Loose Leaf Notes

1. The truth slept but had a dream, a causality count of a world changed.

2. A poem is a dream that’s willed into being / A dream just shows up and writes itself / When dreams are absent / a poem can be imagined / When pens are inkless / a dream spells it out… Read Dreams are From Mars and Poems are From Venus in its entirety HERE. 

3. “Irrelevance is a great blessing. You realize we are not in control. Maybe $88 billion cannot buy a functional democratic government in a tribal country up against forces that espouse cruel misogyny and bribery, and I’m not referring to Texas. So I skip reading the newspaper, preferring not to waste the day in hopeless anger, and instead drink my coffee and write a wedding sonnet for a couple in California and joke with my daughter who is starting a new life in a new city and sit with my wife and enjoy the breeze and smell the hydrangeas.” – Garrison Keillor

4. Billy Collins on poetry as an act of pursuit: “I examine lots of little notions to see if there’s a poem in them, and most of the time I don’t find one there, it doesn’t flower, it doesn’t open itself up to possibility. And then every once in a while, there’s a little notion or an observation or a phrase or some little starting point that wants to go on, that wants to go to a second step, and then I become like a little bloodhound. I kind of sniff my way through the trail and try to see what’s at the end of it. So, it’s pretty much catch as catch can.”

5. August Gold – We get paid in corn / for our garden labor / We strike it rich / with every husk / pulled back / With bellies full / we dig potatoes / for poorer days  when corn is spent.

6. The summer family portrait.

7. Is it all groovy or gravy?

8. The planet spins / a starry web / in a dark quarry of sky / where as above so below / has us all striking gold / as we pan with our eyes / for the mother lode… From Persied 2016, the August meteor shower which we were unable to see this year because the sky was too cloudy.

9. I had never known until recently that “august” could be used as an adjective, as in “respected and impressive,” “She was in august company.”

10. Waiting for the ball to drop or waiting to make a splash?

11. “Poetry, like any other form of language is a means of communication—why not simply communicate what we already know? Well, if I wanted to simply be informed, I’d read a position paper, or a philosophical proof. Poetry is not a logical argument.” Timothy Green, from Poetry and the Unconscious

12. Reading over my dream journal is like reading Shakespeare. At first I don’t understand much because I can’t read my writing. But then, the more I do it the better I get and suddenly I understand it.

13. I once had a poem in my dream that  was titled “I Don’t Tell You My Dreams Anymore.”

________Thirteen Thursday