https://www.libbyfalkjones.com/about daily 0.75 2025-09-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/8c28e6ad-d7f9-4d6f-a2a8-ac325b6a874b/LJ+headshot+22+-+Copy.jpg https://www.libbyfalkjones.com/writer-poet/give-me-words daily 0.75 2023-09-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/384d50d5-0e9e-4a73-b631-7adf3c7dc4b1/LJ+reading+4-23-22.jpg Give Me Words - Poet/Writer Give Me Words I believe in writing. I love words. I love them short and fat, like “body.” I love them sprightly, like “light.” Lightning bug, light-hearted, light as a feather. I love them slow and tender, like “hand.” Hand in glove, handsome, handmade. We need words to know and to express what we know. Let me, with writing, embrace the world. Let me play its music—the gentle tapping of keys, the earlier clanging of typewriter cartridges, the even-earlier scratching of pens on parchment. Let me, with writing, invoke histories. Words let us celebrate. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!,” Lewis Carroll chortles in “Jabberwocky.” And words let us mourn. How do we bear the certain knowledge of our own period, the loss of people and things we love? How do we bear life? We write. If we write to preserve, we also write to bury. Only when we snatch our ideas, experiences, feelings from the buzzing swarm and trap them on the page, only then are we free. Get the words on the page, then you can deal with them. They are not you. But writing is you. Despite the formality of printed letters, writing is a deeply individual act. Writing manifests our essence—if it’s honest writing. When I step though that door, I give it all. But writing replenishes me: I’m not out of words. May we never be out of words. Preparing for My First Big Poetry Reading I could write a poem about speaking poems silently, how they beat in my head when I’m running or driving or walking down the hall, language the center of my heartbeat. I could write a poem about reading poems aloud, practicing in front of the big mirror in my study, seeing my voice breathe out, inscribing words on air. I could write a poem about hearing poems, your poems, my own poems, words dropping like leaves or hail into space, into souls. Writing Before Dawn “I rarely end up where I mean to go, but often I end up where I need to be.” –Detective Dirk Gently, in Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul Words rarely get me where I mean to go, No matter if I start in dark or light. Yet often I end up where I need to be. Ink flows across the page: I think I know My journey’s end, that dawn of rich insight. I rarely get to where I mean to go. My words flood forth to cut a channel deep, Then they meander, bars and swales delight. Often I end up where I need to be. I know I need to float within the flow, No ifs or buts or nors or even mights. Those rarely get me where I mean to go. I’ve hit a rock – oh, this is agony, I’ll never, no, I’ll never get this right! – often I end up where I need to be. There’s power in these words that flow so free: The body knows the way to depth and height. Words rarely get me where I mean to go But often, finally, where I need to be. https://www.libbyfalkjones.com/photographer/artist-statement daily 0.75 2025-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/1878a943-85c8-46f9-aa63-1118b4bc3d68/dv+dunes+LJ+cr+4+2299.jpg https://www.libbyfalkjones.com/selected-publications-awards daily 0.75 2025-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/4d233842-55f6-4244-ba84-11eff6a44c4c/Jones-LibbyFalk-Cover.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/25129870-392c-40ab-8261-42dfc28ab97a/drink_flowers.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/4609c1cc-f7bc-4372-b3f9-21b1a5da8439/yakkityyak.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/25ddf420-2b66-4a92-a7df-c55f3a55cef2/ComingofAgeV02.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/b1f63ae9-a279-4114-9380-924d40372f47/ComingofAgeV01.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/1616640467330-85QMCBGICT7ST9Z2A9B6/Book+Cover+-+Above+the+Eastern+Treetops%2C+Blue.jpg https://www.libbyfalkjones.com/teacher/teaching daily 0.75 2023-10-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605b557600a0cf748a9d5cc0/7e3e1a40-d736-40b8-b5b9-fcd9354fc3ee/crust+gp+adj_115942.jpg Teaching - Teaching “For our next class, I want you to memorize the first eleven lines of this poem.” And she read it aloud, twice, her voice a blessing. The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing… Thus I came to know Galway Kinnell’s “St. Francis and the Sow”—as a fearful forty-year-old, taking my first class in writing poetry, with poet Marilyn Kallet at the University of Tennessee. Despite my doctorate, literary scholarship, and years of teaching, I was a novice at poetry-writing, a bud not yet in flower. I write poems now, and teach others to write them too, along with essays and news stories and arguments. I know writing’s hard. Many students resist it. Even I don’t always love it, don’t always think I’m good at it. But I believe everyone’s a writer. We all use language to make sense of ourselves and our worlds, we all have stories worth telling. My teaching of writing springs from an essential affirmation and belief—an affirmation of the writer’s self and a belief in her potential for growth. Kinnell’s poem embodies my teaching core. The poem reminds me that all my students can learn: my calling is to help them re-discover their essential loveliness. Sometimes this teaching comes through words, as I help a writer see where his language and thought catch fire. Sometimes it comes through “touch”—a wordless openness to the silences that hover at the edges of the page. Always it comes through presence to the self and the work. And Kinnell’s poem reminds me that I must nurture myself so that I too, as teacher, writer, and learner, may continue to flower. From Libby Falk Jones, “Galway Kinnell’s ‘St. Francis and the Sow,’” in Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach. Ed. Sam M. Intrator & Megan Scribner. 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