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Who knows what lurks in the fridge? 

 

 

 

 

 

There are times when the influence of the poets that have come before you become very apparent in your work. You write a poem or a story, and you can see Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost in there, somewhere. In my poem, To My Recent Ex, recently published by A Few Lines Magazine, there is a glimmer of William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”.

 

 

 

There are two very different camps when it comes to the interpretation of Williams’ poem. Some believe it to be a simple and moving look into a loving relationship. The other camp, where I stand, sees the chill and formality within it. Forgiveness is not asked, it is demanded. Ending with the word cold implies, to me, a chilly relationship, where communication is handled solely by notes left on the fridge.

 

 

 

My poem was written at a time when my soon to be ex-husband and I were communicating in like manner, though with us it was texting, we no longer shared a fridge. The isolation in Williams’ poem resonated with me, and I wanted to take it farther, more graphic, more cynical.

 

 

 

And so, instead of sweet fruit, the persona in my poem eats a bowl of spaghetti past its prime instead. The results are stomach turning, in more ways than one.

 

 

 

You can read my poem, and the other great poetry in Issue IV of a Few Lines, by following this link here to the pdf:

 

 

 

http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4016299/vol1iss4-pdf-may-22-2012-12-13-am-1-4-meg?da=y&dnad=y

 

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Agape (Photo credit: Lawrence OP)

 

In April, Dead Mule published my poem Agape. This is the third poem in the Love triad with Phileo and Eros, both published in February by The Legendary.

 

While an overtly religious poem, I believe Agape offers hope for everyone. It was written, as were the other two, for the friend turned briefly lover, reminding him in the darkest hour of the hope he’d found in the renewal of his own faith, and to keep trudging ahead, no matter the dips in the road.

 

But I find, especially at this time in my life, that I too need this reminder on a daily basis. No matter what life throws at you, there is hope somewhere. Nothing is all bad, you cling to the good to pull you out.

 

My belief in Christ has never let me down, no matter what the circumstances. May you find something in your own life to hold on to and give you peace just as well.

 

http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/2012/04/helen-peterson-agape-a-poem/

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The Legendary 2012

On a number of occasions over the years, I’ve been honored to be included in the pages of The Legendary, edited by the sassy Katie Moore. This year, in February, she published my poems Eros and Phileo.

Both poems take their titles from two of the three aspects of love as defined by the ancient Greeks. Eros is romantic, physical love, and phileo is fraternal love, it’s why we say Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love. There is a third poem in this series, called Agape, on the last aspect of love, but Katie passed on this one and it was published instead by Dead Mule in April, but that’s for another blog post in a couple of weeks.

I wrote these poems towards the end of a brief relationship. After my divorce, I began to date an old friend, someone I had met 18 years ago in high school, and there were times where it was difficult to separate the 33 year old man from the 16 year old boy in the band room.

Writing these poems made me realize that what both of us were looking for was a return to the innocence we’d lost over the years, and the relationship ended soon after. This is one of the advantages of being a poet. Writing gives clarity to the reality that inspires the writing.

To read Eros and Phileo, as well as everything else of mine that the Legendary has ever published, visit their archives here:

http://www.downdirtyword.com/authors/helenpeterson.html

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The Voice (U.S. TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another NaPoWriMo has come and gone, and, as opposed to last year, I actually got about 5 poems written. There was a time when I was able to write 30 poems in 30 days, but age, 3 kids, and a serious illness have kept me from keeping up. So, I’m happy with what I got done.

 

National Poetry Month, National Poetry Writing Month for poets, is a great excuse to get off your butt and get writing if, like me, you’ve been going through a dry spell. It’s amazing how easy it is to just stop writing, telling yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, next week, maybe next month. And then you think it’ll be hard to get back in the game, you let the ideas pile up in the back of your mind, you catch up on watching the Voice.

 

But guess what? There are prompts everywhere, even in the showboating of Christina Aguilera and Adam Levine. One you pick up the pen, boot up the computer, and start writing, you wonder why you ever thought it would be so hard. It’s so easy! Like riding a bike! The ideas start flooding back through you, you start to revise, and you’ve got some fresh work to submit instead of the tired old poem you’ve already sent out a hundred times before.

 

It doesn’t matter if you get five, thirty, or just one really good, tight poem. The important thing is to turn off the TV and get writing!

 

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Zygote in My Coffee April 2012

 

To read the issue, go here: http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/100s/issue137contentsradnads.html

 

First, let me just say how happy I am that Zygote came back. They were one of the first to publish me, and so many of those early online zines have gone dark. I’m ecstatic they’ve published my poems, Sapiosexual and Glottophagy, this month in issue #137.

 

Both Sapiosexual and Glottophagy continue the series I’ve been working on of Three Dollar Poems, poems that have long and/or archaic words for titles that then go on in the body of the poem to define the word in some way.

 

A sapiosexual is a person who is turned on by another person’s intellect, and not their physical appearance. Glottophagy is a term that refers to when a language is completely taken over by another, so that the words themselves are lost. This is commonly referred to as language death, but glottophagy, let’s admit it, is a lot more fun to say.

