Reading Barbara Crooker’s new book and feeling the urge to pull poetry back to sanity. Too much language-bending, cutesy difficult writing out there now. It’s refreshing to read poetry with music and purpose that doesn’t strain your analytical abilities, but does deepen your feeling of connection to life. Life is difficult enough — why do poets so often want to make poetry another difficult layer? Not that I don’t like linguistic effect and here and…
I’m working on a poem with long lines and looking at the techniques Whitman used to give them music and structure. He used neither rhyme nor meter to make them work. In the first edition of Leaves of Grass the pages were wide enough to accommodate them. In later editions, designed to fit into a pocket for portability, Whitman changed the page size but not the line breaks. Long lines give an expansive, rambling feeling…
Maybe it’s because I’ve skipped lunch, or after reading a really trendy menu I picked up in the S.F. Ferry Building foor market, but: Food Poetry Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.
I just had a major brainstorm. I was reading American Primitive, Mary Oliver’s early poetry book, and thinking about how these poems differed from her more recent work. I noticed that this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was different from her later collections. Apparently, you can reach the peak of success and still make radical redirections in your writing. It occurred to me (duh! am I the last poet on the planet to get…
Maybe it’s because I have a friend who is slipping away that life seems to tenuous. Whatever the reason, I find myself preoccupied with the shuttle Discovery and getting it back to earth safely. I mean, all those bitty pieces of fabric they’re obsessing over have me worried. The fact that they scrubbed the scheduled landing yesterday is unnerving. The people in charge seem unnerved, despite their jaunty Discovery page at NASA’s web site. That’s…
What does it mean when you’re blogging instead of sleeping? Is this the new form of dreaming? Apparently I’m not alone. Over at Culturecat, they’re having paranoid blog dreams. I’ve run across blog dream journals, an interesting concept. (Why would anyone but me and my therapy group be interested in my dreams?) Also blogs about dream jobs, dream thises and thats, in the sense of fantasies, and of course the erotic dream blogs, which I…
I guess what I wonder about is the idea of sending a manned mission to Mars. This seems to me an insanely unbalanced risk-reward equation. But looking at NASA’s pictures of today’s spacewalk to repair the shuttle gives me shivers of awe. I wonder what the astronaut who did this would say about whether the risk was worth the reward. Space is unimportant from one perspective, namely that of the heart. But today’s mind wants…
And he’s probably writing a poem about it. In his garden. Here’s a lovely picture of my favorite Poet Laureate at the podium. I guess the fact that it’s his 100th birthday is why The Writer’s Almanac posted that lovely Kunitz poem today: Touch Me Summer is late, my heart.Words plucked out of the airsome forty years agowhen I was wild with loveand torn almost in twoscatter like leaves this nightof whistling wind and rain.It…
Discovery docks at the space station but it’s not all razmatazz. It’s a new era of self-honesty in space. Further shuttle flights have been grounded until they figure out the foam debris problem, even admitting publicly that it could be a lethal problem. We watch this shuttle flight with a heightened suspense and wonder — part of the wonder being the question, is this level of exploration worth the risk? My father, the former rocket…
The Vacationed Mind returns to the blogosphere with new thoughts on blogging. Less is more kind of thoughts. I spent an entire week away from: telephone, cell phone, computer, calendar, job, house and creative projects. I had a blank notebook and a couple of pens. I wrote notes on my travels that were terse and outlined. Ideas for poems came and I relied on my memory to store them for later. We deluge ourselves with…