How I found poetry

For many years, law was my career. Overlapping with law, motherhood was my greatest responsibility and joy. Work, as lawyer and later, administrative judge, ended quite neatly with retirement in 2005. Both daughters were, by then, independent adults. Happily, I found poetry.  Actually I found the Great Smokies Writing Program, a program of the University of North Carolina-Asheville where gifted teachers, beginning with Cathy Smith Bowers, taught the art of writing poems. I find it impossible to describe this endeavor without heaping praise on Great Smokies. Workshops are held off-campus in various western North Carolina locales, including Hendersonville where I then lived.  I no longer live nearby but I remain a huge cheerleader for Great Smokies.

In 2018, I published a chapbook, “The Season Lengthens.”  Many of the poems were written in my first Great Smokies classes and I describe it as containing my “early work.”  My second chapbook, “Minute Men and Women” was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. MMW weds two avocations, writing poems and researching family history. Each poem in it is written in the minute form and describes something about one of my ancestors. Minute poems consist of 60 syllables and contain three 20 syllable stanzas. The first line of each has eight syllables and the three subsequent lines have four. The poems have a rhyme scheme, aabb, ccdd, eeff.  (This means the first two lines rhyme, and then the second two and so on). I was introduced to the form by Cathy Smith Bowers. I began writing the ancestor minutes in a later class with Ken Chamlee, another fine instructor. His assignment was to write poems in series, i. e., poems with similar subject matter. Because I had scads of data uncovered in genealogical scavenging, I chose to write a series of poems using those stories. The five I wrote then led to many more. And MMW was born.

A full collection, “The Watchful Eye” is forthcoming from Swanhorse, an imprint of Monte Ceceri Publishers.” Stay tuned.

Anne