 

I am so excited to see these two poems published together, as they are both inspired by the new man in my life, and the impact these changes have had in both my point of view and in my writing. Glottophagy especially encapsulates this, since I had been in such destructive relationships previously, it was hard for me to reclaim the language necessary to write poems and fiction that reflect happiness and true love. Working through the poem was a gateway for me to a whole new range of images and metaphors that had been closed off to me before.

 

I am eager to see what new poems will be inspired by this amazing new journey in my life, and I can’t wait to share them with you, my fans and supporters. I think, in times like these, we can all use a few more happy poems, don’t you?

 

 

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Bronze sculpture of Sancho Panza by Lorenzo Coullaut Valera (1876–1932). Detail of the monument to Cervantes (1925–30, 1956–57) at the Plaza de España ("Spain Square") in Madrid. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The latest issue of The Waterhouse Review is up, and I have to say, since I accepted the invitation to become the first poetry editor, every issue seems to get better and better.

 

The current issue is no exception. The cool thing about being an editor is seeing how, even when you didn’t have a theme in mind, one seems to materialize as you begin to read through the latest batch of submissions. I don’t know how it works, but it does. It’s like literary magic, and it’s wonderful to see how an issue comes together, like a crazy waltz that started as the hustle.

 

April 2012 is no exception. Every piece deals in some way with relationships in some way. Whether it’s the humorous lack of communication between doctor, pharmacist, and patient in Jennifer McGowan’s poem Cough Syrup, the surreal maternal relationship between man and spider in MD Joyce’s story Sancho Panza –OR- Dads Are Just Jerks Who Divorce Your Mom, or a woman’s disconnection with everything in Rachel Cox’s Less Than Superhero, this issue has a little bit of something that everyone can identify with in some way, and I like that.

 

For me, the most personal of the bunch is Katie Moore’s poem My Little Runaway. I’ve been the little girl wanting to run away from the safe and the comfortable, not really knowing what I’m getting myself into. And I’ve been the mother who knows her children will never make it out of the yard before turning back.

 

I hope you’ll take a moment to read the latest issue of Waterhouse, see what else I do in my spare time. We are now reading for July, so if you’re a writer who thinks your work might be a good fit for us, please check out our guidelines page and send it along!

 

http://www.waterhousereview.co.uk/

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Image via Wikipedia

To find out more about Existere, and order a copy of the issue, click here

It’s official. Canadians like me, or at least like my poetry. They’ve proven it, when Existere, Journal of Arts and Literature, published my poem, “We Were Made for a Garden”, in their Fall/Winter2010 issue.

It’s a beautiful print journal, and the issue came just in time for a long sad weekend away at a funeral. I enjoyed everything in it, not just my poem, which is as it should be. Unfortunately, I had the hardest time getting my credit union to deposit the check that came with it. Oh well, Paypal next time.

The poem is a little love poem to someone who came and went with me for a season, very much like a garden actually, right between husbands 1 and 2. The good thing about poems like this is they remind you of happy times with no regrets. It was just that kind of relationship. There’s also a reference in the poem to Jackson Pollock‘s Lavender Mist, so it makes me look all artsy and stuff in the process, without being overt about it like the Georgia O’Keefe or Charles Sheeler poem.

One of the greatest dates of my life was going to see the movie Pollock with this person at the Madison Arts Cinema. There are still a few really small cinemas here in Connecticut, the one in Madison, the one in Niantic, the one in Mystic to be specific. I don’t get down to Madison very often, but the one in Mystic is a favorite place to go see the movies I really want to see, on the few nights I get to go out and be a grown up.

It also helps that, to me, Lavender Mist looks like a garden freshly dug, with lots of potential milling about underneath the soil. So everything tied in really well together, and made a lovely little love poem. I’m glad Existere picked it up, and I can take the issue off my shelf and reread it again and again, to remind myself of happy days, and to give me the courage to grasp the potential of my life today. Which is teeming.

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To read the poem, click here

To learn more about the painting, watch here

One of my very, very first publishing creds. I met George Wallace while I was still in school, going to hear him read in Groton at the UConn campus. At that time he introduced me to Poetrybay and invited me to submit work, which I did. We’ve since become good friends, and have read together on a couple of occasions.

The poem, “On Georgia O’Keeffe‘s Goat Horn and Red”, is based on am O’Keeffe painting I had printed on a tile in my living room at the time. It was written for an assignment in my Writing Poetry class with the fantastic Daniel Donaghy, who had asked us to write a poem based on art work. Unfortunately, he wanted something less abstract, and so I had to write my Charles Sheeler poem for the grade, but that’s another blog post.

The poem in itself is simple, abstract, capturing what I saw in O’Keeffe’s work without getting too deep. Getting in deep came much later in my work. It was cathartic to get into the mix of orange and red swirls, bought at the Recycle Shop in Montville CT to match my newly painted living room’s blue walls with orange trim, a color scheme chosen by my new boyfriend at the time who eventually became husband number 2.

I later sold the tile on Ebay when husband #2 lost his job and I was desperate to pay the mortgage, then lost the house, the living room anyway. But again, another story.

