Cancer Sufferer Bernice Wiemers-Rowden Writes Book of Poetry about Swansea City

A lot of cancer sufferers make wish lists of what they want to do when they are diagnosed with the deisease. Few carry them out.

Bernice Wiemers-Rowden from Swansea in Wales successfully put together a book of poetry for her club, Swansea City.

Ms Wiemers-Rowden wrote a poem about her appearance on BBC Radio Wales and recited it during a chat with presenters Peter Johnson and Felicity Evans, the BBC reported.

And her cancer treatment appears to have worked.

"Bernice Wiemers-Rowden has achieved many of those objectives on her "bucket list", including putting together a book of poetry for her club Swansea City," the BBC reported.

Les Buffham wins two awards at Western Music Association event

I realized a couple of minutes ago I hadn't posted on this blog since July. Is poetry really dead in my life or am I too busy? A combination of both, perhaps. And while this site did rather well without me it has crashed of late.

Anyhow I was woken from my slumber by the earth shattering news that songwriter Les Buffham of Saugus has picked up two awards Saturday night at the Western Music Association’s annual awards banquet in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Yee haw and all that.

Buffham was apparently named Male Poet of the Year, while his song, “No Wilder Place,” cowritten with singer Mary Kaye, was named Song of the Year.

 Buffham, who won his first WMA Song of the Year award in 1997 for “Below the Kinny Rim,” which he co-wrote with Michael Fleming, who organizes Santa Clarita’s annual Cowboy Festival.

It all goes to show poetry is thriving out west, even if cowboy poetry may not be to everyone's taste.

Claude Mckay on Summers in New Hampshire

It's been a long time since I last thought of the lost poetry blog. I was surprised to discover I had posted this summer, although only just. It's funny to also note that the blog carries on without me, racking up hits from old posts. Does it need its initiator at all?

I like this summer poem, even though the season described is so far removed from the heavy, sluggish and humid summer around these parts that it makes me want to move to New Hampshire.

Summer Morn in New Hampshire by Claude McKay

All yesterday it poured, and all night long
I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
Upon the grass like running children's feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
And nestled soft against the earth's wet breast.

But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
And I was blind with hunger for your love.

Verse of the Day - Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's been some time since I posted on here. It't not that poetry is superflous but there's the small matter of life. But poetry can take you places you want to be again in life such as the half remembered cliffs on a May day.

see this photographer at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alphageek/show/

Afternoon on a Hill - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing

Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds

With quiet eyes,

Watch the wind bow down the grass,

And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show

Up from the town,

I will mark which must be mine,

And then start down!

Ennui by Sylvia Plath

I can relate to Plath's poem as I feel bored today, listless at being part of a factor process that fills space and time because we have always filled time and space. Not with energy and light but with material as dull as heavy gray clay.

And so it goes on.

Ennui by Sylvia Plath
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.


The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

Arizona poets - Alberto Rios

The Chair She Sits In - Alberto Rios I’ve heard this thing where, when someone dies, People close up all the holes around the house— The keyholes, the chimney, the windows, Even the mouths of the animals, the dogs and the pigs. It’s so the soul won’t be confused, or tempted. It’s so when the soul comes out of the body it’s been in But that doesn’t work anymore, It won’t simply go into another one And try to make itself at home, Pretending as if nothing happened. There’s no mystery—it’s too much work to move on. It isn’t anybody’s fault. A soul is like any of us. It gets used to things, especially after a long life. The way I sit in my living-room chair, The indentation I have put in it now After so many years—that’s how I understand. It’s my chair, And I know how to sit in it.

Sonia Sachez is named as Philadelphia's poet laureate

It seems every big city and state is getting its own poet laureate these days. Philadelphia has just named Sonia Sanchez, a West Philadelphia resident as its new poet laureate.

According to phillyburbs.com the idea is to create a "powerful means of communication and artistic expression by creating a citywide position for poet laureate."

4 haiku by Sonia Sachez


(for Eugene Redmond)


Blue atom
poet transcribing
our flesh

2.

your quicksilver
words waterfalling in
sweet confession

3.

you have taken down
the morning turned it into
a roar of blackness

4.

your poems…
butterflies fluttering down
to earth.

On the death of Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone has died and I didn't know much about her when she was alive. Except that she was very old.

According to the BBC, her best-known work, including The Solution and Simplicity, came after she turned 70. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry, for In the Next Galaxy. She was 96 when she died.

Stone's second husband, poet Walter Stone, took his own life in 1959 - the year of her debut - leaving her to bring up three daughters.

Eta Carinae


The snow is coming straight down
Like heavy rain,
The crows protesting—
What do they know?
So the weather patterns change.
The crows, blue jays,
The soggy robins, the gold finches—
Dupes of the weather,
All deceived by the light.
The sun, wobbling and coughing
Along the dust belt;
The entire galaxy
Shuddering with Eta Carinae
Swollen to term.
The super-novae, like Christ,
Come to illuminate the ignorant,
Who can only swallow one another.



