I have written here in the past few months about recent best-selling poets Amanda Gorman, Rupi Paur, and Courtney Peppernell. But some of the real best-selling poets are from pretty far in the past. Rumi, Lao Tzu, and the classic haiku poets like Basho and Issa have been selling well for hundreds of years. Amazon has an always-updating list of poetry best-sellers on the site that are a very eclectic group of "poets."
Gibran
I saw a while back that it was the birthday of poet Khalil Gibran who was born in Lebanon in 1883. However, he lived in Boston where he met Alfred A. Knopf who published his book The Prophet in 1923. It wasn't an instant best-seller but it gained popularity. In the swinging 1960s, it became a favorite of the counterculture.
It has been translated into more than 100 languages. It has never been out of print. Today, Gibran is now the third-best-selling poet in history, after two other exceptionally good poets, William Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.
The book is not what some will consider typical "poetry." It is 26 prose poetry "fables."
The "prophet" is not Gibran. It is Al Mustafa who after living away for 12 years, he is about to board a ship home. He is stopped by a group of people and talks with them about life and the human condition. Each chapter deals with a topic like love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. That's a lot of ground to cover.
The book's appeal is not totally unlike some contemporary best-selling poets. Short pieces on big topics. Quotable lines. Easy to read. No dense language.
The Prophet often shows up being quoted at weddings.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls
I've heard it at births, baptisms, and baby events.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.
And his lines show up at the other end of life.
When you are sorrowful look again in
your heart, and you shall see that in truth
you are weeping for that which has been
your delight.
Did you have a resolution for the new year to write more often? Try to produce a poem every day? (I did that back in 2014.) Finish that manuscript and get it published? Good ideas, but not that easy to accomplish.
Keeping a journal is one less threatening way to keep writing regularly, even on a daily basis, and a way to make that even easier is to commit to just one line a day.
A friend told me that she received a "One Line A Day" journal book as a holiday gift. Interestingly, the particular edition she received has on each page of the journal an entry space for five successive years. This allows you to look back at your thoughts on a specific day of the year over the span of five years. That's an interesting way to note change, progress, or lack thereof.
I keep journals and I do sometimes look back to an earlier volume to see what I was doing on an earlier day, week, or month.
You might find that holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, solstices, equinoxes, and other calendar events or simply a particular day have interesting coincidences or synchronicities.
I have also seen the suggestion to do a 5-minute daily journal format. People sometimes will make it a ritual - the first or last thing they do in a day or a lunchtime activity.
What would you write in your daily journal? I know people also keep Gratitude Journals trying to record something each day. I tried that but - sadly - found it hard to come up with something every day without repeating rather obvious things.
You don't really need a special book to do this, but the structure will probably help some procrastinators and be a reminder to establish this as a practice.
A step up is a bound blank book that will look like a book on your shelf. I am convinced that writing in something that looks like a "real book" helps. They also last a lot longer. I have journals that are more than 50 years old and are in great shape.
If you want to add some structure to your journaling, here are a few links to specialty journal blank books.
In this short month and following last month's zuhitsu prompt that generated many long poems, we will ask you to write a poem in a short form.
The quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Persia, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China, and continues into the 21st century.
In the eleventh century, the poet Omár Khayyám created a book of connected quatrain verses known as the “Rubáiyát” which translates as quatrains in Arabic. In the nineteenth century, the “Rubáiyát” was translated by an English poet named Edward Fitzgerald, which brought about a resurgence of this four-line stanza. Nostradamus used quatrains to write his prophecies. Rumi used the form for many poems.
A quatrain can be a four-line stanza using a rhyme scheme, but these six quatrains by Ursula K. Le Guin illustrate how one alone can also be a short poem.
SOLSTICE
On the longest night of all the year
in the forests up the hill,
the little owl spoke soft and clear
to bid the night be longer still.
To make this prompt a bit more challenging, we ask you to use as your title a single word - an unusual word, a word that will need a definition for many readers - and your quatrain will be a rhyming definition.
For example, if your title is "CORUSCATE," the four rhyming lines will need to make it clear - without sounding like a dictionary - that this word means to glitter, sparkle, in bright flashes - like gems or the sunlight on moving water.
I could not find a poem that exactly fits the three requirements of this prompt, so I simply used on the website prompt examples of stanzas from the poems below to illustrate the rhyme possibilities.
You will also need to choose a rhyme scheme. Here are six of the fifteen possibilities and examples of poems containing stanzas using them.
ABAB is known as interlaced, alternate, or heroic) see Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. This is also known as an elegiac stanza and is in iambic pentameter.
When I was assembling our writing prompt on zuihitsu and reading the very old Pillow Book, I also came across a new book by Courtney Peppernell titled Pillow Thoughts. I had never heard of Peppernell and I thought the book might be connected to my prompt in some way.
The Pillow Book was written by Sei Shonagon, a courtesan, around 1000, and it is a diary-like collection of her thoughts and observations on life.
The modern-day Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose that is - according to online descriptions - about heartbreak, love, loss, and self-worth. It is divided into ten sections, "making it so simple to skip to the parts where you want to feel the most." Hmmm, that's an interesting pitch.
It turns out that Peppernell is quite a bestselling author. Her writing career began in 2015 with her first novel, Chasing Paper Cranes.
Her first poetry collection, Pillow Thoughts, was released in 2016 and reached number one in its category, and attracted the attention of other artists, including The Chainsmokers.
The collection was then re-published by Andrews McMeel Universal, along with her second poetry collection The Road Between in August 2017. That year she also released her second novel, Keeping Long Island.
samples via her Instagram account
In an online interview, she explains the publication story.