Hmmm, perhaps it’s time to write a deeper poem.

 

 

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So, by working on it here and there, I’ve come up to about 16,000 words which, to me, is amazing and scary and just weird. I’ve never written this much in my life about one thing. Zombies. Who knew?

I’m not done by any means, but I’ve learned a thing or two thus far, and thought today I’d pass them along.

1. Outlining. It’s not for sissies.

I’ve always been a fly by the seat of her pants kind of girl, both in life and in writing. This works, sort of, for poems, flash fiction, and short stories. It doesn’t work at all in marriages, mortgages, and novel writing. Seat of my pants style, it was hard to get into any sort of routine going. If I wasn’t “Inspired”, or it had been a number of days, (weeks…months…) since I’d written, it was hard to get back into the flow of the story, I would spend all of my limited writing time trying to figure out where exactly I was going.

I don’t always stick to the outline, my writing still takes interesting turns on its own. Now, however, I can sit down, check on my outline where I left off and where I’d like to go, and actually spend my writing hour doing just that, writing.

2. Attempt to Set a Routine, but Accept that Life Happens

I have three children. Finding time to write where I’m not distracted is tough. In the summer, when I’m not working, it’s easier, I try to write during nap time. But we don’t always have nap time. Sometimes we’re at an event for the day, and no writing gets done. And that’s okay. Sometimes I need a break. Burning out is never good, for anyone.

Another great thing is using the gifts of time I sometimes get. Earlier this year, I had to attend a funeral sans children in another town. I brought my laptop and wrote in the hotel after attending the wake, and again in the morning before the funeral. This summer, I had the opportunity to use a friend’s cabin for a couple days, sans kids. Again, I took my laptop, and got a lot of work done. Speaking of laptops…

3. Set aside an internet free computer/laptop just for writing.

It is hard, when the world is only a click away, to get any kind of work done, I don’t care what it is. I try to write on the main computer of the house, I get stuck digging for treasure, or chatting with friends, or refusing crap from Farmville. My laptop is ancient, it has very little battery life, and no built in modem. And that’s the way I like it. (OK, more battery life would be nice, but I digress.) If there’s something along the way I’d like to research, I make a note of it, or I grab my Droid real quick. Then I put the phone down and get back to work.

4. Love your characters. Even the unlovable ones.

This can be hard. In my novel, Divorcing the Corpse, there are some pretty ugly characters, and I’m not just talking about the zombies. You’ve got to find a way to like at least something about everyone you create. One thing I’ve done that has worked with the villain of the story, I asked a very “close personal friend” to help me name him. That way, when I write about the bad guy, I do it with a smile on my face, thinking of my “close personal friend”. The story gets written, someone gets added to the acknowledgments page, everyone’s happy.

5. Have Fun

No, writing a novel is not easy. No one is saying it is. It requires time, thought, and lots and lots of work. But if you don’t enjoy doing it, the work is going to suffer, and your story isn’t going to be as good. It’ll become as much of a drag for your readers as it has become for you. Put it aside, go write something else for awhile. Remember why you love to write in the first place.  Then come back to it. Maybe.

 

So ok, five things I’ve learned. I’m sure there’s many more, I’m sure I’ve got more to learn. But this is what I got so far, hopefully you can use a little bit of this in your own work. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments. Write on!

 

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To read the issue, click here 

WHLR very nicely printed five, yes FIVE! of my poems in their latest issue. I feel loved.

Agamous is another one of those three dollar poems. Agamous is a word that can mean asexual, it can also mean a metal free of impurities. In this poem, I play on both definitions to detail the end of a marriage, when one goes through a period of feeling asexual, almost as if the sexual being is ripped, painfully, from one’s identity, a process not unlike the extreme heat and pressure required to purify a metal.

How I Knew is a humorous take on pregnancy, the discovery by a woman that she is with child, and the attempt to explain to her partner exactly what it was that inspired her to purchase the pregnancy test in the first place.  The answer is, of course, unsatisfying and enlightening at the same time.

The next poem is also a humorous poem, and a 3 dollar one as well. The English Major Comes Home is different from the other 3 dollar poems in that the big expensive words come not in the title, but in the poem itself. There are eight of these words in total, including my favorite, windelstraw. I’ve met English majors like this, in fact, if I were totally honest with myself, I guess I was one. Still am.

The last two take a turn in the opposite direction.

Laying it Down/Picking it Up was a poem inspired by the heartbreaking death of a former student of mine. She was only in 6th grade when she died suddenly during what was supposed to be a routine surgery. Later it was discovered that she had undiagnosed leukemia, and would have died soon, tragically, anyway. The memorial service, however, was a beautiful celebration of a wonderful little girl, and I felt it deserved to live on.

The last poem, You Cut Me Deep, is sad, bitter, using a favorite girlhood toy and the folklore of unicorns. What can I say, I’m a student of folklore, I use it a lot. And yes, okay, I haven’t exactly been successful in discerning the wheat from the chaff when it comes to relationships. I do believe I am getting better. Maybe.

So there you go. A pretty successful and wide ranging collection of poems. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry. They’ll all, hopefully, make you think. Enjoy.