Recomended - 4 for Sunday

It's Sunday and I've realized that I have not been posting nearly as often as I used to. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you really don't have anything interesting to say, or you do but haven't the time to get it said right. It's often been one or the other. I have however seen a lot of interesting stuff this week that I thought I'd share case you may have missed any of it.

Martha Silano at Blue Positive posted her Ten Poetry Rules and while there is a slice of humor in them there seems to me to be a heap of wisdom in there too. Martha is the author of The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and one of my favorite reads this year.

Then there is Jeannine Hall Gailey the Poet Laureate of Redmond, WA who writes Feeling Discouraged about Poetryworld?  First let me say that I like hearing a Poet Laureate talk about discouragement and poetry together. It's comforting to know that even a laureate can feel the pain of discouragement. I also like that she used the word poetryworld as I do feel like I live in that world.
Jeannine is the author of several books the latest of which is Unexplained Feavors which came out this spring and while it's on my list to read I have read earlier books and enjoyed her work.

In interesting read I found this week was Wolf Girl by Nic Sebastain. I love the second stanza.

And finally, a poem by the late Denise Levertov titled The Secret. What I lovr about this poem is the amount of depth she achieves in relatively simple verse.

If you missed any of this, not you have no excuse not the check it out. 

Bouncing Thoughts

Just finished mowing the front lawn. Came in with a diet coke - sweating and here I sit at my laptop and realizing it's just past 1PM I suddenly feel a large portion of my weekend  has slipped by with nothing to show for it (except a challenge to the people on the north and south side of us to take their lawn down a notch.

I've read several things this week (mostly on blogs) that have caused me food for thought.  Here are some of the items bouncing off my cerebral walls.

1. The first has nothing to do with blogs or reading...I simply  missed confessing on Confession Tuesday. The fact is my past week has been busy at work and at  home and I really had nothing exciting to say except I was out of energy and time.  Too much going on and it's still out there like a stationary front on the weather man's map. It's just hanging over the city all sultry. But enough of that because this is one super ball I want to find it's way outside my scull.

2. There is a long standing story that my writing poetry is an attempt to find a loophole in mortality.  So when I read in Book of Kells this week about poet Patrick Lane at the Skagit Poetry Festival how after a poet died the wife of the poet had the family and friends of her husband memorize each 5 poems of his. In this way, each of them had five of his poems alive within them and they would be able to share them with others. By doing this she was keeping her husband and his work alive in the world. So I'm thinking this immortality thing for poets can work.... kind of.

 3. Reading an earlier blog post by Martha Salino I marveled at the description of the writing relationship with Heather McHugh during an independent study. Sure, from what I've read of Heather and her work I've been exposed to this was the kind of thing any serious writer would likely be ga-ga over. Still, what this brought to my mind was not specifically anything about Martha and Heather but the value of interaction of writers in general. I've often thought for instance of writers I'd love to even just have an hour lunch with to talk poetry in general. Their writing processes or motivations. Where do they feed their creative hungers? Things they try never to do when they write. I think about who I'd tag for such an occasion - it's all fantasy - but after all, poets are good at dreaming of the far fetched. I always enjoy reading the letters of poets because there often is the more personal and revealing side of the artist that comes through.

I've read several poems online this week that have me thinking about various different topics.  Strife in third world countries, couple of poems about rather mundane items and last but not least, travel. These things have been rolling through my thought process because I like to thing about poems that I read that truly seem to bring fresh approaches to writing. For example, I've thought a lot about in writing collections of themed poems, how do you talk about one or two things for say 35 poems and keep your reader wanting to read the next poem? How do you keep it fresh... moving and different?