Loose Leaf Notes

1. Who says “za” for pizza? No one I know, but it’s a word you can use when playing Scrabble.

2. If I Have to Die

3. Today’s poetry was paper trash / Unrequited loves that broke my heart / Teased out lines written in circles / Big ideas that fell flat – From I Quit Poetry HERE.

4. The above picture is what it looks like to prepare for a poetry reading where my friend Katherine and I match up our poetry themes for a call and response duo flow.

5. “How fondly I recall thinking, in the old days, that to write you needed paper, pen, and a lap. How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often “written” with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with full hands like a gardener. After a couple of hours, you have taken an exceedingly dull nine-mile hike. You go home and soak your feet.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

6. I got a merchandise pin, pinned on by the band’s drummer in thanks for all my dancing.

7. It’s no surprise that I dance to live bands most weekends. That started way back in high school when I danced the Boogaloo, Philly, Shuffle and New Yorker at The Surf in my beach town of Hull, Massachusetts every weekend.

8. Richard Brautigan, the first poet I loved 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.”

9. I had to smoke my first joint / Remember Macbeth  / and Romeo and Juliet / Hear poetry readings  / at a coffeehouse in Boston / and think ‘I could never do that…’  – More from In Answer to ‘When Did You Start Writing?’ HERE

10. The kleenex box got passed around the classroom a few times at the Radford University Death and Bereavement class where Katherine Chantal and I were recently guests, sharing our Grief and Relief, Soulful Aging Poetry to counseling students. We both read poems about losing family members, brothers, a sister, a husband, a parent, a great niece. Katherine, a ceremonialist who facilitates life passages including death memorials, spoke of sitting with a friend before she passed and I shared being with my brother Dan as he took his last breath… More from Please Pass the Kleenex HERE. 

11. How did you happen?  What time is it?  It’s the high tide of the inner life where love is the prize, where we visit our regrets, and pray at their altar. “Don’t add another stone to the pile,” he says.  “Can we all get over this idea of getting back to normal?” – More from our Nights of Grief and Mystery with Stephen Jenkinson HERE.

12. “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” Annie Dillard

13. Now I’m looking for loopholes / to fix what I quit / to write today’s honest word / not tomorrow’s regret.

____________Thirteen Thursday