Loose Leaf Notes

1. I could have gotten more points at last week’s Scrabble game with another play, but I went out with the word “WON” because I actually won the game and it was fun to play the word.

2. It’s been a long time since I won anything. In 2005, I participated in a poetry slam at The London Underground in Blacksburg and won $100! more than ready for some innuendo and comic relief with my poem Scrabble Lover. More HERE.

3. In 2008, I was one of three players from our informal group representing Floyd in a Scrabble Tournament to benefit the Literacy Volunteers of Roanoke. We took home first prize and each won a $50 gift certificate at Barnes and Noble! More HERE. 

4. Writing is my cottage industry. More HERE. 

5. This week’s Scrabble Scramble

7. Are people with dementia simply on a different dimension?

8. “Could the long-sought Theory of Everything be merely missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed?  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the “Big Bang” rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: We are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious — consciousness.” Robert Lanza

9. “Undeniably it is the biological creature that makes the observations and creates the theories. Our entire education system in all disciplines, the construction of our language, revolve around a bottom-line mindset that assumes a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived on a very temporary basis. It is further assumed that we accurately perceive this external pre-existing reality and play little or no role in its appearance. However, starting in the 1920s, the results of experiments have shown just the opposite. The observer critically influences the outcome. An electron turns out to be both a particle and a wave but how and, more importantly, where such a particle will be located remains dependent upon the very act of observation.” Robert Lanza

10. My dad used to always say, “My home is my castle,” and now that’s my motto too.

11. Transplanting perennials is quite an operation. I use plenty of water. I dig down deep and try to avoid cutting the roots. Then I carry them carefully, place them in the pre-dug holes, monitor their vitals and watch for days to see if they took. Meanwhile my hands are covered in mud instead of blood. I hold them up like an operating doctor as I walk from garden to garden.

12. I heart gardening and Scrabble.

13. Check out THIS heart shaped stoplight that is intended to evoke positive feelings among drivers in Iceland.

________Thirteen Thursday

An eyelash of new moon
warmed to a shine
when the moon broke its gaze
and the night went blind

___________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

Joe and I have been interested in taking videos of guitarists in action since our eldest grandson Bryce has been learning guitar. It’s also true that the guitar has long been my favorite instrument.

I also love a good singer/songwriter, which Jared Stout is. It was actually Jared who coined the phrase “guitar swag” at their Dogtown Roadhouse performance Friday night.

I wish I had recorded Jared, a Blacksburg homeboy, singing one of his originals, but I was too busy dancing. The one clip I got was not an original and the place was noisy with the band’s followers who were dancing and who knew and sang all the words to every song, so the video is hard to hear.

When I wasn’t dancing, which was only during the band’s break, we sat with friends, one of whom is from Blacksburg and has known Jared since he was a kid. It was fun to get an inside scoop.

The band won Floydfest22 On the Rise runner-up, which is quite an honor in these parts.  Jared’s song “Home” references places in Blacksburg and around VA Tech, like Gillies, the Duck Pond and more, which was a kick for us locals and people like me who spent a lot of time in Blacksburg when I worked at my friend Juniper’s Seeds of Light bead shop back in the day. I’m looking forward to the band’s 2024 main stage Floydfest appearance at the festival’s new location, part of the winnings of the festival’s patron-voted competition.

1. When Mother’s Day and your birthday fall only days apart and you have three friends whose birthdays do too.

2. Add to that that my grandson Bryce’s birthday three days before mine, May 14. It was also his Little League baseball shirt number when he was 11. We all struck a home run the day Bryce was born. The current score is 15!

3. Three wishes granted or three strikes you’re out?

4. How a poem is like cake: Don’t use a mix / or stale ingredients / Don’t look in the oven / too much when it’s cooking / or eat too much at one sitting / Don’t over-sweeten / or over-stir / A baker and a poet /are both concerned with flavor / It’s all about consistency / and knowing when it’s done (dedicated to my amazing birthday cake chef, Kelly.

