I could swim in these lines from “Inland” by Chase Twichell for days:
Above the blond prairies,
the sky is all color and water.
It’s as if the poet read the pages of my mind and wrote a poem based on the reading.
I love painting more than poetry.
The spare details used created such enduring images that’s hard for me to let go of the poem.
love is folded away in a drawer
like something newly washed
A couple years ago I stumbled upon this graphic on my Tumblr dashboard. Recently, I contacted the designer behind the art and asked if he planned to release the design as a poster or t-shirt. He replied he might if more people were interested in a t-shirt.
So, David Sherwin wants to know if anyone, beside myself, is interested in ordering this design as a t-shirt?
In spite of a very crazy week I’m still on track with the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. The rain delays on Monday afforded me time to compose a page-length poem. It’s no where near the ideal of composing 75 lines of poetry per day, but it’s a much needed discipline just to fill a page in my moleskine notebook.
Recently, I heard, or read, someone responding to the question of which is more important: growth or innovation. The person responded innovation, because innovation feeds growth and not the other way around. HBR provided the following points of innovation:
Link: The 4 Ps of Innovation
Ray Gonzalez’s prose poem “Beginning with Two Lines from Rexroth” begins with the opening line:
I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments, the unpainted pictures, the interrupted lives, a staircase leading to a guarantee, the glowing frame of wisdom protecting me from harm after I escape the questions of a lifetime.
There’s an urgency to these lines that remind me of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Also, there is a strong collision of abstract ideas and images as in the following line:
There is no agony and waste, only the steps into the frontier where it is easy to hide.
There’s an interview with Ray Gonzalez on Bombsite where he discussed who he crafts line and prose poems.
A writer laments that he has a huge Facebook following, but it doesn’t convert to readers of his book. From AdPulp:
Gregory Levey, communications professor and author of Shut Up, I’m Talking, says, “if my online fans can’t even grasp that the fan page they’ve joined is for a book, I’m not particularly optimistic that they’ll read the book in question – or any books at all, for that matter.”
Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco opines: “Facebook has become such a burden and a time-suck that they’re only able to devote a fraction of their shattered attention spans to it. They’re reacting to friends’ updates and clicking ‘like’ buttons and joining fan pages like Pavlov’s dogs — it’s becoming mechanical, thoughtless. The opposite of ‘engaged.'”
(Link: Yet Another Facebook Story: A Mile Wide But An Inch Deep)
After reading this I may just pull the plug on my Facebook account (though I know, like the Hotel California, Facebook doesn’t really let you leave).
If my voice is not reaching you
add to it the echo—
echo of ancient epics
Afzal Ahmed Syed‘s poem “If My Voice Is Not Reaching You” offers such a great opening stanza. A poet can go almost anywhere with those opening lines and a reader will follow with intrigue.
The title says it all: Kindle and iPad Books Take Longer to Read than Print:
…reading speeds declined by 6.2% on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle compared to print.
(Link: Kindle and iPad Books Take Longer to Read than Print)
Deborah (of 32 Poems) invites interested persons to write a poem a day for the next 30 days. The invite was sent out on Sunday (and I didn’t read it until today… so, I’m a bit late), but I think I’m up for the challenge. Anyone else?
Read more details about the challenge here: 30 Poems in 30 Days.
A few months ago I began brewing my coffee through a tea infuser. The glass decanter for a coffee press I used had shattered and I was awaiting shipment of a stainless steel coffee press. So I brewed a cup of coffee with an infuser and was amazed by an excellent cup of my favorite bean beverage.
The stainless steel coffee press arrived and I began using it daily. It took me awhile to get used to the taste (coffee tastes slightly different in a steel press). The convenience of putting the coffee grounds in the press, adding hot water, pressing, and (more often than I’d like to admit) hauling the press to the office.
Then a programmable coffee maker arrived and I was giddy at that thought of waking up each morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. After a few days of that I decided to revert back to the slow process of a single cup of infused coffee. The coffee maker added a plastic oily taste that I really didn’t enjoy. The steel coffee press had a slight metallic taste that reminded me of drinking coffee from an enamel metal camp cup (which wasn’t bad, just different). The glass coffee press had the best flavor. But there’s something about the slow, ritualistic ceremony of pouring hot water onto the infuser and watching a light layer of foam appear on the grounds that is very appealing to me.
When I read the following story in the Mountain Xpress, I found a local establishment that caters to me coffee snob tastes. Here’s five comments made in the article:
Here’s a five step approach to successful blogging list I discovered.
- Decide WHAT the Post Should DO for You
- How Can I Be Helpful?
- The Actual Writing
- Review The Last Few Weeks’ Posts
- Repeat
In one corner Billy Collins. In the other corner CA Conrad for a dispute over Emily Dickinson’s sexual preference. This should be a great fisticuff battle… except it’s taking place in the American poetry scene which will be mostly ignored by the general public.
Repeat after me: Branding is product, service and experience.* It’s not a wicked cool logo with drop shadow and PMS color key nor a catchy slogan. It’s simple and complicated and it’s why ad agencies typically don’t get it.
- Ad placement drives profits
- Advertising creatives are spoiled. And entitled. And enabled.
- The integrated agency is a fallacy
- Advertising is a knock-knock joke. Design is a dialogue
Design is dialogue sums it up for me. Know your audience, build community, and provide consistent, satisfactory customer experience.
*Watch this video for an excellent overview of what brand is (via AdPulp).
A good book is like a good conversation with a good friend.
