“If thee needs anything and cannot find it, just come to me and I’ll tell thee how to get along without it.” — Etta Macy, Owen County, Quaker, in “Indiana’s Self-reliant Uplanders,” National Geographic, March 1976.

It’s something I’ve heard from others later, across the country.

~*~

Oh, my, one of my favorite off-the-cuff poems of all time wasn’t by the poet I’ve long attributed it to but rather our dear colleague, Richard Pflum. To wit: “In the garden / the women are pacing to and fro / speaking of fellatio.”

I stand corrected.

Reacting to an attack on “just folks poets” by an Iowa staffer in Kayak, criticizing those he looked down on in circles of poets who didn’t aspire to greatness but rather preferred comradery and “goodness.”

“All American poetry today sounds the same,” to which Paul Solyn replied, “not if you listen to it.”

“There aren’t any memorable lines in today’s work,” was equally glib. What was he expecting, advertising slogans? By the way, as one poet told me, “The lines I in my work I find most memorable, other readers don’t.”

[Gee, I found nothing about packing up everything or loading the U-Haul or farewells. Guess I was just too busy.]

~*~

Gleanings from my spiralbound journals plus commentary from now. .