Yesterday's post was "The First Violet" by Karl Egon Ebert, which was completely evocative of Spring. And here in the mountains of New Hampshire, Spring is just now starting to spring: the forsythia, tulips and daffodils are out, the trees are in bud, the snowmelt is racing in the stream outside my window. And so it was that I came to today's poem ( Read more... )

Yesterday's poem was "O My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose" by Robert Burns. Where to go next when the talk is of roses? To Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet? "What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet." (Act II, sc. 2.) To Gertrude Stein's "Sacred Emily", which contains the line "a rose is a rose is a rose ( Read more... )

The poem I picked to start out my poetry collection posts is "The Ovenbird" by Robert Frost, first published in his collection Mountain Interval in 1916. Oftentimes the lines that come unbidden to my mind are the final two, but today, it was the third-to-last line: "But that he knows in singing not to sing ( Read more... )

One of the best-loved of Frost's poems, and with good reason, is "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening". It's been widely anthologized in collections for adults as well as children, and it has been set to music and as the text of a picture book on at least one occasion. I feel I should tell you that much as I love this poem, I've been thinking ( Read more... )

Today, because I'm pressed for time, and because I was thinking of this poem, and because today is the start of the Great Backyard Bird Count, I am providing you with an "encore" of a post that I put up in April of 2007. Man, I love this poem. Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard ( Read more... )

Saturday is February 14th, celebrated in many places as St. Valentine's Day. It's all terribly commercial these days, but there's something a little bit sweet (no pun intended) about the idea of letting the people you love know that you love them ( Read more... )

Believe me when I say that the title of this post is 100% accurate as to content today, as is the Eddie Izzard quote in the icon. The long story version is that I've just read an interview (from which I will be quoteskimming come Sunday), in which Keats was mentioned. And I thought (as I so often do) "F*ck me, I love Keats", which happens to be a ( Read more... )

I know that for many people, the holidays are "the most wonderful time of the year." For others, based on medical statistics, they are stressful and possibly depressing. For me, they are a wintry mix. (I know - I kill me ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I spent over an hour settling my brain (to borrow a phrase from Clement C. Moore), during which time I pawed through quite a number of notepads and notebooks and pieces of paper to get a feel for what I've done, what I've started (turns out to be a handful of things that I got started writing or close to writing, but which haven't been ( Read more... )

The ravioli course was good, if tiring (more than three hours on my feet is more than two hours too long standing around, even if I'm learning how to make pasta dough and how to roll pasta dough using a Kitchen Aid mixer attachment and how to make ravioli and puttanesca sauce, and even if I'm getting to eat spinach & 3 cheese ravioli and butternut ( Read more... )