Contraction
1 week ago
Friday, September 10, 2010
Catch The Wave
Billy Collins was a recent Poet Laureate of the United States, a position held in the Library of Congress. In his tenure, he put in place a whole group of published poems designed to be an English track on poetry for high school students, a poem a day. He is one of our best poets. This video gives you a chance at eight other recorded poems and I believe Billy is reading his own work.
I have continued my own poetry push, renewed from last spring. A high tide has come up on me. I have written 54 poems in a month. Not only that, I have reached out to two poet groups using prompts to write to. I have been doing this following of prompts impromptu for two years, using the blogs of others and posting the results there all along. One guy named me Johnny Applepoem because I keep planting poems where I go. I know this could be rude to some, that some folk might not understand or want that, thinking I am competing or believing myself the better poet or some such, but it is more like I am catching the wave. I am replying as if it were conversation. My blogfriend Rachel has understood and has joined me happily from time to time. Now we assume we will do that poem and response thing. There are others who get me. I am particularly happy when people leave poems behind on my site. At least if I am rude to some, I have hold of this truth. I am not doing to you guys that which I would not have done to me. I want your inspiration. I am happy to receive your poems any time here on my blog.
I am not possessive of my work. You will see no copyright statements here.
Catch The Wave
The ebb and flow is
mystery, tidal, inner
moon of hidden world
not shaped like this one
and there is nothing to do
about that shifting
tide but surf or nap.
There are times to move quickly
and times to idle-
best to stay alert.
July 16, 2009 9:01 AM
July 16, 2009 9:01 AM
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i love this sensibility you have and like what you are doing with poetics. my own return to my poetic expression was facilitated by my reuniting with my son, who is a poet and story teller and who re-awakened it ( and continues to inspire it) in me.
ReplyDeleteas for leaving poems and poetic expressions, yea verliy!! pray do so at my place anytime you like :))
and thanks for the sincere invitation to return the favour here at your place.
also enjoyed billy collins; i just heard a wonderful interview with him as he discussed an anniversary of emily dickenson's work. great stuff.
cheers!
I like that; you planting poems. yes you do, i love that.
ReplyDeleteand another beauty today,
mmmm, best to stay alert, i know.
Harlequin :D I really like Billy for what he did for the high school kids. The poems he chose, they were not juvenile in any sense.
ReplyDeleteJozien, if you are alert then you will avoid the more foolish heart pain. You cannot avoid it all, of course.
Oh, yes! Ride the waves of inspiration. I'm so pleased you don't have a copyright hang up either. I'm only too pleased when anything I write menas enough to another that that want to pass it on - even if they're cheeky enough to call it their own! The Cosmos will know the difference...
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly it. This thing we have here is not about anything "practical", not for me. I know what could be and I too have an urgency, but it is not that kind of thing at all. First of all, nothing here is mine anyway. Love is involved, and truth of some kind, and joy, lots of joy. You others who may come here are as real, as important as I am.
ReplyDeleteThere is no need to prove anything here, though there is a need to measure up. I want at the end of the day to be able to say so, that this day really happened and I was really in it.
I understood this, the poems left behind, all along.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that. I think most do, who are bit, infected by some sort of spirit creator themselves. There are others who drive the bus from self centered aspiration of some kind, as I did music in the early days, asking of music what it cannot give ultimately. That creative source is possessive. Or there are those who insist that money is coming. They too are possessive, but in poetry?? How likely is that? You have a better chance as a musician or an actor, and that ain't good.
ReplyDeleteI am at the far end of things and what I am doing from the self point of view is recording my life, no more. The rest and the most is that there are poems trying to get free. This makes the self centered motive problematic because my history is severely distorted by the demands of the poems.
i likes that Billy Collins guy.
ReplyDeleteWell, I can live a life anytime I want with a Galaxy Gramophone
And I can pitch my soul at any speed I like
Depending on what level you're on
In the space between a subconsious track
I'm hung up shakin'hands with myself
As I try make my serial plans through the eye of a storm
To centre of the milky way
Well I can pick up a life anywhere I choose
On my Galaxy Gramophone
And I can make it sound so beatiful by scarching in a twilight zone
A rereversal unichorusverse for puppets on a cosmic string
As I pass around a loop through the eye of a storm
To centre of the milky way
Well I can live my life at any speed i like
Depending who's turning me on
As I try to make my way back home throught the eye of a storm
To the centre of the milky way
Through the centre of a milky way
To the bottom of the milky way...
Lundberg/Olsson
The Soundtrack of Our Lives (TSTOOL)
Ghost, lovely to have you hear again. Thank you for channeling Lundberg and Olsson, I think. :D
ReplyDeletePoetry of the heart and spirit jus IS. It exists because it does, not because we will it or seek it. It is as natural as our breathing. Sometimes it is what the world would consider good and sometimes it is not. It really doesn't matter, does it Christopher? It just is.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'm so happy when you drop one my way.
Karen, I was reminded by my cousin Patia that some of us are driven by the practical. She is continuing to look for ways to make her words pay because she is deep in debt, having taken that debt on in order to learn her way around the words. I guess for her there is a deep need to be released from that burden and a deep demand for the fairness of things to work out. She is a wordsmith among other things but I have seen no poetry. She is not so silly as to think she should make poetry pay.
ReplyDelete