We are excited to share the fruits of our invitation to write an ode to ordinary things. Earlier this year, in recognition of National Poetry Month and our commitment to living gratefully, we invited you, our community, to try your hand at writing an ode to an ordinary thing.
A wild celebration of every imaginable thing arrived in our inbox — especially food — oh, how we love our food!
We were delighted with what came in. A wild celebration of every imaginable thing arrived in our inbox — especially food — oh, how we love our food! There were love letters to onions, licorice, slippers, weeds and starlings; adoring odes to dandelions, lemons, crickets and streetlights; even vultures and maggots were honored. What fun we had immersing ourselves in your poetry and passions!
To download as a PDF, please click on image above.
Our intention was to create a short eBook and to also publish some of the odes on our website. In order to refine the collection for the book, we called together a small group of authors, editors, and poets — all lovers of poetry. After much thoughtful consideration, along with both playful and serious discussion, the Grateful Ode Appreciation Team (GOAT) — in a process where the poets remained anonymous — selected the twelve odes you will find in this publication (available for download as a PDF, or to read in your favorite eBook reader). Each of the poems in the book can also be found on our website.
In addition, we will be posting a handful of other poems which delighted us. At present, you can “marvel at the scented beauty” of lemons in Ode to Lemons. We will continue to add to the collection in the coming months.
We’d like to offer our warmest gratitude to those of you who submitted an ode for consideration and we regret that, due to the volume of submissions, we were unable to connect with each of you individually. Your poems have truly been a gift to us. We hope that they were as uplifting to create as they were for us to savor.
We offer our heartfelt gratitude to members of the Grateful Ode Appreciation Team (GOAT) — Christi Cox, Jeff Cox, Jack Hopper and Nina Miller — for generously sharing their experience, discernment, humor and kindness. You can learn more about the team on the acknowledgements page of the book. We hope that these odes to ordinary things enchant you, but, perhaps most importantly, we hope that they open your eyes, as ours have been opened, to the myriad wonders that surround us, waiting to be seen and celebrated.
Please enjoy and share these Odes to Ordinary Things!
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To read in your favorite eBook reader click here.
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Thank you to all who contributed to this ebook. It’s just the thing to get those gratefulness juices flowing as we tend to ignore the everyday blessings. And this is such fun too!
I will share since you ask. Looks great! Go GOAT!