This and That

Sometimes I think constraint writing must be when my mind is drawing a big goose egg when I’m trying to write. Of course this isn’t what is generally considered as constraint writing.  Janet Holmes has an interesting comparison between the twitter of today and the telegraph messaging of the 19th century. Check it out on Humanophone 2.0

Copy of The Philosopher’s Club came in from an Intra-library loan program.  This is an out of print book that I need for later this month. It’s out of print & only was published in hardback used copies are running between $37 - $120 so I was fortunate to be able to come up with it in time. It’s the first book of Kim Addonizio who is an awesome poet.

I must confess that as I’m writing this I’m watching Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D List. She is so outrageously riotous. Ok, I really should be writing.

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Disordering as a positive attribute…

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.”  ~ Arthur Rimbaud

 

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Finishing off July

Oh what a week! I won’t go into the long and the short of my week, but I will say that it seemed more of the former.

Outside of my own immediate personal space the week has truly been something else.

• Governor Sarah Palin took on a new direction as a private citizen with a not so private involuntary collaborative poetry production with none other than William Shatner. Then her Twitter went dark.
• We’ve seen the birther conspiracy theorists raise their voices  in a crescendo of…  well, I think they really speak for themselves.
• There was a beer summit held at the White House.
• Major League baseball teams played their annual musical chairs as the trade deadline came and went.
• July had the highest death toll for US troops in Afghanistan since the war began nearly eight years ago, and the lowest death toll in Iraq since that war began six years ago.

Looking for a weekend of productive writing and less insanity.

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become enveloped in art

Those four words underscore the advice offered by Tara Jepson writing on writing for Examiner.com.  This was an accidental discovery but one I wanted to share with readers because it certainly demonstrates an opportunity for all of us who write.

If I could reduce this article to simplest terms it would be realizing that “art begets art.” Perhaps not a novel idea but sometimes when we are struggling with where to go in our work we often overlook some of the best opportunities for prompts and sources of inspiration… the art of others.   Article Here 

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Shatner to a Beat Poetry on Palin’s Weird Farewell

If you haven’t seen this, check it out. William Shatner cracks me up here.

CLICK HERE

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Thunderstorms and Poetry

 

Reading today from Gary Snyder's Danger on Peaks and Naomi Shihab Nye's Fuel. Two very different writing styles. Both poets however lean heavily on personal experiences.

There’s a thunderstorm moving into the area tonight. I must confess that at times I enjoy just crawling into bed and listening to them unfold from the distant rumbling and slowly move closer until I can feel we are in the eye of the storm. Of course I say that with some light heartedness as being in the mid-west we can have quite violent storms. Still, it’s just one of many fascinating aspects of nature that one sometimes gets sucked into. As a poet you have love the various languages in which nature speaks to us.

Well, I’m off to bed… with book in hand.  Let it rain.

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Bringing prairie to the city & the mind

 

Trip to library today, picked up some poetry books to read, and a novel. I don’t often read fiction these days, but I thought I’d get something light to do recreational reading. Poetry really doesn't quite fit that bill for me though I do often really enjoy reading poetry, but I generally consider it more a act of academic endeavor.

After the library I made a stop at a nearby track in the heart of the city where a natural prairie environment has been recreated.  I got a good exercise walk in then went back around a captured some pictures.

Funny, this make me think of Emily Dickinson writing on the topic of prairie:  “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee. / And revery. / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few.”

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