5. For a couple of decades I’ve been part of a Triple Spiral of Neighborhood May Goddesses who celebrate our birthdays together. Like clockwork our birth dates fall like dominoes just days apart.

6. Over the years we’ve posed together with irises in our hair, roses in our teeth, holding pies and all varieties of cakes in restaurants, in kitchens, on porches, and at tea parties. We’ve watched our clothing styles change, ourselves getting sillier, and Dolphin, the youngest, grow up. More HERE. 

7. And when Dolphin moved to Alaska and then to Maine, her mother or her sister Amy stood in.

8. Caught up? Or caught up in a distraction that doesn’t allow you to be caught up?

9. Joke for Watson: “My husband’s name is Joe. It’s a good thing his last name isn’t King or he’d be Joking.”

10. Can I boast about the host who opens up her house?

11. How come age isn’t like art or poetry? / How come it’s hard cold facts? / A labeled box that never fits / A branded number that follows your name / And just when you get used to it – it changes!  More HERE.

12.  If Robots Wrote Poetry: They would bargain with the devil / Sell you a wind-up nightingale / A parlor trick gimmick / of soulless semantics / Until you no longer knew the difference / between Muzak and Mozart / between sentient creation / and automated content… -Read the rest of this poem HERE.

13. And if I’m ever confined to a bed in a room / I hope my grandson plays Led Zepplin on guitar / His brother can cook me noodles and teriyaki vegetables / while we up the ante in poker and Old Maid – Read Now That I Can Do Crossword Puzzles in One Sitting in its entirety HERE.

______Thirteen Thursday

Eighth Annual Little River Poetry Festival Celebrates its Intergenerational Poets and the River That Spawned Its Name – by Judith Stevens

Once upon a time, on a long-ago visit to Floyd, Festival founders Jack Callan and his wife, Judith Stevens, asked a Floyd native to help them trace the Little River to its source. It was a wonderful way to spend a sunny weekend. In Winter, they often bundled up and rose while it was still dark, taking folding chairs to sit by the side of that selfsame river, listening to her burbling song in the predawn hours –writing poetry.

The essence of the Festival is Nature. Kayaking down the Little River with its usually calm presence and its majestic mountain rock formations rising dramatically along her sides, speaks to the heart and soul. Past poetry excursions up Buffalo Mountain, Rocky Knob, and down Thunderstruck Road offer additional opportunities to draw others into writing about the beauty of Floyd. Some people have never kayaked or written a poem in their lives. They do both on the Little River. The prevailing sounds of wildlife, insects and feathered friends provide a soothing backdrop for our float, a reassurance that even with the challenges and unexpected events in life, the Little River, as seemingly ordinary as it is extraordinary, exists on her own timeline and offers a tranquil experience.

The river exercises her magic; we return peaceful, renewed, yet exhilarated. On one such paddle, we experienced Nature’s ability to reveal Herself as we steered underneath a giant rock overcropping, landing in the midst of what turned out to be a natural rock formation. We instantly “saw” an audience on the riverbank, listening as poets read their newly composed poems from their kayaks under the shelter of that natural granite amphitheater.

So far, the river has been kind; only three to four feet deep and with no whitewater, it only requires minimal paddling. The gentle current carries you. Even the weather has not kept us from ecstasy. The only time it rained, we closed the flaps and shared homecooked meals, poems, music and laughter in the sanctuary of our tent. (Musical instruments welcome!)

We have been supported by an “old guard” of poetry, members of the Poetry Society of Virginia, poet laureates, and published members of the mountain community, as well as many sharing poetry for the first time. Last year brought a large group of young poets who gave energy and cohesiveness to the Festival. Smiles and good will greeted the dozen or more teenage and young adult poets who created a group rap poem that was met with warm appreciation – one generation learning from another.

Come on down to the Sowers Family Farm, 2053 Thunderstruck Road, “On the Water Outfitters” Kayak Company, in Floyd starting Friday, June 2 around 1:00 p.m. through Sunday, June 4 at 3:00 p.m. Enjoy homecooked meals by donation.

