…if you don’t know, April is National Poetry Month! As part of my English degree, I studied quite a bit of poetry, and wrote some of my own. I’m definitely no poet myself, but I have a huge appreciation for those who enjoy it and write it well. I had several friends in undergrad who were very talented poets (and great writers in general), and in my literature classes, I always found at least one poet that I connected with the most, in some way or another.


So I thought, what better way to celebrate National Poetry Month–and literature in general–than to share some of my favorite works with all y’all? Every Friday this month, I’ll share one of my favorite poems with y’all, or an excerpt if it’s a really long poem. I won’t share any that I wrote myself because quite frankly I’m not that proud of them. But I do have my favorites by others, and that counts.

So stay tuned for the rest of the month and humor the inner literary nerd in me. I kind of miss my poetry and lit classes from undergrad, so this is a great way to keep up with it. We’re all nerds about something in our lives, right?

 

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