Deborah offered a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. I took up the challenge and so far I’m on schedule with one poem a day. Maybe after the challenge I’ll translate the poems from handwritten form to digital, but for me the urgency is to get it all down first. It’s kind of like catching butterflies or lightening bugs.
One interesting item is that the poems have developed a theme. When I accepted the challenge I wasn’t planning on writing 30 theme-based poems, but somewhere under the surface it appears in each page of the poems I’m composing. I guess I’ll find out if it changes course by the end of the challenge.
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:
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.'”
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.
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?
Brewing a cup of coffee with an infuser
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… read more »
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:
Espresso beans are like bananas.
Coffee shouldn’t be about speed.
It’s espresso, not EXpresso, people.
Dark roast does not have more caffeine than lighter roasts.
“Fair Trade” doesn’t really mean much of anything.
It is not so much that I miss you as the remembering which I suppose is a form of missing except more positive, like the time of the blackout when fear was my first response followed by love of the dark.
Coffeehouse Junkie 
