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.

Poetic Risk

This whole business of art and risk that I mentioned in my post yesterday came about as a result of listening to an NPR broadcast in which a person was talking about a architect with a particular flair for bold artistic design. The person related how his work involved great risk taking and asked if, "after all isn't that what art is about, being able to take risks?"

The suggestion of artists being able to take risks with their work was not totally new to me. Still, it is not something that I dwelled upon and really didn't extent my thoughts so far as my own poetry.

In comment to my post yesterday, Roxx talked about the risk involved in submitting your work. And while I too thought about this, I have sent out enough material and read enough of my work in public that I am for the most part not particularly wary of such exposure any longer. At least not to the point of dwelling on it with dread or fear of rejection. I know this is a hurdle most all of us have to get over at some point and I don't want to minimize what Roxx has said, but I am thinking more about the risk in the act of creating art itself. Forget submitting it anywhere for a moment and think about writing in a journal a poem or poems. Where is the risk that you are taking, or are you?

It is a challenge to cycle through ideas sometime and write about things that have been touched upon a million times before by others. You have to be different in your approach. Perhaps this has something to do with the advent of post modern poetry and many gravitating away from structured forms and or creating new ones themselves.

Stepping outside the box and doing something different or applying yourself diligently to a form or subject matter that has historically been uneasy for you... these are risks. The first erasure poems involved risk. The first Hay(na)ku poems were risks... and so on. If you are putting something together that you believe in, but know is different and challenges the norm, and may or may not be widely accepted, than you have risk.

So now, I need take a good hard look at myself and ask just how often am that I allowing myself to take risks with my writing?

tag: poetry and writing