What happened with Pillow Thoughts is originally it was self-published, and it had been out for a couple of months, and one morning I woke up and all these people on Instagram had messaged me and said that the Chainsmokers had tweeted out a poem from the book and everybody was asking “where is this poem from, we love this poem” so just to wake up to that was incredible. I knew who the Chainsmokers were too, I love their music, I like what they’re about, so to have them connect with a piece of my writing was super awesome and so we contacted them and they said “yeah send us a copy of the book we’d love to read it” and everything happened from there.
Courtney Peppernell is an Australian LGBT author, and she sells a lot of books.
For me being in the LGBT community I wanna be…. I write for everyone. But LGBTQ+ they’re special to me too. Especially with pillow thoughts…there still a lot of people out there who think I’m male. They don’t realize I’m actually a female. They have no idea that I’m gay. Some of my favorite messages are…they’ll come to my page and go “Courtney I thought you were a guy and sort of now I kind of get you and your book makes way more sense now” that’s cool bc it shows that love is universal but it also connects me with LGBT readers and the struggles that some of them go through and just mental illness in general.
On January 1, 2022, books that were published in 1926 entered the public domain in the United States (copyright differs in other countries). That means that you can do remixes and other things with these works. Are you a poet who also writes stories or novels? Maybe a reimagining in your 2022 practice.
On this call for submissions, we will consider the Zuihitsu (随筆 zuih-itsu), a genre of classical Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author's surroundings. The name is derived from two Kanji meaning "at will" and "pen."
It is neither prose poem nor essay - though it can resemble both. The translation is to "follow the brush" as in painting, letting the brush take control of the hand. The form implies there will be discovery rather than plan. The creation of order depends on some disorder.
The usually short entries contain juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials and pieces of varying lengths. It is often personal writing and contemplation. In longer zuihitsu pieces passages that look more like "poetry" (shorter lines, figurative language) also appear. One article I read called zuihitsu a genre in which the text can drift like a cloud.
Zuihitsu might be best known in its first appearance more than a millennium ago in The Pillow Book written by Sei Shonagon, a courtesan of the court of Empress Sadako/Teshi. Sei was a contemporary and acquaintance of another courtesan, Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote another Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji.
Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book) was written around 1000 and like many old personal diaries and journals it gives us reflections on the customs and usages of the time. Sei Shonagon kept a diary that includes the intrigues, dalliances, and habits of Japan's late tenth-century elite, as well as her personal feelings.
I read an abridged translation by Arthur Waley. There is a little thrill in reading the diary of this very young woman. She writes in a time and place that treated poetry as important as knowledge.
Zuihitsu written today by most Westerners is hybrid. A precise definition is hard to give. I would say that the emphasis is not so much on a subject as it is about the movement between the passages. The passages are interconnected but flow from one to the next more by association than any literary logic. The writing process mirrors the author’s mind. Parts may be in verse if that is the best form for the idea. The form changes the content. Another description I have seen of the form is that it is a "lyric essay."
The first time I was introduced to the form, the modern poem that came to mind was "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. Looking at it again, it does seem to fit the form. Here are two of Stevens' "ways"
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
American poet Kimiko Hahn published her collection The Narrow Road to the Interior and uses this ancient Japanese technique in the writing of her very modern poetry. (Her title is taken from haiku poet Bashō's famous travel diary, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior).
A Zen priest once told me that without snagging on a storyline, the body can only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I heard.
The imagination can break through them.
Boiled peanuts. Leather of daybreak. Cotton thinning out into thread. Dried vomit. Ice water from the spigot. The sacred and profane share a border. In the desert, small droppings of unknown origin.
Even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of watching and of not being watched.
Hybrid forms leave fences open. They are wide fields with snow leopards, wolves, and honey bees. The combustion of imaginings forms a lake, water spreading, explosions on the surface of an oil slick.
Hybrida is the change of properties. Long ago the earth plates shifted, came together in new permutations. New land. New World. It permits a space to be wounded, sutured, broken again, and untied to float to a beyond.
This mixed presence is a ghost, converses with the living. What lingers sounds like leaves crushed beneath feet, or the light that remains on after you’ve distinctly shut it, the house in the field over there, the one that keeps living whether you view it or not. Lights in the upstairs room. Shadows move when the wind changes its mind. It seems inhabited, doesn’t it?
All those poet interpretations are worth looking at but as our model this month, I chose some sections from The Pillow Book itself. The author often makes lists under headings that could serve as titles. Here are some examples (there are more on the prompt page of our main website).
Pleasing Things
Finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.
In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.
Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep.
Looking into a Chinese mirror that’s a little clouded.
Things That Make Me Feel Nostalgic
Coming across a torn scrap of lavender- or grape-coloured fabric crumpled between the pages of a bound book.
On a rainy day when time hangs heavy, searching out an old letter that touched you deeply at the time you received it.
Write a zuihitsu-inspired poem, collecting a series of random but interconnected thoughts and personal notes about your surroundings.
I think that a good starting place would be to use Shonagon's organizing method of a heading which can become your title or serve as a kind of stanza. You need to decide on some unifying element even if your pen takes you along a stream of consciousness to some place unexpected. For example, you could write 12 thoughts, one for each month, or have 7 for each day of the week. The sections might resemble haiku.
Your submission this month is not a pillow book or diary, but it might be an excerpt from one. There is a free online text version of The Pillow Book if you are looking for more section ideas.
This is a very open form. Feel free to ignore most essay and poetry rules. We hope you're open to the challenge.
The holidays and the year end are busy times. I'll (hopefully) be traveling at the end of 2021 and (hopefully) returning a few days into 2022. As such, I won't really be looking at poems in this last week of the year or doing much on a computer.
regularly, even on a daily basis, and a way to make that even easier is to commit to just one line a day.
Sure, you can use 
When I was assembling 
