Loose Leaf Notes

1. Comment overheard on the unrest in Ferguson: “The problem is not so black and white. Oh. Yes it is.”

2. Is “spare” the mutant plural of “pare,” as in spare the clutter and pare it all down?

3. When does too much cuddling lead coddling?

4. “Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.” – Chris Rock

5. In 2008 I had the pleasure of meeting Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Virginia Poet Laureate, Claudia Emerson when she was a keynote speaker at the Power of Poetry Symposium in Lexington Va.  I loved that Emerson, who died last week of cancer, used to be a mail carrier and that she had a masterful ability of using concrete images in her poetry – the furnace, the hairbrush, a quilt – to relate indirectly to underlying emotions. I also loved that her fellow guest poet at the Symposium, Vietnam vet, Bruce Weigl, denounced the Iraq war during his reading, calling the Bush administration “deceitful.” That was especially remarkable because the symposium was held at the Virginia Military Institute.  Photos HERE.

6. “I saw your interview with Jeffery Brown on the PBS News Hour,” I told Emerson when I met her. “Oh, I was so nervous,” she answered. I don’t think the symposium organizers could have chosen two poets with more down to earth accessibility and integrity as Emerson and Weigl. – Read more about the symposium and how my friend Mara won a symposium award HERE.

7. Like a mug of warm morning / already spilled in summer / the sun lays tipped / on its side / Then it rolls too fast/ like a cool glass marble / a cat’s eye blink / across the sky – read the complete poem HERE.

8. When I posted the above poem on Facebook, I got a comment from my sister, who knows I mostly write poems about the moon. She said, “Another great poem using the sun instead of the moon.” “Do you think the moon is jealous?” I asked.

9. I was thinking how jealous and zealous could be a scary combination when I looked up the origin of the word jealous and discovered that it is related to zealous and at one time was used in a good sense, as in “tolerating no unfaithfulness.”

10. More Fort Revere Writings on the Wall from Hull, Massachusetts are HERE.

11. Yesterday’s version of cyber bullying: When I was 13, a rejected boyfriend painted a very derogatory message about me on one of the walls at Fort Revere that my girlfriend and I had to paint over. Whenever I visit the forts I always look at that very spot and remember it.

12. Watch the video of my potter son that made me say, “I think I’ll buy a Land Rover” HERE.

13. THIS is so cool. (Pun intended.)

___________Thirteen Thursday