One Page Poetry Circle Archive

Welcome to the Virtual One Page Poetry Circle!

Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Theme: Poetry and Shoes

Find a poem! Send a poem by email!

We're back for the fourteenth spring season of the One Page Poetry Circle where people examine the works of established poets. While there is no instructor and this is not a workshop for personal writing, once a month OPPC gives everyone a place to become teachers and learners to explore the form, content, language and meaning of poetry. Since the circle began, participants have selected and discussed 1353 poems and have read countless others in pursuit of poetry that speaks to them.

This spring we will gather virtually, by email. We ask you to send us the poems you have selected on the subject of Poetry and Shoes, with a comment on why you chose them. We'll share the poems with you through our blog and by email.

Our theme for March is Shoes. Shoes make vivid images in our memories, from Cinderella's glass slipper to Dorothy's ruby slippers to the mound of shoes at Auschwitz. Often shoes are used as a synecdoche, a literary personification that signals a whole human, as in this poem by Charles Bukowski:

• when you’re young
• a pair of
• female
• high-heeled shoes
• just sitting
• alone
• in the closet
• can fire your bones;
• when you’re old
• it’s just
• a pair of shoes
• without
• anybody
• in them
• and
• just as
• well.

For a more provocative look at high-heels, Mary Karr's "Beauty and the Shoe Sluts" bares the role of women's shoes in femininity, beauty, style, and suffering. The poem ends:

• After they've chased down
• the fleeing god, fucked him dead, sucked
• all flesh from his bones, dawn spills light

• on their blood-sticky mouths,
• and it's like every party you ever stayed
• too late at. In chorus they sing and grieve:

• "Will they come to me ever again,
• the long, long dances?"
• And Mother holding a black-patent ankle strap

• like a shackle on a spike heel
• it must've been teetering hell to wear glances
• sidewise from her cloudy hazel eyes and says, "No,

• praise God and menopause, they won't."

Whether a poem makes you feel like slipping off your shoes or taking one off and throwing it, choose a poem that has meaning to you. Then email it to one of us by March 8th, with a brief comment of why you chose it.

Can't locate a poem you want to send on the subject of shoes? Check out Poetry Foundation or poets.org.

In the meantime, please blog with us at onepagepoetrycircle.wordpress.com.

Spring 2022 Schedule
March 8: Shoes
April 12: Slant Rhymes
May 10: Clouds

Abigail Burnham Bloom, abigailburnhambloom@gmail.com
AnnaLee Wilson, annalee@kaeserwilson.com