Loose Leaf Notes

1. Every time I watch the PBS Newshour I feel like messing up Margaret Warner’s hair-do.

2. Raining poems? It doesn’t happen every day. Look HERE.

3. What’s the difference between a slurpie and a slushie?

4. I think the makers of word processing software should create a poet’s program option in which the first letter of every new line isn’t automatically capitalized.

5. Is the milk spilled or spilt?

6. Poetry cries over spilt milk but isn’t fooled by an unclothed emperor or one corrupted by wind-up songs of gilded birds in cages.   You can read the rest of this poem is HERE.

7. Growing up in a working class family, the literature available to me was How Now Brown Cow and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson. All summer long I tested the meter of language with jump rope and bouncing ball songs. My Irish-American father spouted nursery rhymes, both traditional and made up. Ours was an oral tradition of reading, reciting, and singing out loud. ~ Read more about how fairy tales and nursery rhymes were the foundation of my love of language and how they also gave me access into an inner life HERE.

7. THIS photo makes me question the whole grass is greener and white picket fence thing.

8. The sundresses I live in at home all summer are like my dishcloths; they get dirty fast and need to be replaced often.

9.  THIS art installation at the Museum fur Gestalung Zurich, Out to Sea, is on a big scale. It shows how much plastic garbage is released into the sea every 15 seconds.

10. Picasso said that when critics get together they talk about aesthetics, but when artists get together they talk about turpentine.

11. I have a title for nothing in particular.  I just like the way it sounds: Poetry with a lisp sounds like this.

12. Timeless advice from seventeenth century poet Charles Baudelaire:  Always be a poet, even in prose.

13. Where do poems come from? HERE are a couple of my personal examples.

Thirteen Thursday