Genealogy Poetry
After the all the facts have been gathered about your family, something is still missing. The telling details that define your family as unique are often obscured in a welter of dates and names.
Poet Lynna Howard, "PrueHeart the Wanderer," will capture the personality of your ancestors; or bring to life the traits you share with your ancestors.
Image courtesy of Leland Howard.
See www.wildernessbooks.com
A HUSBAND RETURNS
That she knows it's him
before she turns
to the footsteps
still familiar after ten years.
That he changes his cologne
and she still recognizes
the scent of him approaching
in one of her dreams.
That other phone voices
may be mistaken
but never his
even if he begins with breath
or a sigh.
-Lynna Howard, January, 2007
How does it work?
You (the client) hire the poet to create a poem of lasting literary quality for $100 per poem.
(You pay $25 by personal check or money order to begin the work, and $75 when the poem is completed.)
Via email, telephone, and/or snail mail, you provide details about your ancestor's life, including traits or incidents that make them memorable.
The poet creates your poem within 3-4 weeks. A rough draft may be discussed with the client before a finished work is delivered via email or snail mail.
The client owns all rights to the poem, and may publish it at their discretion, with the proviso that the poet must always be credited with each publication; including, but not limited to electronic, oral, and text-based publication. The poet may publish the poem with the permission of the client.
Email or snail mail agreements will be considered to be a contract between client and poet. The poet prefers to select both form and content, but will write to specific forms per the client's request (sonnet, villanelle, etc.).
Email the poet: lynna.howard@mac.com
Phone the poet: 208.357.1917 (USA)
Snail Mail: 441 Hummingbird Lane, Shelley, Idaho, 83274
ALASKAN RECORD COLD, 1972
Night begins too early.
single nights in a row
merge in the distance to one.
All the university world
rings with fluorescent light.
The new ice age begins here
in married student housing,
Fairbanks, stilled heart,
deepest interior of winter.
The baby cries in her sleep
as needling cold pierces
a window above her crib.
Traveling the spiny shafts of nails,
cold penetrates the building
and gathers in frost blooms
on our second floor walls.
I dream and dream of ways
to save the baby. All ways
lead underground and still
we die until
a new dream starts.
A desert of dry ice
tortures the building,
wood cracks explosively,
walls shrink desperately
into themselves.
I bundle and bundle the baby.
She crawls out with extremities
red with cold, chest beating
pink with heat.
— Lynna Howard
Sample Genealogy Poem
Not a Prudent Man
My brother, artist of rocks,
is officially not a prudent man.
His lease on a mine in Idaho's dry land
has been rescinded.
Official High Poobahs say
even a Prudent Man
would make no living
thereon or thereof.
With his artist's eye
for the alchemy of jewelry,
for music hidden in stones,
for the raw makings of sculpture
or garden walls—with all this
he misses the blunt point
of extractive industry.
All that official time wasted on surveys
and tailing piles of paperwork,
I could have saved.
Ask me. I'll tell you, Sir or Madam,
my brother is not a prudent man,
not hollowed out by money,
humanity extracted, talent crumpled
like a folded dollar—
but only my brother, artist of rocks,
a proclaimed dreamer.
by Lynna Howard
Copyright by Lynna Howard, 2005.
Appearance online as a work sample is not
to be construed as publication.
All rights reserved.
Do not copy nor distribute without permission.
Sample Genealogy Poem
Excerpts from:
A Mother/Daughter Poem
I move in for the kill
and the mouse blinks.
Sun glints off the axe,
a god-spear of light.
80 million years since mouse and I
shared a common ancestor—
blink of an eye in time's long line.
There's a resemblance in the face.
...
Yes, I'm the kind of woman
who owns an axe, and
sharpens it too. My daughter,
New Yorker, Manhattanite, and
we assume, civilized,
has to kill bare-handed.
...
We the chosen,
sharing quality-of-mercy genes
honed to sharp edges, forget again
what we look like, what planet we ride,
where our bodies end
and the ones to be killed begin.
by Lynna Howard
Copyright by Lynna Howard, 2005.
Appearance online as a work sample or excerpt is not to be construed as publication. All rights reserved. Do not copy nor distribute without the poet's permission. Contact the poet at lynna.howard@mac.com
Sample Genealogy Poem
Wisdom of the Ages
I want to tell you about my great grandmother.
Every day for fifty years
she would swing her legs out of bed in the morning
and rest her bare feet for a long moment
on an oak floor laid down by her husband.
For at least three months out of the year
there would be a square of sunlight warming
the golden boards near her four-poster.
No bedside rug for Granny,
she met the soul of her dead husband there,
with her soles on the warm planks.
This is how she died:
In her nineties,
she placed her feet with increasing care
in a patch of June sun
that moved almost too quickly for her.
Rising slower and slower,
Granny finally came to a full stop
with her cold feet
in her husband's warm embrace,
and she never moved again.
There are many ways to die,
and before she managed it herself,
Granny saw most of them,
accidental, natural, suicidal,
and acquired.
This is what she had to say about diseases
transmitted sexually:
There really aren't that many facts
that line up straight and last through time.
Don't trade your friends for anything.
Don't look for death because he's too easy to find.
My Dear, share your condoms with your friends.
Granny didn't see
why condoms shouldn't be
reusable if properly cleaned.
by Lynna Howard
Copyright by Lynna Howard, 2005.
Appearance online as a work sample is not
to be construed as publication.
All rights reserved.
Do not copy nor distribute
without the poet's permission.
Legalese: Unless otherwise noted, the text and images that appear on this web site are copyrighted material. Please do not copy or redistribute these materials in any way without prior permission. All rights reserved. Thank you, Lynna Howard. Copyright 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.