March 2003 Archives
My wife was reading Voice, and she tells me clocks don't leap forward until next week.
Came across Mind today. It's an interesting blog with thoughts of the day, almost like short poems of wisdom, for entries. The blog also, thankfully, reminds me tonight to spring forward forward an hour.
Brandon Barr makes an interesting point at TextURL. He says topical lists get their organization at a grassroots level, whereas forums are organized from the top down.
He says blogs are different. How? Maybe the individual blog is different, but I suppose one blog wants to join company with another, for blogs, or clusters of blogs, to join a conversation. In this way, blogs might be like lists: the single voice combines with other voices until, from the bottom up, an overall voice emerges.
I just punctured my thumb with a paper clip. There's a little red dot of blood that, if I don't suck it, pools, then drips. A bandaid would help.
My wife says I'm obsessed with blood in poems. Not too long ago I read through a lot of old work, and blood in fact was here and there. Oh, well--perhaps I've always had this wound in my thumb.
At times the Internet's a terribly murky place, filled with people who should be in Saddam's bunker with a missle coming at it. I'm talking about spammers who attach a username to your domain name, then send mail as if it were coming from your organization. May a missle cruise up their assholes and explode.
I just returned from a poetry reading that was part of Meramec's celebration of Women's History Month. One of the readers mentioned the short lives of male wasps. When I got up to read "Old Amusement Park" by Mary Ann Moore, I mentioned the similar short lives of male ants. Males don't seem to have long life spans in the world of insects.
I went to the reading to listen. But a colleague said I would read, and gave me the book of Moore's poems. There was one poem I liked but couldn't pronounce the last word and didn't know the word's meaning. Gagesse, I think. Then I saw "Old Amusement Park." Late last week I went to New York City, landing at LaGuardia, which looked as if it had always been there. But the subtitle of Moore's poem was "Before LaGuardia Airport." Evidently, the park was razed to make way for the airport. That was interesting to learn.
I just appeared as the guest poet for March at Bellatrix Blue. The poems there were in progress for several years, and I still don't know whether they're finished. That's a problem of mine: Never knowing whether a piece is finished. Maybe such a thought indicates there's work still to do.
I just returned from a writing conference in New York City where I heard Steven Berlin Johnson talk about digital text. I came away from his talk with an idea at last of how to approach this blog.
To unwind after getting home I looked at some poetry blogs and came across Million Poems, a pleasant enough blog from Jordan Davis, described as "Not a book, but a depot for poems in route." I'm confused, however, by "route." Does Jordan mean the poems in his blog are drafts? If so, I'd love to them read them instead on a Wiki so I or any other reader could follow the drafts. That would be a lovely route to follow.
Recently on the Sainteros blog there was a post condemining the military's use of the word awe. I've always thought of awe as meaning something positive. A beautiful sunset, the rapids of the Niagara River, the way my wife looks at me with love in her eyes, a good poem--all those things fill me with awe. They leave me with an overwhelming feeling of wonder. They leave me with the feeling that the world is good. The military has hijacked awe and made it mean instead something destructive, something that leaves you witha profound fear. That's a meaning also of awe, but it's the second meaning. Most people, before this war, have more than likely equate awe with the positive connoation.