Strings


We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
"Oh," groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.

 

Boredom by Margaret Atwood

Tuesdays can be so dull. The week seems to stretch ahead with little hint of respite in our regimented lives. Wednesday is hump day - perhaps the worst - although one day we will be dead and in our last days we will probably give our right arm for a month of Wednesdays.

Still this circle of the week and the seasons can be claustrophobic. It can trap us in these ever decreasing circles like the rings inside a tree. Freedom is a relative concept, decreed by time, circumstance and wealth. Routine, once familiar and comforting, can also be our jailer.

And now we are trapped in our unbending ways, shuttered off in rooms and kept from the sun. Atwood's poem makes me think of the repetition of the saw and the hard and flat Canadian plains where there are no horizons. And God knows we need something to aim for.

Bored by Margaret Atwood

 All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

Verse of the Day - Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets and Fern Hill is surely one of his best poems. Which makes it special.

Fern Hill is about childhood and youth and its exuberant verse runs like the imlpulses of the young until its bittersweet conclusion; "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

It also echoes the estuaries and rolling green hills of  South Wales that Thomas made his own. You have to go there really to feel it and understand.



Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.


All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.


And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.


And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,


Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Anna Akhmatova and the victory of art over dictatorship

All our images from that time are gray and industrial - of seven year plans and cold intrigue in the Politburo; of weapons of war being paraded past a faceless leader in Red Square.
It's strange and unreal now to think of Russia in the 20th Century, of those totalitarian days when art, literature and religion were trampled under the jackboots of the paranoid Georgian.


But the land of Tolstoy and Chekhov wasn't going to give in easily to the plunder of its ideas and free expression, to the reduction of all that art and color onto one flat easel that bore the brutish features of Comrade Stalin. Even as the trains bore the dissidents north to the labor camps and salt mines of Siberia, as Collectivisation led to mass slaughter of the peasants and famine, so writers continued to write in the most uncompromising of places.

The life of Anna Akhmatova illustrates how art can triumph over oppression. The poet's first husband was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921; her son and second husband were deported to the camps. And yet her popularity with the Russian people meant even the all powerful Russian leader did not risk imprisoning her.

In the days since Stalin's death there have been seen many imitators. The Romanian leader Nikolai Chauchesku  in 1989, although it appears he can still be friended on Facebook; Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006 and it appears the mob didn't wait for a formal execution in the case of Muammar Gaddafi.

So is this the end of the line for the dictators who paraded in dark glasses and outlandish uniforms while their people suffered. Probably not but it gives hope that art and freedom of expression will overcome in the darkest of places.

Everything is Plundered by Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

1921

Can poetry revive Modesto's Image

I'm always interested in the redemptive power of poetry and how it can breathe life into the most uninspiring of places. T.S. Eliot's bleak canvass was The Wasteland and Slyvia Plath wrote about the dark places in the mind.

In their own way a group of poets in California have attempted something almost as impressive; putting a positive spin on Modesto.

I have never been to Modesto, although I believe I skirted past a few strip malls on its western side. The Rough Guide said there was no reason to go there unless you wanted your car stolen.

The book More than Soil, More than Sky, is the work of 51 poets, according to the Modesto Bee.

It goes beyond crime and foreclosures to talk about the cycles of nature, although the cycle of offending is there too.


"Some write about rural life. Think almond trees and red-tailed hawks. Others talk about the city's urban nature. One poem looks at prostitution on Ninth Street, another remembers an 11-year-old boy shot and killed by police officers," the article states.


Sam Pierstorff, who teaches at Modesto Junior College, is one of the inspirations behind the book. It's interesting but I'm still not sure it will persuade me to get off the bypass.


The Drowning of Poetry by Sam Pierstorff



It looks as if murders of crows have nested
in the ceiling of Barnes and Noble and are now
peeing on the poetry section below.

Or maybe God himself is spitting
upon the paperback coffins of living poets
lost in dead languages.

But the clerk says it’s the broken air conditioner:
“It’s been dripping all day.”
The poetry section is soaked. A plastic trash bag

catches each drop with the sound of cracking quartz rocks
or a quick succession of letters depressed on a keyboard:
the sound of this poem or this line perhaps
if you could hear it being t–y-p-e-d.

And why not the Self-Help section or Audio Books?
Shouldn’t those aisles drown first?
Or Religion? Imagine the fanatics lined up for miles
to see a book cover with Jesus weeping real tears
or the miracle of shelves parted like the Red Sea.

The temperature tonight seems fine
in the crowded bookstore, but the air conditioner
has broken above Poetry where no one seems to visit.
Perhaps the section is lonely.
Perhaps the ceiling cries.

