Barbara Schweitzer, the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnet (Little Pear Press), has twice been the recipient of Merit Fellowships from the RI State Council on the Arts for poetry. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and on WRNI’s “This I Believe” program as well as in many literary journals and anthologies. Her plays have been staged in RI, MA, and ME. Her play Sub Zero is published in RI Writer’s Circle Anthology.
November 2019 update: A revisit to the origins of the Origami Poems Project on the anniversary of our founding in 2009. This free poetry 'project' began with a prompt given to a group of RI poets by Barbara Schweizer for several short poems. The poems were configured into a little chapbook. After this modest, micro-beginning came the creation and sharing of small chapbooks. The Origami Poems Project began with the nudging of Barbara Schweizer, Lynnie Gobeille and Jan Keough - the 'Origami Three' - along with the enthusiasm from other RI poets.
(Photo from 8/20/2009 article written for The Independent by Doug Norris.)
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► Barbara's microchaps & selected poems are available below.
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Origami Microchap |
Selected Poem(s) |
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Click on above title to download PDF microchap
Cover Photo: Carla Cesario • |
Heart-Shaped Rocks Nature loves to break
down and remake edges rounding granite faces, curving shores, scalloping brittle sand and ice; ledges bow to ocean urges, fold themselves over in supplicant repose, sculpt caves of soft mouths to swallow the high seas. Eyes blink in direct sunlight – even your baby blues. Nothing craves a straight line. Even our gritty words circle in the zephyred air and carve curlicues around our feud. • Barbara Schweitzer © 2009
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Click on above title to download PDF microchap
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Playing Hearts We kids cut our teeth on diamonds, our hearts
on spades and clubs. Our first houses weren’t made with brick or straw but with a deck of cards. Jokers were wild, aces were high, we played for high stakes, as if our lives were on the line, and of course they were each time we shuffled the fifty two chances to fail or be blind to each other’s feelings or needs, to muffle kindness or care, to unlove each other, and we did it so well, we went on to higher feats like that, each with our own misnomer and sense of ourselves as queen, king, or joker, depending entirely on the luck of the draw, when we were born, and the jungle’s heartless law. •
Barbara Schweitzer © 2009
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Click on above title to download PDF microchap
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A Sonnet On Why I Write Sonnets One writes a sonnet in fifteen minutes
to uncover what one might have in mind,
not necessarily to beat Guinness
Book of World Records, but rather to mine
unknown fields of pleasure buried in silt
of everydayness one lives with without thought
to its harmful effect. Black lung’s sad ilk,
cachectic thinking, ruins minds, is that not
true? A sonnet addressed to you may leave
one open to complaint. Someone might say
rhyming words with “you” is downright lazy!
Stu, blew, few, through, two, queues are easy prey.
No matter. It’s great fishing in a mind,
one’s own babbling brook bobbing fourteen lines.
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Barbara Schweitzer © 2009
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