Stanzas

I loved poetry long before I cared what my house or apartment looked like.  I was a late bloomer when it came to colours, patterns, and furniture arrangement.  Still, I was very excited to learn that the term stanza, which we use to talk about a chunk of a poem, means room in Italian.  So a poem is a like a house, a collection of rooms, and a house is like a poem.  In fact, writing a poem can feel as hard as building a house, and getting a house to feel just right can be as hard as getting a poem to feel just right.  But what's an open-concept house, like the one I live in, then? Is it a free verse poem?  Free verse still has less noticeable structures that hold it together, like my house, and can still use repetition, rhyme, or any of the other tools of poetry just like my house can use repetition of colour or rhyme of pattern.

I wasn't thinking about any of that when I named my first book of poems House Beneath. source That book was named by the literary blog picklemethis.com as one of the ten best books of the year in Canada of any genre. The title poem in that book is actually a dream.

This blog might mention poetry sometimes, but I intend it as a place to show family and friends little projects I have on the go trying to make my house sing, and to share my slowly learned, late blooming understandings of what works and maybe even why.