Verse of the Day - Mark R. Slaughter

It must be fall again. The leaves are about to fall and the evenings have a chill tinge to them. I have neglected this blog for some time but give it fleeting glances every now and again. Like the feeble and fleeting sun on the lake in fall.


Pirouetting Autumn by Mark R. Slaughter



The tree blushed - a rude blast of air
Betrayed a shapely bough.
My saddened heart aware
That Nature's clock was chiming,
I froze upon the twelfth
Clanging tone, caught alone,
Staring at a creaking door -

Left ajar for dancing, coloured Autumn,
Pirouetting in her leaves,
While agitated summer creatures
Backed away resignedly,
Sighing in protracted breves.
I turned; gave company;
We stood together, watching
Summer slowly blow away.

Verse of the Day - Adam Zajajewski

Yes folks, there are poets whose name begins with the letter z, a letter that's pronounced zee over here, although I prefer "zed"


Adam Zagajewski is not only the only poet I am familiar with with a 'z' surname, but he's the only Polish poet I am aware of. And this poem strikes a chrord with me because I need balance - work/life balance right now.


Balance by Adam Zagajewski

I watched the arctic landscape from above and thought of nothing, lovely nothing. I observed white canopies of clouds, vast expanses where no wolf tracks could be found. I thought about you and about the emptiness that can promise one thing only: plenitude— and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland bursts from a surfeit of happiness. As we drew closer to our landing, the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds, comic gardens forgotten by their owners, pale grass plagued by winter and the wind. I put my book down and for an instant felt a perfect balance between waking and dreams. But when the plane touched concrete, then assiduously circled the airport's labryinth, I once again knew nothing. The darkness of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness, the darkness of the voice that counts and measures, remembers and forgets.

Verse of the Day - Chase Twichell

I found this poem by chance but I rather like it. It makes me think of the quietly rotting interior, the lonely farmsteads we pass on a road to nowhere; it can only be America; a world unpruned and broken where love is folded away in a drawer.

These are lonely and sad images but there's something appealing about them in the same way as there's something appealing about solitude and giving up on our mainstream lives.

Inland by Chase Twichell


Above the blond prairies,

the sky is all color and water.
The future moves
from one part to another.

This is a note
in a tender sequence
that I call love,
trying to include you,
but it is not love.

It is music, or time.
To explain the pleasure I take
in loneliness, I speak of privacy,
but privacy is the house around it.
You could look inside,
as through a neighbor's window
at night, not as a spy
but curious and friendly.

You might think
it was a still life you saw.
Somewhere, the ocean
crashes back and forth
like so much broken glass,
but nothing breaks.
Against itself,
it is quite powerless.

Irises have rooted
all along the fence,
and the barbed berry-vines
gone haywire.

Unpruned and broken,
the abandoned orchard
reverts to the smaller,
harder fruits, wormy and tart.
In the stippled shade,
the fallen pears move
with the soft bodies of wasps,
and cows breathe in
the licorice silage.

It is silent
where the future is.
No longer needed there,
love is folded away in a drawer
like something newly washed.
In the window,
the color of the pears intensifies,
and the fern's sporadic dust
darkens the keys of the piano.

Clouds containing light
spill out my sadness.
They have no sadness of their own.


The timeless trash of the sea
means nothing to me—
its roaring descant,
its multiple concussions.
I love painting more than poetry.

National Cowboy Poetry Gathering details are released.

Now yee haw, howdee and all that, you don't often associate cowboys with poetry - spitting on the earth and falling off the backs of bulls more like.

But I received a press release today for the 28th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering—the nation’s greatest celebration of the American West, its people, culture and tradition - which will take place January 30 to February 4, 2012, in Elko, Nevada.

"Every winter for the last 27 years, cowboys, ranchers, rural and urban people have traveled en masse to this small high desert community, to join with friends, family and others who care about the rural West. Together, they listen to poetry and music, learn about cowboy culture in the U.S. and around the world, experience great art, watch western films, learn a craft, and gather to eat, drink and swap stories," the release says.

 Ticket sales for the 28th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering begin on Tuesday, September 6, 2011. Members of the Western Folklife Center, which produces the event, can purchase tickets that day, while non-members can purchase tickets one month later, on Thursday, October 6.


Programs at the 28th Gathering will focus on the southwestern United States, specifically Arizona and New Mexico—which are celebrating their centennials next year—and West Texas. The event will present poets and musicians from the region, as well as workshops and panel discussions focused on regional food, culture and agriculture. An exhibition of Southwest ranching culture featuring the photography of Kurt Markus and Jay Dusard will be on display in the Western Folklife Center’s Wiegand Gallery.

The 28th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering will feature nearly 50 poets, musicians and musical groups from the U.S., Canada and Australia, performing on seven stages at four different venues. The line-up includes cowboy poets Baxter Black, Wally McRae, Paul Zarzyski, Waddie Mitchell, Yvonne Hollenbeck, Joel Nelson, Doris Daley and many others.

