Sordid Blog

I’ve been terribly remiss about not posting things during National Poetry Month, and I should be spanked, and if not spanked, at least given a stern talking to … but for the day ahead, I’m feeling a bit Stevie-Smithish …
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further [...]

Lori sent me a link to this piece, “Reasons to Fuck Poetry“, and I find it a fun read, but maybe for reasons that others do not. Here are a couple of my favorite parts:
Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry. English professors, [...]

Crisp autumn night walk
Night lights twinkle through youth sounds
Culminates in Poop
This one is part of my continuing series on important things, which is things that happens to me.  I’m practising so that I can go to next writing retreat with daddy …

licking sweet dew from
moist green daybreak grasses
sunrise morning walk
yeah, i felt poetical this morning on the walk … i write things all the time … poems they just come to me

Sadly, you can see the winding-down eyes of everyone here. The look says, ‘oh, shit, this is almost over’ … And that is the most interesting part for me to watch: while some folks annoy each other, and that’s plain to see (and hear from time to time the snarky comments), I’m shocked at [...]

One of my favorite little poems from childhood is e. e. cummings’ “maggie and millie and molly and may” …
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and [...]

Not the best sketch comedy I’ve seen, but I love the parody of Angelou, who is so easily parodied, and the excerpts from Craig’s list … poetry is really all around us, isn’t it?

This morning, as I stumbled late to waking and plodded down the stairs to go for a walk, Lucia greeted me with an offer of coffee. It was hard to say no, but the light spilling over the next hill and across the adjacent valley called to me, so [...]

Over the holiday break — the Tar River WP took a few days, which worked out well as several participants reflected last Tuesday on how badly they needed some time to digest everything we’d already done — I’d asked everyone to read the first three chapters of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I’ve [...]

For today’s poem, I return to Billy Collins, who became one of my favorite living poets some years ago, just before he became Poet Laureate of the United States. When I first picked up Picnic, Lightning, it was the poem “Marginalia” that I most enjoyed, perhaps because I could really understand the reference to [...]