Journal bits for the past week

a few random items from my journal this week...

Feb 14 - At times like this Alice will sit at a small table/pouring Earl Grey as we sip from miniatures/and talk about what, I never recall.

Feb 15th -In talking with Meghan yesterday I can tell she is getting excited about my upcoming visit.

Feb 16 - Yesterdays rewrite of An American Whim  came after receiving critical comments (that I sought) from PB and AD. AD gave me the most critical (technical) view while PB spoke to things she liked about it. 

Books are scissor stacked/in piles, on end tables,/desktop, the thick of carpet/on the floor next to the easy chair

Feb 17- Where has this month gone to? Already a shortened month it appears to work against the benchmarks I've arbitrarily set...

Feb 18 - MR emails me, "you of all people have new stuff and old stuff." Feel like I've been busted.

The pretext for the afternoon / was as one sided as the face /of Mount Rushmore but not near/as stark....

It was not with the exchange/of currency or anything so mercantile/

Feb 19 - was so totally whipped out from work today...

Technorati Tags: journal bits,writing,life as a poet

 

Blue Moon Over Kansas City

A poet friend the other day was giving me feedback on one of my poetry drafts and in response to something I had written said, "You should read Wallace Stevens if you haven't lately. The crazy things that guy does with repetition and refrains." So, I went looking for a Wallace Stevens poem and read The Emperor of Ice-Cream which I found enjoyable. I then moved away from the poem and began to type. Keep in mind I often begin drafts in longhand. There were just two words that came to my mind and they were, "The pretext" and nothing more. Where they came from I couldn't say, but after typing them from the keyboard with just a momentary pause I began to type again and in relatively short order, maybe 20 minutes at the most I had a draft that I stopped working on. After moving away from the draft for some time, I went back and quite frankly felt that I could do nothing more to it. Not by addition or subtraction other than a change of title.

The number of times I've written something on the spot like this and could not improve on it are like never.  There is one occasion in which I came close to this, but still made some editing changes. It's not an occurrence that one has happen very often, if ever.

I may well wake in the morning and find room for improvement, but I don't expect it will likely change much. That's how good I feel about it. Better than some pieces I've worked on over a span of more than a year. It's moments like this that makes all the other eternal rewrites seem worth enduring through.

Thanks Amy for the advise. How the Emperor of Ice-Cream led me to the pretext and all that followed to write what I now call The Face of Mount Rushmore, I'll never figure out. They are nothing alike, but I'm sure that one lead to the other.

Technorati Tags: poetry,Wallace Stevens,The Emperor of Ice Cream,A poet's life,writing

I've Been Bad

Instead of writing tonight I watched three rerun episodes of Boston Legal. Does that make me a bad poet? I'm being rhetorical here, a response is not required.

Technorati Tags: a poet's life

Annie Finch's workshop on love poetry

Annie Finch has authored four books of poetry, Eve, Calendars, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, and the forthcoming Among the Goddesses. She is a Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine and Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Click here for her workshop on love poetry

Technorati Tags: Annie Finch,workshop,love poetry

Likes and Dislikes

I've been spending a lot of time writing this weekend and as words have flown in and out of my my head I've been naming them good words and bad words. Of course the good and bad designations are nothing more then reflections of my personal likes and dislikes.So tonight I thought I'd list a few words that tickle my fancy and some that I simply do not care for.  In some instances it's that sound of the words that I like or dislike. In other, I'm fascinated by some aspect of the word, its meaning, etymology, etc. So without further ado, I give you some of my likes and dislikes from our language.

Likes	Dislikes
elliptical	stutter
exude	heir
puce	vomit
ubiquitous	mayonnaise
pathogen	infomercial
explicit	Raspberry
irascible	irksome
prevaricate	bile
coetaneous	foil
awe	sideburn
toasty	lash
vulnerable	dwarf
arbitrary	mumble
immune	pungent
crumpet	snub
oscillate	squeal
Formica	liquefy
capsulate	winch

 

Technorati Tags: words I like,words I dislike

Happy Valentines Day to All

I got an early start on Valentines day by taking my wife to the Melting Pot on Thursday evening. She hates to fight the crowds so we beat them.

It was a lovely dinner and I especially enjoyed the Traditional Fondue.  Swiss is among my favorite cheese.

Of course the dessert we had the Yen and Yang Fondue which was a blend of dark chocolate and white chocolate for dipping the various dessert and fruit items. While this was very good, it was quite rich and really a bit much. I enjoyed the dinner fondue the most.

The atmosphere was low lighting and we were seated nicely with a minimum of distraction. I'd do it again anytime!

Oh, as if we were chocolate deprived, last night on the way home from work  Cathy stopped at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory for gourmet Chocolate Apples. Mine was Tigers Butter... yum!

Technorati Tags: Valentines Day

This is entirely too good not to comment on. The BBC reports a competition is underway to find poetry which will feature in the stalls of public toilets of Shetland. Six poems of 12 lines or less will be featured for three months and the replaced by a next set of six.

Poetry in the loo; what a way to brighten ones day. Leave it to the Scots to bring a little culture to the toilet. Thumbs up!