Penny J. Johnson's Blog, page 4

Books of the Month: May 2-June 5 2021

Better late than never posting about my reading from last month. There is a little bit of everything in this list. Happy Reading! Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers: Five Stars I started reading this book after watching Saving Mr. Banks. I recommend reading the original series and watching this […]

Knit

Join me each Wednesday for this virtual reading experience as I read a selection from Redefined: A Year of Poetry. By the end of the year, I will have read 52 of the 366 poems contained in this collection. I encourage you to subscribe to this blog in order to […]

Kitsch

Join me each Wednesday for this virtual reading experience as I read a selection from Redefined: A Year of Poetry. By the end of the year, I will have read 52 of the 366 poems contained in this collection. I encourage you to subscribe to this blog in order to […]

Research Weeks

For the next two weeks, I will be researching for my weekly posts about poets, poems, quotations, poetic forms, and practice of poetic themes. My Redefined: A Virtual Reading Experience will continue to be posted on Wednesdays. I will post my Books of the Month on the first Saturday in […]

Practicing Poetic Themes: For the Love of Nature with Personal Perspective

I had a difficult time choosing a poem for this week because, to be honest, sonnets are not a go-to form for me. Yet, what often happens for me when I am reading about poets and their works is that I begin to imitate them, which is often what practicing […]

Poetic Form: Sonnet

Most high school English courses include an introduction to Shakespeare and his voluminous collection of sonnets. But, Shakespeare was not the only poet to hone his skills at waxing poetic to his Muse in iambic pentameter for fourteen lines of three quatrains and a couplet. In fact before Shakespeare, Petrarch […]

Juvenilia

Join me each Wednesday for this virtual reading experience as I read a selection from Redefined: A Year of Poetry. By the end of the year, I will have read 52 of the 366 poems contained in this collection. I encourage you to subscribe to this blog in order to […]

Poem of the Week: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig”

Before I delve in “First Fig” included in Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles—“a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism”–I want to approach this poem from the common ground of poet to poet and poem to poem. Most poets at […]

Poet of the Week: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Before studying Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life and work, I knew little about her except for her most famous poem. I still think I have much to learn about one of America’s influential women poets of the twentieth century. In truth, I find it difficult to separate her life from […]

Practicing Poetic Themes: Poetry

Sometimes the best theme to write about is the thing we are doing. Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” is one of her most intriguing poems for its original premise and its revision scale . As poets, we always create, but the writing process often changes. Sometimes we love poetry. Sometimes we truly […]