Tag: Jennifer Mills Kerr

Explore New Poetic Territory ~ Find New Meaning & Connections Using Found Poetry Techniques – A Workshop with Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Explore New Poetic Territory ~ Find New Meaning & Connections Using Found Poetry Techniques – A Workshop with Jennifer Mills Kerr

Break free from your usual poetic groove. Very often and without realizing it, poets slide into familiar language and images. In this workshop, Jennifer will guide you on how to restructure, remix, and recontextualize words from other texts in order to break into new poetic territory. This class is a creative kickstarter for all experience levels.

Bring at least three inspiring texts you’d like to explore to class–whether historical documents, novel passages, your favorite poems, or all of the above. Choosing your source materials prior to workshop will allow you to immediately jump into our writing sessions.

Workshop Leader: Jennifer Mills Kerr
Date: Tuesday, February 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local time.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>>  Register Here <<<

About The Workshop Leader

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/

Two Poems by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Why I Write

Because yesterday, I saw a flock of birds,
circling silver-white, wings a sparkling

platinum ring, a proposal that can’t be denied.
Because I want to thread their music into lines,

or at least try. Because today my mind’s a
cellar, dimly-lit, with piles of torn fabric, and

I need to knit all my unrequited pieces.
Because somehow I still believe words

can answer our distances, our broken
relationships, every cracked window

distorting sight. Why can’t words be fire?
Why can’t they cauterize? And why can’t

I stop the urge to write when our world
declares it a waste of time? And on bad

days, so do I? Because those soaring
birds! They’ll never crash or change

or die, unlike you or I. Because the
page can be our sky.

* 

Last Light of Winter’s Day

Flying crows fade within the oaks’ dark arms,
and the lake, flickering with what light remains,
like tinsel after a holiday.

Standing at my garden gate, I’m awakened to
loss again, how it shines with what’s missing,
with what’s missed.

Loss isn’t inside lab tests. It doesn’t live within
my will or all the doctors’ visits, but sparkles
inside its own darkness–

a coin peeking from wet dirt, water blinking
at the bottom of a well, and the oak branches,
blatantly stripped,

blatantly open, now hold the light of dusk,
a whispering silver, so soft, so brief,
so precious.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Her poems are forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review and SWWIM. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/

ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading

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We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading!

The reading will be held on Sunday, May 4 at 2pm Eastern. 

We expect the event to run approximately 2 hours.

Featured Poets: Jennifer Mills Kerr, Terri Kirby Erickson, Dick Westheimer, Ann E. Michael, Kai Coggin

>>> Tickets available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

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~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California.​ After twenty years writing & publishing fiction, Jennifer has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to supportive editors, teachers, & friends. You can connect with Jennifer & read her work at her website.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Gasmius, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an Interchange Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated nine times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Poets(.)org, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at both SWWIM and Terrain(.)org, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. www.kaicoggin.com

Lost by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Lost
        post-election, 2024

This is where I live now: clutching
a nest of thorns and spent blooms.

Last night, an intruder opened every
window of my home to startling cold.

No wood for fire. No socks or coat.
My closets hold spring dresses, thin

cotton, paltry, owned by another woman.
In this strange country, I search empty

rooms for blankets, matches, candles,
an exile, holding dead flowers. Even

their broken bits I pick up, to clasp
what’s fallen, cradling what’s gone.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. Say hello through her website or connect through her newsletter, Poetry Inspired.

Memorial to Scarcity by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Memorial to Scarcity

I keep a whisky bottle inside the cupboard,
depleted except for a tiny bit, the golden
liquid glimmering, a magical snake
caught within glass. So little left.

This scarcity, a memorial to my mother,
one I visit, tilting the bottle back and forth,
remembering our vacant conversations.
My mother loved whisky, but what I have
would never be enough–she always made
sure to tell me that. The scant amount I keep,
a reminder of her endless thirst, circling
our days, a hissing snake, poisonous,
striking the soft spots until they hardened
into rock.

Now that I’m sober, this creature slithers
safely behind glass–
look how it sheds its skin, a frayed memory,
paper thin. Look how it eats its own tail,
a life holding emptiness, zero, always
the place to begin.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California. She leads virtual creative writing & reading groups for poets. After twenty years publishing fiction, she has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to encouraging friends and editors. Say hello at www.JenniferMillsKerr.com.

Your Name by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Your Name

Heavy on my tongue,
hard candy that doesn’t
melt or sweeten,
the taste of old pennies
in spring water.

Once I shared it with others–
and you sparkled, floating, dust
motes in light.

Many women miscarry,
my doctor says.
Within my silence
a tiny black coffin

Imagining your face–
at one, at ten, at thirteen–
anchors me–
then your features fade,
sand beneath salt waves

Shifting, half seen–
a ghost I create–
to give birth
to you again
and again

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is the founder & lead teacher of A World in a Line, an organization that inspires poets from around the world through virtual workshops. Lit-amorous, she’s on a perpetual quest for the next amazing poem to read, savor, and share. Connect with her at JenniferMillsKerr.com