Denise Duhamel - No Home Wrecker

Denise Duhamel is a poet whose wit and craftiness caught my attention a long time ago. Ooops, mayby it was not that long ago. Or heck maybe she was in grade school when I first read her poems. (How's that for a save?)  Anyway, she is the featured poet on How a Poem Happens for today.

In the interview questions by Brian Brodeur I especially enjoyed the question about inspiration and her comment about meting the muse halfway.  Great post!!

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was "received" and how much was the result of sweat and tears?
I do believe in inspiration and the muse. But I also believe you have to meet her halfway, show up everyday whether she shows up or not. As a writer, you (I mean, I suppose, I) have to be there to receive her whims. I write a lot of pages that never wind up in poems. When I reread my free writing, often a draft of a poem is there proceeded and followed by gibberish or cliché or nonsense. Then I excavate the draft and begin revising. I don’t believe in sweat and tears associated with writing because I love writing so much. I think of it as high-octane play and fun.

Catch the whole poem and interview here! 

Magpie Tales 93 / Poem: How Size Matters



How Size Matters

a time

a place to stop

a sofa

against a rock solid platitude

on the main street of a life

of obligatory divestiture

of  inflexible options

of throwaway propositions

of too big to fail

of too small to matter

Michael A. Wells

Magpie Tales 93

spiraling words

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used. ~ David Lehman



 

Knock My Socks off Poetry Wednesday

A couple of poems that I've read recently that I especially enjoyed and I feel are worth a read...

Ben Parkers'  Sharing the Task that appeared in Rose & Thorn Journal.


David Oestreich's In Praise of Coffee that appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry.

Getting it Right

A fist—      White knuckled

gripping something

               anything

bloodletting and leaches

               a vacation to cryogenic reality

brittle regions of home

               splintered and fractured

lessons of melodious ramblings

in hurtful octaves

breaches – spankings – platitudes

               tomorrow we rehearse

The Moment

"But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age."  — Virginia Woolf

Confession Tuesday - coughing up the week

Dear Reader:

It is with a deep breath I come to the confessional. A deep breath because I'm trying to breath big today. It's been actually two weeks since my last confession and it was on the day that I should have been making my last one that I was feeling really crummy. By Wednesday morning I would be well on my way to feeling much worse. Today I went back to work. Only for a half day and I confess that when I left the office at 1 pm, I was pretty worn down. Pneumonia is a pretty nasty thing; of that I’m a believer.  

I took a nap after getting home and feel a little recharged but I kid you not once I put my head on the pillow, I crashed and burned. 

I confess that I have no exciting holiday stories to share. Just the one about the guy who did not travel across town with family to have dinner with other family members and that story is full of coughing up stuff you don’t want to hear about, or while surrounded in bed by dogs who are looking at you like “why must you keep up that annoying cough and by the way, what’s with the piles of Kleenex wads?” 

Oddly it seems there were moments this past week when in my general state of physical decline I had some flashes of brilliance (unless I was being delusional) about several aspects of a manuscript I’m working on.  It seems some clarity paid me a visit. And if they were only delusions I’m willing to except that/them anyway. I vaguely recall someone in the past saying you don’t have to be crazy to be a poet but it never hurts.

So really, with the kind of week I’ve had I confess that you just have to find the silver lining by getting a hold of the frayed ends and pulling on a strand just to see what unravels. 

Oh, least I forget… I confess that I lost weight over Thanksgiving. There is that to be thankful for.