Tamara J. Madison

Welcome to TamTalk!!!

TamTalk!!! is my personal blog where I would also love to hear back from you!  I will post about once a month or as often as I can. 

I am a writer/poet/performer who believes that the arts, creative writing, and poetry are not just for a select group of people but for everyone.   A poem, a song, a painting, a performance can lift your spirits, teach a lesson, launch cupid’s arrow, and even trigger a breakthrough!  It can make those tough and uncomfortable stages of growth a bit…

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow writer who was extremely frustrated with her work.  I have been there many times as a writer and have abandoned my work for days, weeks, even months at a time.  I have also been on the other side and watched fellow artists and even my students struggle with what to create.  Often in their frustration, their works-in-progress are discarded and their motivation dies.

Since many are pondering what they want to manifest for this new year of 2020, I…

     I gotta new ‘do, looking pretty cute these days, smelling myself as some of my elders used to say.  I am hopping out of bed with more energy, playing in my closet, thumbing through textures and colors to create my regalia for the day. It may sound like a simple thing.  Some folk feel that way most of the time, but for me, it had been a while.

     I had locks in my hair for 14 years. I loved them, and they loved me back.  Twice they grew to be more than two feet long and gracefully swept my…

Dear Ms. Oprah Winfrey,

     Happy Sunday to you from sunny Orlando, Florida! I just read where you featured United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo on Super Soul Sunday.  I look forward to seeing it.  I am glad and very excited to hear that you do, indeed, read and hopefully love poetry!  How exciting for us both!

     Well, Ms. Winfrey, I have been wanting to meet you for quite some time.  I have admired and watched your work for many years. The last time I saw you was at Hillside church in Atlanta…

     “Gratitude” has become a popular catch phrase these days for social media posts, journal entries, new age living, life coaching, and even for marketing campaigns. It’s catchy, cute, perhaps even profitable in some cases. But saying “thank you” and showing momentary appreciation is just the very beginning of the Gratitude Journey.  Gratitude is much more than words, smiles, and pleasantries. 

When we are truly grateful:

• We nurture the energy. This helps to prolong the energy. We can it, place it…

     I needed an affordable getaway! I was looking for something that was not a part of my family or work roles and responsibilities.  Yes, I wanted some productive “me time.”  I also wanted to challenge myself to read more for my own pleasure and personal work as a creative writer rather than simply reading material exclusively for the college where I teach.  BEHOLD and praise be, the book club! 

     I had the fortune of stumbling upon a book club at a restaurant that includes a gourmet meal and book…

     As excited as I was when I bought it, I had to struggle to read this book the color of a period napkin with rope and knots on the cover and bold white lettering, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING by DaMaris B. Hill, like I didn’t already know being born into a black/brown woman-body, bleeding the moon wasn’t “dangerous.”  I had to make sure that I read this book at the right time when I could rightfully process it.  Roxane Gay claims ,“This book is a reckoning,” so I reckoned that I needed to be…

Brown sugar and cayenne,

Intertwined harmonies of violin and viola,

Winding willow and rooted oak,

Neck jerk, sassy smirk, and mile-wide smiles,

Melodic soul, metaphorical role,

Finger pop, hand pat, hip bump and juicy roll...

       The party may have started before we arrived, but we danced our way in and raised the roof.

*

     School brought us together to “flex and tech,” but poetry found and bound us, liquid language, simultaneous heartbeat, morning, noon, and night.

(one of our first…

I am posting this as a special request from one of my students.  Thank you, Andrea, for asking me.

The following is a poem that I use in my poetry classes to introduce poetry as storytelling.  It is one of my favorite pieces to perform.  The place is real, the persons are real, and yes, this really did happen. 

If you enjoy the poem, please feel free to leave a response on the blog.  I would love to hear from you!

he was poised on a street corner,

…

     I remember the red and black Atlantic Record’s label and the forty fives that my parents kept in the floor model stereo.  I remember putting on a stack of records and hearing something in this voice that I just had to have.  I remember seeing Ms. Franklin on television and thinking that there was something about her that I just had to have or better yet that I had to be.

     I remember listening to my parent’s stack of 45’s filled with her music.  I memorized the words to her songs effortlessly…