Today's subject line is from Destiny Hemphill's "dna is just anotha theory for reincarnation: me, sitting in a burning tree (c. 4063)," which is the featured poem at Poetry Daily at the moment.

Bloody cough. Bloody heel and shoulder. Bloody paperwork. The BYM is fighting another cold, too. The list goes on. But I happened to catch Tank Ball ( Read more... )

Some weeks - months - YEARS ... life comprises wild pendulum swingy-swoops-de-swoops between "Boo-yah, I got this" and "!@#%!@$@!!@#@!#@!#!$%%%!!! learning/practice curve de tabernak ( Read more... )

Between the host's TV (on until 4 a.m. or thereabouts) and the neighbor's lawnmower (running at 8 a.m.), I didn't get as much sleep as I'd hoped, but there is coffee and almond cake right now (sparklepoints to Past Me for packing the latter), and there will be craic and napping later. Plus my 5 a.m. rummaging through my luggage revealed that ( Read more... )

Today's subject line comes from Muriel Rukeyser's Effort at Speech Between Two People, which I loved when I first read it at age 16 in John Frederick Nims's Western Wind, and had a sudden urge to reread just before I went to bed ( Read more... )

I was drawn into Christian Wiman's "He Held Radical Light" excerpt at Poetry Daily earlier today because I became curious about where he was going after calling a good chunk of another writer's body of work "flavorless as old oatmeal." But the part where I sat up straight was when my own dour mutterings about eventual nothingness ("Look, I'm not ( Read more... )

During this afternoon's driving around, I caught part of the TED radio hour's rerun of a feature on a boiling river that didn't appear on any maps before a Texas grad student's aunt connected him to a shaman who has allowed him repeated access to it.

On a far more mundane level, my cabin at Splashdance didn't appear on the map. Finding it -- ( Read more... )

Literally:


( Read more... )

Tonight's subject line comes from the first line of a letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell on April 1, 1958. It was actually a sunny day here, but I liked seeing the phrase just now, as well as the pleasure of peeking at a letter written sixty years ago (replete with frustration about a worker stealing apples and singing awful songs, a ( Read more... )

Today's subject line comes from Mary Oliver's Wild GeeseThe cardboard coffee-cup sleeves in my hotel room exhort, "COOL IT! You can't book a vacation with injured fingers." It took me a minute to realize it was referring to hot beverages, since what's on my mind at the moment is the discerning act (for an assortment of reason, right now the word " ( Read more... )

The subject line's from Louis MacNeice's "Snow." Which we don't actually have here, as it's above 70 F ( according to @NashSevereWx, we hit a record-breaking 76 F a couple of hours ago). The temptation is to ignore the must-do list and putter about in the yard, but I would also like to get enough sleep before driving around the northeast later this ( Read more... )