Who am I, really? What do I want to be remembered for?
Raccoon as a Trickster, a local Native twist.
Why be clever?
“The distance I felt came not from the country or the people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”— narrator in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood set in Montana
A viral carousel.
Quaker by degrees. Turn up the heat?
Quaker vagabonds were Dharma bums, too. The itinerant ministry proffers its own humor.
Things I learned in two years of college French? Le is pronounced luh.
As a youth, I admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was my favorite.
I never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence my poetry as much as my college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction, especially.
When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget your or I as the psalmist is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”
I’m past the bitterness, the years – all the lost potential.
Jnana's Red Barn 