Loose Leaf Notes

1. Too much nature in poetry is like reading about the landscape in The Lord of the Rings when you just went to get back to the action.

2. To me the action is the everyday as it converges with the inner and outer life, and the big questions about immortality, mystery and how our wounds and gifts coexist beside each other.

3. Conundrum is my current favorite word

4. We just watched the Steven Spielberg directed “Ready Player One,” or what I think of as “Willie Wonker meets The Matrix.”

5. Funny how someone is considered to have learning disabilities if they have trouble reading or doing math, but no one says, ‘I’m impaired because I’m not creative.’

6. It’s hard to mess up Grateful Dead music like it’s hard to mess up a bacon and eggs breakfast, and I’d eat the later three times a day and dance to the former every time.  See how M.C. Broom & The Jam got it right at Dogtown Saturday night and how they were joined by Buck and Griz for a whole lot of guitars and a blast of a dance party! HERE.

7. Not long ago I realized that all my favorite poets were men – Richard Brautigan, Billy Collins, David Whyte, William Stafford — and so I began a search for a favorite woman poet, bought some books and read poetry by women online with mixed success. Recently, a reader who knows me well from reading here suggested I check out Jane Kenyon.

8. I literally checked her out at the library and the first few poems I read were ones I wished I wrote, could write. Kenyon wrote in plain, naturalistic style. Here’s what the Poetry Foundation wrote about her:   New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Kenyon’s verse probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life…

9. Here’s a line from her “In the Nursing Home” that knocked me out –  She is like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in.

10. Kenyon writes in the style of the imagist poets. Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century as a reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry.  Early 20th century Imagism was derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and called for a return to what were seen as more classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, and a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms.

11. Richard Brautigan has been described as a bridge between the beat poets of the ‘50s and the counterculture of the ‘60s.  His work has been associated with primitivist poetics.  “It’s like if James Joyce smoked a pile of weed and said, “screw it, I’m going to write something fun”‘ one reviewer wrote.   Another said, “He’s a kind of Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face.”

12. Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this. – Richard Brautigan

13. 1st comes the heartbeat / then the search for the nectar / in the Garden of Eden / on an island called Mother / Next comes the first cry? and the need? to be rocked? I got my start in rocking cradles? Keeping time with the poem eternal? Then went on to harder stuff? Not trusting the heartbeat would last? Thinking nothing is right? unless I do it myself… Read the rest of my poem Rock & Roll:  The Early Influences which explores my history of being a couch banging rocker as a girl HERE. ___________Thirteen Thursday