“Reading aloud lets you craft great writing” writes James (of Men with Pens) how goes on to offer a few tips on writing including:
Link: How to Become a Better Writer and Get Readers Loving You
The last couple months I’ve been writing scripts for a proof of concept (POC) audio production. Often I’ll find myself pausing during a reading and re-write portions of copy because it sounds weak or clunky or maybe too upbeat when it should be somber. During a recording session with other voice talent, we may continue revising copy because transitions, though they look good on paper, may not perform well. So, yes, reading your writing out load us beneficial to improving writing skills.
I’m reading an anthology of steampunk essays and fiction titled, well, Steampunk. It’s a sub-genre of science-, speculative-, historical-fiction. What’s intriguing to me is the hard-boiled speculative science with smartly dressed Victorian, British fashion. For those of you serious about Steampunk, would you believe there is a Steampunk Emporium (providing clothing and other accessories) and Clockwork Couture (another purveyor of fine clothing and accessories).
Here’s a few writing tips from the author of Til We Have Faces:
1. Read good books and avoid most magazines.
2. Write with the ear, not the eye. Make every sentence sound good.
3. Write only about things that interest you. If you have no interests, you won’t ever be a writer.
4. Know the meaning of every word you use.
It’s either a clever turn if a phrase, or not. “I grew up in the Bible Belt…” the anonymous contribution to The Sun’s Readers Write section begins and concludes that “…it was better to be an honest sinner than a dishonest churchgoer.”
The phrase that arrested my attention is “honest sinner.” Juxtaposing words in that fashion are delicious.
So, I looked up the etymology of the words to see if the anonymous author is clever or something else.
“Honest” comes from the Latin meaning “honorable.”
“Sinner,” or its root word “sin,” as far as I can find comes from the Latin meaning “guilty,” thus sinner means “guilty one.” Further, “sin” means to “miss the mark,” specifically, “to miss the mark of righteousness.”
So the anonymous author constructs a phrase meaning “honorably guilty” or “honorably missing the mark.” Either conclusion (“honorably guilty” or “dishonorably attending church”) seems disappointing. To open up the phrase a bit more — the author proposes that it is better to honorably miss the mark than to charade dishonorably in church. At this point I realize that the anonymous author reveals a logic similar to that of wet noodles. I’m too disappointed to continue to write about the author’s logical fallacies and philosophical short cuts.
(link: Fireflies in the Garden by Robert Frost)
Some evenings, as the sun sets, I water the garden. A two-gallon water can is used and one can of water per garden box seems to be sufficient. The other night while I watered the garden in the evening, the fireflies appeared to come up from the ground and surround me; almost as if the water droplets transformed upon impact and rose into the gathering darkness as luminous creatures. Within an hour or two I could see their light in the tallest oaks and pines surrounding the cottage. But, alas, like Robert Frost offers “they can’t sustain the part” of the stars above.
Like twilight time, the garden is transitioning. The snap peas began to wither a few days ago. I can’t tell if it is due to the lack of rain or the peas have passed their season of growth. I’ll plant kale and shard to replace the pea plants. So far the most produce comes from the chili pepper plant and the lettuce. The zucchini and squash are disappointing. It appears the leaves have some kind of mold; yielding only four vegetables. It’s too early to tell, but it looks like the tomato plants will yield well this year.
James Longenbach presented a lecture titled “The Excess of Poetry” at the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers this morning. Here’s a few of the notes I wrote:
There are more notes I wrote, but they are a bit scramble. Longenbach presented poems by Keats, Dickinson and Pound as way to explore the “fine excess” of poetry.
GermanHeit is an excellent resource for those interested in learning to read German (or learn in better) or those desiring to know more about life in contemporary Germany. Recently, GermanHeit published a post about the German author Herta Müller — winner of the Nobel Prize for literature — regarding her novel “Atemschaukel” (link: GermanHeit). I inquired if there is a reliable bilingual or an English edition and GermanHeit replied with a link to an excerpt (link: “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” – an excerpt). A link to zeitgenössische Dichter (link: Die Deutsche Gedichte-Bibliothek) was also provided after I mentioned I enjoyed reading Durs Grunbein’s poetry. In one of his collections, Grunbein portrays a grasshopper as a Stoic philosopher in the poem “In der Provinz 3.” One of the qualities of Grunbein’s poetry I enjoy is the way he unfolds a poem and an image or thought is revealed in an arresting manner that catches the reader slightly off balance.
The Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers provides free readings and lectures to the public. The first reading begins tomorrow night. The reading schedule is posted on their web site (link). I plan on attending as many as I am able. However, a passage from one of Günter Grass’s novels makes me wonder about the validity of creative writing programs.
Here unpolished literary attempts were read aloud and critiqued…. based on the American notion of teaching creative writing. (Crabwalk, Chapter 2)
Czeslaw Milosz’s birthday is today. Just in case you wanted to know.
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
(link: The Glory of the Garden by Rudyard Kipling)
The correlation between gardening and prayer had not occurred to me until I read that Kipling poem. American culture has forgotten how growing one’s own food is a lot of labor and often a gamble. This year there has been sufficient rain, but previous years these mountains have experienced drought. In years past I’ve lost plants to a Spring frost, plant mold and blight. But when Kipling wrote those lines ubiquitous herbicides and pesticides where unavailable as well as genetically modified plants. Gardening and spirituality have always been connected, but only in recent history that we have forgotten that truth as the culture detoured to a road of industrial foods.
So far the garden has yielded a modest supply of lettuce for occasional salads, a dozen or so snap peas, a half-dozen chili peppers. The tomatoes should be coming in soon as well as the squash. The first load of vermicompost was used in the garden box where the peppers grow. (It may be difficult to see in the photo, but there are two green totes behind the tomato garden box where I vermicompost table scraps.) At the current pace, worms compost one tote of table scraps every three to four weeks. It’s hard to imagine that this little garden provides so much work that many evenings and weekends are filled with labor on my hands and knees.
Coffeehouse Junkie 