We had doubled our subscriber base from one to two (thanks Mom!), we had cut our backlog of unresponded-to submissions from 2,348,274 to 2,348,251, and we had adopted a tough anti-favoritism policy that would become a model for the non-profit poetry (but I repeat myself) industry. ![]() You'll see why this is important in a minute.Ĭall me bitter, but when I was removed as editor of that forlorn little rag in a bloody coup (I was treated for severe paper cuts at the student infirmary-$10 co-pay!), I had it headed in the right direction. If your tastes in entertainment run to the obscure, the impenetrable and-in the special Christmas double issue-offensive poetry. I needed some guidance that only the best poetry can provide, so I turned to this month's issue of plangent voices magazine, at $3.75 your best entertainment value. They didn't really hang together, though, my many fragments of inspiration. Eliot once said, “Mediocre writers borrow, great writers steal.” cummings I don't use capital letters all the time, I sometimes write haiku with lines of 5, 6 and 5 syllables (nobody ever notices) and I frequently recycle other poets' best images. Still, I hated to just throw them out-what a waste that would be! I try to maintain a pretty small poetic footprint like e.e. I was enamored of them all when I wrote them but I had to admit they weren't going anywhere.Įliot: “I just picked Ezra Pound's pocket.” There were recollections from my boyhood growing up in a small Midwestern town. There was children's poetry-”Fuzzy, buzzy bumblebee, hope he doesn't land on me!” There were lines that expressed the tragic sense of life: “Something is born, and something dies.” That's not going to find its way into Reader's Digest. All of them possessing some merit, some lyrical element, but none of them finished, none of them formed into a literary whole. There's the big notebook I take on the train each day and the little notebook I keep in my desk drawer for moments of late-night inspiration-those were full-but I also found scraps of poetry in my winter coat pockets, in the console of my car, in my brief case. The next day when I took stock of things I found that the clutter was worse than I thought. ![]() “Okay,” I said, recalling our longstanding division of labor. ”I'll do a poetry clean-up tomorrow.” “We agreed that poetry was going to be your thing-along with garbage and changing the cat litter-remember?” “Maybe the poetry is starting to pile up around here,” I said. We keep one of those flip signs in the front vestibule: “543 days without a major household accident,” and we turn the card just before going to bed each night. That sealed the deal-around our house it's safety first, last and always. “I nearly broke my leg stepping over it when I was bringing up the lawn furniture.” “What do you care? It's not in your way-you never go down there anyway.” “That's a villanelle I'm working on,” I said, and if I sounded a bit miffed, I was. “Can you do something about those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement stairs?” she asked. ![]() I tackled the garage last weekend, we did the patio and the backyard today, and as we finished up my better half made the sort of helpful suggestion that always casts a pall over the rest of the weekend. ![]() Spring comes late in New England, so we're behind the rest of the country when it comes to spring cleaning.
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