Happy New Year!!!!

Robert Bly Dead at Age 94

I woke to news yesterday that Robert Bly had passed away at age 94 on Sunday, November 21. It brought back memories of my best friend, an English major and fellow warrior, turning me on to Bly 45+ years ago. As usual, he responded perfectly by sending me this.

Robert Bly reads 'After Drinking All Night With a Friend, We Go Out in a Boat at Dawn to See Who Can Write the Best Poem' from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Pity the Nation - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

Curse of a Charmed Life - Kim Stafford

 

New Year's by Dana Giola

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

Songbird Guards a Twig

From Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac

Mrs. God - Connie Wanek

Thoughts on the 9th Anniversary of My Best Friend's Suicide

Reading Poetry for Engineers

Recently. The New York Times had an interesting article by Matthew Zapruda, Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think.  I found it very interesting as one who often struggles with the topic.  Points I found enlightening were:

1.     “Like classical music, poetry has an unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and education to appreciate, which takes readers away from its true strangeness, and makes most of us feel as if we haven’t studied enough to read it.”

2.     “The art of reading poetry doesn’t begin with thinking about historical moments or great philosophies. It begins with reading the words of the poems themselves.”

3.     “The mere exercise of getting as deeply into the words as possible shows them that meaning and possibility come from this act — not from a search for an interpretation, often one someone else has already made.”

4.     “Coming upon a word, having it rise up out of the preconscious, intuitive dream-state and into the poem, either to begin or somewhere along the way or even, blissfully, at the end, is the special reward of being a poet, and a reader of poetry. By being placed into the machine of a poem, language can become alive again.“

5.     “Somewhere, in every poem, there are words that shine forth, light up, almost as if plugged in. This is what poetry can do for language, and for us.”

I sent the article to a poet friend of mine and asked him what he thought of it.  This is how he responded in part:

“As W.B. Yeats wrote in a letter to a friend very late in his life:  "Truth cannot be told, but it can be embodied."  To ask me what the "meaning" of a great poem is, or Hamlet is, or Beethoven's last piano sonata is, or Edward Weston's "Pepper No. 30" is, would be like asking me what the meaning of a mystical experience is.  The central failure of people to understand certain poems of Emily Dickinson, for instance, is not a failure of intellect or learning, but a failure in the depth and breadth and intensity of their living.

Believe me, answering your question truly would engage all that is most important to me, all that I have learned about what is most important.  And it would not involve conceptual description or definition so much as why and in what way all concepts and discursive writing are intrinsically and inevitably false.  Ah, you are stirring the ocean in asking me that question!. . . .  But then, your blog bespeaks a taste for the open sea.”

Check out Zapruder’s piece and use your life experiences to read a poem or two occasionally.  If it is a good poem, you will find that word or words and they will add depth to your life!!

Thoughts of Joyce - A Week After Bloomsday

On the Anniversary of My Best Friend's Suicide

Take Time to Look Up!!!

From NPR's Writer's Almanac today:

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Guy Clark - One of the Greatest Songwriters of All Time

We lost a great songwriter with a wonderful eye for the greatness of ordinary life this week in the passing of Guy Clark at age 74.

Despite writing some of my favorite songs of all time, the man is not as well known as he should be.  Hopefully, the great articles and stories written about him when he passed with help get the word out.  (The Tennessean and the New York Times.)

We will miss you Guy!!!!!

The Meeting by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thank you Garrison Keillor and Writer's Almanac for this Christmas poem and your great pieces everyday!!!!

Armistice Day Poem

Memories of Steve Millener and Moving to Colorado

I heard this poem on Writer's Almanac today and thought of my drive across Kansas and eastern Colorado on I-70 in the late 1970s with my buddy Steve Millener (now gone), one of my all-time favorite people.  Both of us moving to Colorado together in his light blue Volkswagen Rabbit loaded with everything we owned.

Driving West

by Linda Pastan

Though the landscape subtly changes,

the mountains are marching in place.

The grasses take on the fading

yellows of the sun,

and cows with their sumptuous eyes

litter the fields as if they had grown there.

We have driven for hours

through bluing shadows,

as if the continent itself leaned west

and we had no choice but to follow the old ruts—

the wagons and horses, the iron snort

of a locomotive. We are the pioneers

of our own histories, drawn

to the horizon as if it waited just for us

the way the young are drawn

to the future, the old to the past.

Fourth of July Poem

Imagine This - Freva Manfred

When you’re young, and in good health,
you can imagine living in New York City,
or Nepal, or in a tree beyond the moon,
and who knows who you’ll marry: a millionaire,
a monkey, a sea captain, a clown.

But the best imaginers are the old and wounded,
who swim through ever narrowing choices,
dedicating their hearts to peace, a stray cat,
a bowl of homemade vegetable soup,
or red Mountain Ash berries in the snow.

Imagine this: only one leg and lucky to have it,
a jig-jagged jaunt with a cane along the shore,
leaning on a walker to get from grocery to car,
smoothing down the sidewalk on a magic moving chair,
teaching every child you meet the true story

of this sad, sweet, tragic, Fourth of July world.

A Golf Haiku

A beautiful day
The golf balls are a flying.
It's me who's crying. 

-- Tweet by @ProductPoet