Hear poet Brian Magill of Yorktown share creating “Neanderthal Poetry,” using only words of one syllable. Jack Callan has created another Poetry Ensemble featuring Northern Virginia prizewinning poet, Eric Forsbergh; Richmond’s PSV Vice-president Joanna Lee; Virginia Beach playwright, Larry Brown; Portsmouth’s Edith Blake. Festival founders, Judith and Jack will read with the Ensemble theme, “Everything is Possible ” as Jack takes a break from building their Floyd home on the side of a mountain, chronicled in an aptly titled poem about his building adventures, “Stonehenge.”

Meadows of Dan musician/poet Jim Best will be on hand with his hang drum. Floyd poets Katherine Chantel and Colleen Redman will perform for the traditional Sunday, “Free Floyd Day,” in a nod to our host city. This is an “open to all residents” of Floyd on Sunday, sent with love.

There’s something for every taste: from Gentle “Yoga for Health” with a Certified Iyenger Instructor, poetry readings, workshops and poetic excursions, to sunning or napping in the meadow, utilizing your “Lawn Chair Clause.”

Bring your tent and try “primitive Camping” in the field for $10 per night! Festival cost is $45 dollars for the entire weekend, or $15 per day. Drop-Ins Welcome. Add $35 for kayaking down the Little River. Pay for your meals when you meet the chef.

We’ve come full circle on the water again, “Spirit bearing witness to Spirit.” See you at the River!

-Little River Poetry Fest @ www.facebook.com/LittleRiverPoetryFest For details contact Jack Callan in Floyd: 540-745-2961 To Register, Contact Judith Stevens, Registrar: 757-428-7744 539 Mulligan Drive, Virginia Beach, VA 23462. Registration HERE.

I.
They would sell you a bridge
from a copy machine altar
where God is an avatar
and the world is flat

They would bargain with the devil
Sell you a wind-up nightingale
A parlor trick gimmick
of soulless semantics

Until you no longer knew the difference
between Muzak and Mozart
between sentient creation
and automated content

II.

Let the billionaires share
what never was theirs
Let robots cure cancer
and climate change
But don’t let them ban
or cancel the artists
Don’t let poets become
the jukebox nostalgics

__________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United / dVerse Poets Pub

1. Some people assume that thinking about death means your worrying about death. I think about death like I think about space, the stars and the universe.

2. The Upside Down of Playing Around flashback HERE.

3. Lifeboats: There are only a few / I reveal myself to / I let carry me / to places of honesty / I break down or float / without destination / and trust the winding route / to a shared soft landing

4. The last thing my friend 95-year-old friend Alwyn said to me before she died was, “I’m waiting to see how it ends.”

5. My bother Dan’s last words were: “I’m alright.”

6. “ChatGPT = that student who didn’t do the reading but wrote the paper anyway.” Paul Weinfield

7. “What GPT systems spit out is language … channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.” -Leif Weatherby, Jacobin Magazine

8. Geoffrey Hinton,  considered the “Godfather of AI” quit Google to warn about the dangers of the technology “…Obviously, many of the organizations developing this technology are defense departments. And defense departments don’t necessarily want to build in, be nice to people, as the first rule. Some defense departments would like to build in, kill people of a particular kind. So we can’t expect them all to have good intentions towards all people… because it’s much smarter than us, and because it’s trained from everything people ever do this — it’s read every novel that ever was, it’s read Machiavelli, it knows a lot about how to manipulate people — there’s the worry that it might start manipulating us into giving it more power, and we might not have a clue what’s going on… It’s as if aliens have landed, but we didn’t really take it in because they speak good English… I think it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.” PBS Newshour

9. “When a book of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named “Racter,” it was hard to know what to make of it. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed was a fever vision of weirdness. One critic insisted that Racter’s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a “coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter’s mystique. That mystique wasn’t at all harmed by the fact that Racter didn’t exist…

10. “…The entity responsible for insights like “When my electrons and neutrons war, that is my thinking” was actually a piece of code. Racter (short for raconteur) had been hatched on an early desktop computer programmed with the rules of English grammar… It led avant-garde poet Christian Bök to wonder if humans were needed to produce literature at all. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, he argued, was an “obit for classic poets.” Awaiting us was an era of “robopoetics.” – More HERE. 

