I discover what I did all last year in assembling the numbers to send to my friendly local accountant so he can get the IRS to send me money. I did not remember buying a camcorder — really I didn’t. I had forgotten about that trip to Napa Valley and the seventy dollar bottle of wine that seemed like such a good idea at the time. Though I did get a poem out of it.…
My previous post regarding smiting a major computer company has been canceled due to embarrassment. In fact, I’m going to set time limits on my blogging — late night blogs are proving not up to the standard I hope to set of interesting someone besides myself. To atone for a ramble about how hard (or easy) Google made the switch to the new Blogger, I’ll offer a derivation for the word “smite” (a juicy-sounding verb…
The month when my muse is so swathed in mufflers and shawls I can hardly hear a thing he’s saying. When my typing fingers are tapped out, having completed two play scripts in the last year, and the new poetry manuscript lies fallow and unfetching, the first 60 pages of the novel fatten in imagination, but will not let their engine jump-start. When each new poem seems like a spring thaw, only to ice over…
Merry Christmas and Happy Solstice — welcoming the return of light. Here’s something from Dan Ladinsky’s The Gift, a Hafiz poem that to me is the spirit of this season: WeAre notIn pursuit of formalitiesOr fake religiousLaws, For through the stairway of existenceWe have come to God’sDoor. We arePeople who need to love, becauseLove is the soul’s life, Love is simply creation’s greatest joy. ThroughThe stairway of existence,O, through the stairway of existence, Hafiz HaveYou…
It seems the only things that get written around here from now till 1-1-07 might be cards, checks and gift tags. Where’s time for a poem in all this? And even if time is found, where’s inspiration in a week of rain, jostling for parking spaces, gridlock and ineradicable price tags? The only solution at this season is to focus on giving — not giving things so much as giving time, energy and cheer —…
I have a young friend whose article today in the Contra Costa Times cites his desire to write a great novel. He participated in the National Novel Writing Month experiment — first invented in the SF Bay Area and now a national literary celebration of enormous proportions. He investigated (like a good journalist) how people do this, how the movement began, and he participated, and found that he wasn’t up to writing 1,666 words a…
Happy Thanksgiving! Be sure to baste the turkey. When you’ve finished eating, take a nice walk for the view. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.
Did you know America had one? I didn’t until this week, and had never heard of Jack Prelutsky. Poetry Foundation did a wonderful thing for the state of American poetry when this year they named Prelutsky our first Children’s Poet Laureate. Teachers, take note and google his name to find lots of resources for teaching poetry to children. We need to create a new generation growing up with the love of the word. Visit https://racheldacus.net…
Apparently, there’s quite a list. Moon, shard (go figure), love, heart, mother, father, grandmother, cat, dog … well, you get the idea. Basically, you’ll be safe if you eschew (now that’s a word you can feel free to use in a poem, along with switchblade) anything with a positive, upbeahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gift connotation. Positive, upbeat — add those to the list of banned poetry words. And who are these poetry police, you may ask? Well, Frank Zappa…
So much is written about writing craft — I have a shelf full of books on poetics and two shelves full on the craft of prose (prosetics?) — yet very little is written about the things on which we write. I don’t mean keyboards or papers but the actual surfaces, which increasingly come to my attention as they distract me from my craft or art. For years I labored day and night at a desk…