Drinking Sangria in the Garden, Collaboratively

Such wonderful summer party fun to have Dear Booze's Cocktales publish my sonnet "Drinking Sangria in the Garden." Dear Booze has published several of my pieces in the past, too, and it's delightful to be back on these happy pages!

https://dearbooze.com/cocktales/f/drinking-sangria-in-the-garden

A bit more about the poem though -- it didn't just pop out of my sangria-infused imagination. I have a wonderful Monday Poetry Collaborators project going with poets Elizabeth Beck and Gail Schulte, both former VCFA classmates. We've undertaken all kinds of invigorating collaborative writing projects, like writing golden shovels on each other's work, or doing erasure poems of the same dictionary pages.

Our present project is writing "container poems" -- Gail's are "On the Couch", Elizabeth's are "In My Next Life" and mine are "In the Garden." We then incorporate words and phrases from each other’s container poems into our own, creating an organic, inter-related body of works that talk to one another and wander back and forth from container to container -- kinda like pouring drinks from a cocktail shaker. This poem pulled a set of words -- sangria, unkempt, housecoat, magenta -- out of poems by Gail and Elizabeth, and turned them into a lovely wine punch on ice.

Want to hear more about collaborative poetry? For my New England poetry peeps, save the date of October 4th 2025 for a day of collaborative poetry in West Brattleboro, Vermont from the New England Poetry Club and the Poetry Society of Vermont -- free to members of either organization, and well worth the membership fee so join up now! Registration coming here soon: https://poetrysocietyofvermont.org/event/collaboration-the-nepc-and-psov-unite/