Saturday Night

A little writing today. Read quite a few poems. Sketched something tonight. Yes, as in drawing. I amused myself.

Local Poetry Sceen

The Writers Place here in Kansas City has a new director - Anne Calvert Bettis. Congratulations Anne on your new position.

A few upcoming events:

Sunday April 20th - Poets at Large - featuring a panel of experts discussing the Beat writers and their influence on later writers. Starts @ 2:00p.m. followed by an open mic @5:00p.m. Anyone can sign up to read a poem by a Beat poet or a poem inspired by a Beat writer.

Monday April 28th 8:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. is the Writers Place Open Mic hosted by Sharon Eiker from

Executions Around the World

Amnesty International announced the annual totals for executions by country in 2007 yesterday. These figures in many instances are estimates and actual numbers are likely higher. A link to the report and specifics about the data can be found here.

The Top Five Countries are:

• China 470+
• Iran 317+
• Saudi Arabia 143+
• Pakistan 135+
• USA 45

It should be noted that the number of U.S. executions last year had been slowed by pending court action before the U.S. Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the use specifically of a type of lethal injection used by many states. The majority opinion of the court ruled today in favor of this type of execution which will likely put many executions on a fast track in the U.S.

China will be the focus of a lot of attention with respect to crackdown on dissidents in China and Tibet. China is known for harsh sentences where protests are concerned. The upcoming Olympics has placed China under a spotlight and it appears that China is tightening the flow of news in and out of the country.

In many instances the issue with capital punishment is not limited to the moral question of state ordered executions, but in many cases it goes as well to the fairness of their system of justice since there is no means of correcting errors.

Journal Snippets

I've not posted many snippets from my journal lately, and I suppose that can be attributed to the fact that you've seen a lot of my drafts for NaPoWriNo. I thought I'd see what I can pull out that has not already been posted.

• Towering above my earliest memories of the city/ grand beacon and vertical point of reference / scraping the sky / occasionally the top swallowed by clouds
• Disfigured dairy / yellow glacier / sliding across the plate / victim of global warming / localized
• A reconfigured Rene Zellwelger / thumped in the head / and some Carly Simon concussion of a song / splitting it apart / there's nothing "so vain" going on here.

New Math?

I've read from time to time people making comparisons between poetry and mathematics, which on the surface seems so totally unlikely. To me personally, I've never been proficient in math with anything beyond the basics and don't find it interesting at all. So naturally, such comparisons don't seem to fit for me. In addition, I see math as very static, poetry as any art, seems to defy such description. So when I come across this quote, I am especially amused: The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Fell off the NaPoWriMo Wagon

I did it.... I'm confessing and hopping to climb back on. My daughter and her new fiance flew in to town Thursday evening and just left to go back to Arizona this afternoon. It was our first time meeting Derek. Of course if Meghan had been alone it too would have been distracting from poetry. I'm not complaining. I'm glad we had the time with them. I'm just saying that a poem draft a day was not going to survive this event.

So there, I'm bad. I've failed. And now I've gotten it off my chest. Tomorrow is a new day and I'm ready to get going again.

Day 10: My NaPoWriMo blog released from the grips of bloger at last

A spiked presence—

Before my eyes
A star with supplementary credentials
Far more prickly a presence

A perverse way of making points
And overload of opinion
Not at all shy of expression

The tentacles of the nucleus
Of radiant light
Obliquely insane