Loose Leaf Notes

1.  Poetry lives outside the confines of academic convention or techno-logic mass-production. It’s not house-broken.

2. I recently did one better than William Stafford. He encouraged his students to write a poem a day, and when they thought it would be too much work, he suggested that they “lower their standards.”   Saturday night, I decided I wanted a poem to share on Sunday’s Poet’s United poetry forum, so, I surprised myself by writing one in less than an hour.

3. I’d be happy if I could write one poem a week.

4. This morning Joe was singing the Beatles song to me ‘you know my name, look up my number’ to me, to which I responded ‘number nine.’

5. Yesterday I went shopping for clothes and was at a disadvantage because I don’t like jeans with holes, tears or butterfly appliques on them, and I don’t like tops with one sleeve missing.

6. In his last interview, Tom Petty compared songwriting to fishing: “It’s kind of a lonely work because you just have to keep your pole in the water. I always had a little routine of going into whatever room I was using at the time to write in, and just staying in there until I felt like I got a bite.”

7.  A friend on Facebook posted, “I like virtually all Queen songs that aren’t played at sporting events and in gyms,” to which I responded, “I hated every time they play Jeremiah was a Bullfrog at weddings.”

7. “And some of us on Facebook know more than we should about each other,” said at a weekend wedding party where I ran into lots of old friends.

8. Till the Cows Come Home is HERE.

9. We Had a Party at our House HERE.

10. Love That Moon HERE.

11. Each day’s writing was like a journal entry, field notes from the trenches of grief’s frontline. I let myself trust my own stream of consciousness, trust that each separate story would become part of something whole, just as I hoped I would be again.  – From the Introduction to The Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote in 2001 about losing two of my brothers a month apart that was used in a grief and loss class for counselors at Radford University.

12. Can you write a poem on a deadline? / Like your life depended on it? / In a noisy café? / Like William Stafford? / In every room in the house? / There is no instruction / No paycheck or pink slip / There is no score / and no demand for it … Read the rest of How To HERE.

13. Could poetry be the shadow of matter like the moon is a reflective muse to the sun’s glare?

___________Thirteen Thursday