11. These initiatives have now been dwarfed by Racter’s newest descendant. Released in 2020 by OpenAI, a San Francisco startup, GPT-3 is an AI tool that was force-fed a vast portion of the internet. (The entirety of English-language Wikipedia adds up to only a fraction of the billions of words ingested.) Endowed with algorithms that help it make sense of all that data—“neural” algorithms modelled after the circuitry of the human brain—GPT-3 can produce, from a simple prompt, astoundingly human-like writing of any kind: recipes, actuarial reports, film scripts, real-estate descriptions, technical manuals.

12. With an estimated billion dollars in backing, GPT-3 isn’t a better Racter; it’s a godlike Racter. Forbes named it the AI “Person” of the Year. Anyone who believed AI to be “nothing like intelligence,” said one expert, “has to have had their faith shaken to see how far it has come.”

13. The above is enough to turn me off from my love of Science Fiction.

______________Thirteen Thursday

There are only a few
I reveal myself to
I let carry me
to places of honesty
I break down or float
without destination
and trust the winding route
to a shared soft landing

___________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” -Susan David, PhD

2. And if I’m ever confined to a bed in a room / I hope my grandson plays Led Zepplin on guitar / His brother can cook me noodles and teriyaki vegetables / while we up the ante in poker and Old Maid – Read Now That I Can Do Crossword Puzzles in One Sitting in its entirety HERE.

3. Writing poetry is a way to zoom in.

4. Veil: evil is veiled. It’s in the word. So is the word “live.”

5. I found two four leaf clovers! Too bad I found them after Joe and I hit a deer with his truck.

6. We lost our wheels but got on our bikes.

7. After I wrote the poem “Now That I Can Do Crossword Puzzles in One Sitting,” I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was when I discovered that the puzzles in the first part of my book were easy but the ones in the second part are hard.

8. The message of Soulful Aging is to “do it with art.”  We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name aging as a natural way towards “transcendence.” Taking our leave takes time. More from Reveries of Aging: Aka Losing Our Minds. HERE. 

9. “Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair… Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted…

10. … But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image — just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments. The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound — simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love… Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living — for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love…”

11. “Imagine that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. If we could access all life—the whole record—we could experience it non-sequentially. We could know our children as toddlers, as teenagers, as senior citizens—all now. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now [Besso—one of his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us … know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Robert Lanza, A New Theory of the Universe

12. Biocentrism Builds on Quantum Physics– “Insight snapped into focus one day while one Lanza was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds. Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?”

13: You Are the Walrus HERE. 

_____Thirteen Thursday

Reveries of Aging: Aka Losing Our Minds is the fourth installment of the Soulful Aging Tour, the call-and-response poetry readings that Katherine Chantal and Colleen Redman have been doing since the winter of 2022 at various regional venues, including at Radford University, Little River Poetry Festival, Yoga Jam, Jessie Peterman Library, the Soup Shop and Blue Ridge Green Burial’s Death Cafe.

The message of Soulful Aging is to “do it with art.”

Our shared art is a way to honor what is and to express the grief and the insights that come with the changes of aging.

For this Losing Our Minds installment, Katherine and Colleen invited their friend Mary Wiley to contribute her poetry that artfully speaks to living through this stage of life.

In the spirit of depth psychology, Katherine asks, ‘Do we lose ourselves / so as not to know / we are leaving?’

Mary wonders, ‘Do you know that I am leaving / that the door is within sight?

Colleen ponders, ‘If life’s creation can’t be destroyed / but can only change form / then nothing is ever thrown away / it just moves from room to room.’

We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name aging as the natural way towards “transcendence.” Taking our leave takes time. Colleen Redman

Note: Katherine and Colleen’s poetry books are available for sale on Amazon and locally at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store. More on Soulful Aging HERE. 

_______Wordless Wednesday