The Writing Path Blog

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Help Is Happening

Just in case you’re glued to CNN, as I’ve been, and suffering from Hurricane report overload/meltdown, read this account of large numbers of people getting real help. Yes, it’s the Red Cross, our oldest relief organization. At the bottom of the first link is a link for online donations, if you want to do something quick to make a big difference. Isn’t it good to know some things aren’t broken and don’t have to be…

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Books & Friends – A Memory

I lost a friend to lung cancer a couple weeks ago. She was a friend I “walk-talked” with on a weekly basis, an irrepressibly charming travel agent who was an avid reader as well as raconteur. Can you imagine a more entertaining walking companion? She lived with the diagnosis for six years, participating in support groups to help others adjust to their diagnoses. Her endurance surely set some kind of record, but I think her…

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Poets in hurricane country

If anyone is seeking to get in touch with poets in the hurricane area, there’s a blog site keeping track of inquiries and responses. I just saw several names of people I know on the list. This is a wonderful service right now, helping to connect people who have lost touch. One million displaced people was a number I heard on the news recently. It just boggles the mind. Here’s another useful blog related to…

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Radiance

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…

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Thinking about Walt Whitman and really long lines of verse

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…

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A Poet’s Development

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…

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Shuttle’s safe return

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…

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blogdreaming

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…

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