Have I heard of any of these fellas - nope. But I guess there must be a market for this kind of thing. This sure is a new take on the moon, that source of much poetic inspiration over the centuries. In saying that I'm left rather cold by that whole leathery bottomed cowboy love among the cactus kind of thing. Don't get me wrong: I thought Brokeback Mountain was a great movie and I'm all for homosexuality in the movies. But the love scenes certainly made me feel a bit queasy.


 See here for more details.

The Bucking Horse Moon by Paul Zarzyski

A kiss for luck, then we’d let ‘er buck—

I’d spur electric on adrenaline and lust.
She’d figure-8 those barrels
on her Crimson Missile sorrel—
we’d make the night air swirl with hair and dust.

At some sagebrushed wayside, 3 A.M.,
we’d water, grain, and ground-tie Missile.
Zip our sleeping bags together,
make love in any weather,
amid the cactus, rattlers, and thistle.

Seems the moon was always full for us—
its high-diving shadow kicking hard.
We’d play kid games on the big night sky,
she’d say that bronco’s Blue-Tail Fly,
and ain’t that ol’ J. T. spurrin’ off its stars?

We knew sweet youth’s no easy keeper.
It’s spent like winnings, all to soon.
So we’d revel every minute
in the music of our Buick
running smooth, two rodeoin’ lovers
cruising to another—
beneath Montana’s blue roan
bucking horse moon.

Verse of the Day - John Betjeman

John Betjeman was the poet laureate when I was growing up. He seemed like friendly old type; the sort you could while away a couple of hours in the pub with. His successor Ted Hughes was surely a better poet but less easy company.

I drove through Slough a couple of times when I was in England. It isn't as bad as in the 1930s when Betjeman wrote this poem. But nor is it the sort of place you linger in unless you are in the cast of The Office. I remember a strip of Polish shops, a nondescript industrial park and little more. It was was on the road to Windsor.

This poem seems to be a commentary on industrialisation as well as Slough and alienation from the natural world. And it's still relevant today because we all know people who daren't look up and see the stars but belch instead.

Slough by John Betjeman


Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.


But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.


Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Poetry on the streets of London

I have neglected this blog recently due to a trip to England. London may lack the romance of Paris but there's certainly poetry on these teeming streets; on the sides of the Tube and among the wacky performers at Covent Garden.

I'm not sure Londoners would be very interested in this poem or have a view on whether it's good or bad. True to my most random moments I plucked it out of mid air. The Internet is made for acts of wild and abandoned randomness. I highly recommend it.

However, the good folks of London are probably far too busy looting flat screen TVs to care.

London Baby by Mohammed Nashir

Who doesn’t miss London?
It is heaven on earth
Everything in one city
People bustling
Crime
No Crime
A life of phantom
Excellent Lyrics
Listen to this while I spit
London Baby
The hustle and bustle
The muscle and london’s Hollywood
Don’t miss it for one second
Never leave
Who wants to live in a boring small town
Live in London Baby
Not for the OAP
For the Messy
Violent
Alive
Artistic
And
City People
Not for the faint of heart

Verse of the Day - Emily Dickinson

It's strange to think of Emily Dickinson writing about wild night because she shut herself away from society and never had any, to my knowledge.

There are few poets less likely to wake up with a hangover and have vague and half remembered images of the night before. And let's face is, most of us have had a few of those mornings.

But poetry embraces the spectrum. Dickinson was the antithesis of Lord Bryon. If you found yourself sitting next to her at a dinner party, chances are, you'd probably stab yourself with a sharp knife to be taken away by the paramedics.

But Dickinson and Lord Bryon are both great poets, sitting as they do at the opposing ends of the spectrum.

Wild Nights, Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

Verse of the Day - Walt Whitman

I'd like to think my soul came out at night like Walt Whitman's but to be honest after a night of writing dry legal content, I fear it's shrivelled up and died in a corner of this silent house.

Inspiration can be a fickle thing, flickering when you least expect it and draining away when you want to call upon it. Coffee can keep me going through midnight but it's a poor awakener of the soul. The reality is we move in the same places, drive the same highways and go through the same motions every day. The possibilities are out there spread across an indistict horizon that becomes more abstract everyday.

So do we stick to these designed roles? Do I walk everyday into the same wordless lunchrooms and see the same people cowered over their sandwiches? Or can we seized the abstract, do the unexpected and finally change who we are?

I'm not sure what this has to do with Whitman, but mainly I hate this poet and see him as overrated, not that I've had much time to study his work. He looks like a beardy old  bore, though, the type of guy who would harrangue you at the railway station when you are trying to read your book - so there.

A Clear Midnight by Walt Whitman


THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars