Surprised

Haiku has never been one of my stronger forms. For all the simplicity of it, I guess I try and complicate things. At any rate I'm never happy with them.

A short while back, my wife e-mailed me a link to a site that was sponsoring a local contest related to creating better awareness to air quality issues. They were looking for haikus to express the cause. You could submit once a week for four weeks. I composed three or four. Sent the one I was happiest with. I intended to enter once a week, but got busy and forgot.

This week I got a call and was told that I had won a bike from a local cycling store that was partnering with the organization for the contest. There were three first place prizes - all bikes - awarded. So I get to go pick out a Giant - Cypress. I would never have guessed my entry would win. Exciting!

A Moment with Our Surroundings

Freezing a moment with words.... We do it with camera and some artists do it with paint on another medium. But in this day and age, we often are not content with the frozen frame version of life. No, it seems that we must be able to roll it by in continuum. Motion pictures in a fast paced world that we live in. Even my cell phone has not just a camera but a video component.

Sometimes I think we miss a lot by not breaking it down into individual frames and looking at the picture as a particle of life, or of some smaller incident rather than allowing it to simply zip by.

I appreciate that aspect of poetry. Capturing a speck of time in the continuum of life. When we do this, I believe we find that life is so much richer for it.

"Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless." ~Julia Cameron

“If we read one another, we won’t kill one another.”

Robert Hirschfield writes about the Palestinian-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye and provides an excellent picture of a person who believes as I have said here in the past, that we find more common ground and understanding by reading each other.

A Few Gems and Lots of Frustration

Supposing I were patient, this post would be about something else. Or it would not be at all.

To write, even in the midst of others is such a solitary act. I am not a person who has to find complete solitude to write, I am able, to a large extent, create it even as I sit in a room with others. I can move into a conversation and come back to myself with relative ease. Still, that return to self is just that, being alone with yourself for those thoughts that develop into structured language.

I find I am quite capable of putting together some wonderful bits and pieces and then the problem of patience, or I should say the lack thereof, seems to take hold of me. It would be easy to dismiss this as having to much motion, commotion, distraction or whatever around me. If it were distraction, then the solution would be to write in a more secluded place to isolate myself, to shut out anything that might constitute a diversion. Since I have written in complete solitude as opposed to my personal one I have describe above, and still experienced this same problem, I must conclude that where I am writing is not the issue.

Sometimes I think I am better off writing something very average in a first draft and then craft it into something better. It is those moments when I have something come together like Emeril Lagasse throwing garlic into the pot and "BAM!" Those moments that are usually followed by great consternation, which leads to frustration, which leads to the difficulty of trying put something equally as good with it.

Knowing full well that first and last lines of poems are almost always the most important, that they need to be strong statements, I can tell you I have countless first and last lines still awaiting middles. I am indeed an impatient poet.

Tag: writing and poetry

Oh Pluto, What Have They Done?

This morning I work up to nine planets and tonight there are eight. In what seems to me to be an all too silly exercise in subjectivity, the International Astronomical Union voted Pluto off the island. Instantly textbooks all over the world are rendered obsolete. Was this actually a grand conspiracy by text book publishers to puff up sales?

Suddenly, memorizing all the planets in grade school has become an exercise in frivolity and I wonder what other acts associated with "so called" learning will I discover were a waste of time?

If all this is sounding cynical, I have succeeded. There is a part of me that wants to strike back at these stiff collared nerds for dissing the mysticism Pluto provided to my own childhood and likely countless others of my generation who grew up one the threshold of possibilities of space exploration.

I know the chilled little sphere called Pluto is really still in the fringes of an ever expanding universe. It hasn’t gone anywhere. And in some lame attempt to appease, it has been given the status of dwarf planet. This of course raises a whole series of new questions. How many dwarf planets are there? What are their names? Which number is Pluto?

Who are these people who too it upon themselves to disorder my universe? They call themselves astronomers but they are merely dwarf astronomers.

Tag: Pluto

Indiana poets will be featured on IndyGo buses

Meg Grey writes about the “Shared Spaces/Shared Voices,” an innovative public art project that pairs public transportation with poetry written by Hoosiers.

Drama Queen

Drama Queen
(just being Ann)


The fanfare isn't you at all.
I've watched the hilarity-
Your social conscience,
A cosmetic powder of absurdity
Enriched with the honey glaze
Of some cable news anchor
Seeking an erection in ratings.

And you play the southern church choirgirl
In suburban soccer-slut-mom 5-3/4"
Above the knee dress and ululate on
In discernible hyperbole
Saying nothing- still,
You exhaust it all, Anglo bitch
In your own little circus world
Pimping for the right to be right,
While unloading your glock.