The man, wearing a burgundy Florida State University t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Lethal Simplicity,” nodded as we approached each other on a recent walk around the neighborhood. “And how are we today?” he asked. “Simply fine,” I responded and laughed as his golden retriever pulled him on past. I thought of Dorothy in […]
Commit Poetry: Edgar Guest – and My Uncle Edgar
For Edgar Gilmore with congratulations and the best wishes always of another Edgar. Sincerely, Edgar A. Guest June 17, 1939 That’s the inscription inside Edgar A. Guest says: It Can Be Done, a book I found when we were packing up to move. I called my dad the other day. “Who was Edgar Gilmore?” He didn’t know. […]
The Metz Fire of 1908–and Maybe a Connection
My grandmother once rode a train through the middle of a forest fire. I heard the story second-hand from my dad. The family settled in Alpena, he told me, and never returned home to Tower, Michigan. Grandma was four years old. She was born in 1904. Tower is about 15 miles west of […]
Commit Poetry: Printing in My Heart’s Wax
Although I’ve forgotten a lot about my high school years, I do recall a fear of poetry, and letting my eyes roam around the room or stare at my book while I mentally begged the teacher not to call on me in class. Yet if I really was so scared, why did I torture […]
Commit Poetry: The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps […]
Commit Poetry: Prufrock Complete And Worth It All
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . Who starts memorizing poetry at my age? If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be memorizing swaths of poetry now—on purpose—starting with a 131-line T.S. Eliot poem, I might have rolled up the bottoms of my white girlfriend jeans and […]
Dared: Bikes, Lanterns, and Mary Oliver
After I took that spill on a hill at dusk into a pile of Mackinac Island horse manure some years back, I was afraid to climb back on my bike. But when we moved into this neighborhood carved from the Everglades, I agreed to join my husband on various wild adventures, some of which involved […]
Read-to-Write: Nature-Deficit Disorder (1)
I grew up on a lake–practically lived in the woods–and did all kinds of things outdoors that these days would be considered too dangerous. There was little on TV (we got maybe two stations) and no electronic “gizmology.” Books were my best friends, and I often read them outside. Last week my husband and I […]
Commit Poetry: Ten Reasons Why To Memorize
It remains a mystery why Tweetspeak Poetry chose Prufrock for me to memorize. If they didn’t feel like I was done with Thomas E, or he with me, and they wanted me to extend my brainy pathways with something long, they could have chosen a more sing-songy piece—like maybe something from the Old Possum’s […]
Commit Poetry: Prufrock – Part 7
Continuing to complete the dare issued by Tweetspeak Poetry in the fall–to memorize T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To […]
