13: It Grows on Trees
1. Panoramic is a prescription for pandemic.
2. I can’t force a poem like I can’t force myself to dream. I wait for both to happen. And some dreams come as big dreams and some dreams are small, just like poems.
3. I was reading an interview with the late poet Mary Oliver, who the interviewer (Maria Shriver) described as a courageous poet who writes about the natural world, love, survival, gratitude and joy. In the interview, Oliver described her poetry as “praise poetry,” saying “I think you get more flies with honey than vinegar. So I try to do more of the ‘Have you noticed this wonderful thing? Do you remember this?’ I try to praise. If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth was meant to look like.”
4. Much of my poetry is focused on the inner life, a place that we universally inhabit but generally don’t talk about openly. I think of the inner-life as the natural world of the psyche, a landscape to be mapped, explored and adventured, and not so different than the outer natural world that so many poets write poems about.
5. Like our outer life, our inner life is affected by where we born and how we were raised. Whatever our circumstances, the natural world remains. Only our perceptions of it differ.
6. A good punch line hits home.
7. Buffalo Mountain Hike: This Ain’t No Walk to the Mailbox HERE.
8. I was raised on jump rope songs, nursery rhymes and the songs of the ‘60s. The first “poem” I remember was one from Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the line “out, out brief candle” that I had to memorize for school. I didn’t understand it and thought I didn’t like “poetry.” But then I read Richard Brautigan’s “I’m sitting in a cafe / drinking a Coke / A fly is sleeping / on a paper napkin / I have to wake him up / so I can wipe my glasses / There’s a pretty girl I want to look at” and I was all in!
9. Reading Shakespeare (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet) in school was the closest I came to speaking a foreign language, besides French, which wasn’t as much fun and which I wasn’t good at.
10. I remember three times I was embarrassed as a girl: the time I had to deliver newspapers for my brother and customers called me ‘the paper girl,’ the time in French class when the teacher said there was no translation for my name so she used my middle name (Ann) from then on, and the time I got bit by a dog and had to lift my skirt and show my underwear to a doctor.
11. “Trees don’t grow on money either.” Unknown
12. How long can vultures fly without flapping? Six hours.
13. Trump is a lame duck but he’s always been a quack.
___________Thirteen Thursday
November 18th, 2020 2:42 pm
#13 is so appropriate and made me laugh. Inspired by the Mary Oliver and it made me felt better about what I call my usual Pollyanna mode …ignoring the bad, pointing out the beautiful (IRL and blogland). .I had the same embarrassing” experience doing my brother’s paper route. Except when I went to collect, one elderly customer called his wife to come “look at our paper doll.”
November 18th, 2020 3:35 pm
Ha ha! They called their family members to come out and see me, the paper girl, too, but I didn’t get the doll part!
November 19th, 2020 8:35 am
Your #2 & #4 sum me up perfectly, these days.
And I could feel that video wind, wish I had some wings to glide away on.
Have a great day, CR.
November 19th, 2020 12:20 pm
Right on with #13. I grew up on a farm so never got the paper boy/girl experience. But I remember some embarrassing moments. Funny how all that stuff from childhood stays with you, and adulthood just blows by like a single day.
November 19th, 2020 2:01 pm
jump rope songs were the first rap music! People in our old neighborhood called us “the poodle walkers”
quack… now enough quacking and go be quiet and think about what you’ve done…if possible… and don’t forget to concede on your way out (fingers crossed) for the sake of OUR country and Democracy. Voting is a good thing y’all . Just because it doesn’t go your way doesn’t make it fraudulent.
end of rant