Reading experiences

My Reading Life
When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd by Walt Whitman - elegy on the death of Abe Lincoln.

A Dance to the music of time

"Pat, don't you think the passage of time is what all literature is really about? Poems, plays, novels, everything?"
- Gene Norris, Pat's English teacher.

Millay

I like the courage in Interim
Back cover

Her elegies are good. 'still' appears a lot in her poems.
A maiden lost in love is not down.

No rose in a garden that ever grew
In Homer's or in Omars or in mine

-Edna St Millay

If memory worked differently
our poems would not end in
rhymes but begin with synonyms
or end with antonyms

If it remembered experiences with
varying degrees
our poems would end in
er and est

Her sonnets

Life

The Lesser tragedy of death reminded me of another poetry book which is about a dead person.

Clean slate

The volley ball court
is sand raked
Three birds walked
towards the center
of a triangle
and then
they flew

Formats

A Pecha Kucha poem by Terrance Hayes in Lighthead

Yellow milk

A grandfather has cows
He names the young
after the labor
of his
grandchildren

Cows in Africa

Travel

The Masque of Africa
Makerere
Marabou stork
Kasubi tombs
Buganda
Busoga
Sezibwa falls
Lake flies

Authorial Alliances

This morning listening to an NPR program on a book about Salinger's life, I was reminded about Mornings with Mailer
Dormer

Analysis

Chronic symptons are koans- apparently unaswerable questions meant to increase our consciousness - Arnold Mindell

liquid antibiotics

Growing up Jung

subculture and counterculture

Culture attacks all certainities ... Hanif Kureishi,My ear at his heart

Yet to figure the meaning.

Daffodils

Night is the name we give to the shadow of the earth. - Becoming Animal, David Abram.

Wordsworth has given us daffodils but David Abram's prose opens our eyes so we can see nature's beauty in all its forms and intensities of light.

Paul Shepard

Wheres the porthole?

I skewed my eye
and warily see
my face
inside out
like inside of
dolls we played
with in 80s.
detachable heads
reachable forms
of eyes, nose,
mouth inside.

******************

I felt a funeral in my brain
Dear Migraine

Mountains

The mountains are shedding their snow early - Money for nothing, Kevin Holdsworth.

I have admired Humphry peak, I have admired it with snow but I never thought of the snow belonging to Humphry. I can speak to the mountain as one. I find it hard to imagine multitudes.

In the shadow of a Mountain

Miracles of light

If not for life
lets go to the
moon and mars
for the sorts of
Reflection
Luminescence

Universal experience

It is so much easier to write if your experience is familiar to others. Then everybody is on the same page and its the impact part that you are focusing on in writing. I havent seen the Aurora Borealis, so I am still a stranger to the experience. It would be a different reading experience otherwise.