We are sitting at the edge of Michigan’s own slice of the Caribbean—Torch Lake. The water is teal, sometimes turquoise. A handful of children are making little crayfish corrals of sand, circled and fortified by rocks, catching the creatures first with a net and pail. As for us, we’re fortified with turkey sandwiches and bottles of […]
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 […]
Commit Poetry: The Stolen Child – First Stanza
Tweetspeak Poetry has issued an all-inclusive (that means to you, too) dare to commit W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child” during National Poetry Month. Some suggest that it helps to turn the words of a poem into a song when you’re trying to memorize it. No need to with this one. Tweetspeak has already posted […]
6 R’s of Poetry Memorization
I finally settled on six weapons to finish off Prufrock—I mean, to complete this dare—and they each begin with the letter “R.”
Committing Prufrock: Chasing Rabbits
Here I am working on only my third barista badge. I have a ways to go, but I can’t look too far ahead. If I do, I’ll panic and start muttering in the streets about having to recite all “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at once. This is a long poem, so I […]
How in the Universe am I Going to Do This Thing?
After Tweetspeak pinned me down to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (all of it) and after I stopped hyperventilating, I decided to take a bite of the peach with a smile. I rolled up my sleeves and the bottoms of my jeans (I can do that in November in South Florida) and asked […]
When You’re Without a Dare Care
One never knows when a certain editor might start to crack a dare, so it’s good never let one’s guard down. But there I was on Saturday morning—just sitting on a bench outside our cottage, enjoying the warm breeze as it wafted through the palms. I was watching tiny geckos, snapping a few pictures, and trying […]
Dreaming With Darwish: Forms of the Dream
“Tell me how you lived your dream in some place, and I’ll tell you who you are.” ~Mahmoud Darwish It started as just a 30-day dream dare with Mahmoud Darwish. It’s been 60 days, and I’m not done with him yet. This poetry dare arrived in two parts: first, read a poem a day […]
Dreaming With Darwish: Nurture Hope
The poet Mahmoud Darwish believed there needed to be a time gap between an event and the writing about it. My thoughts about this latest dare are like “cotton ginned by the wind.” Maybe I need a wider gap. I’ve sat most of this past week in “A State of Siege,” a long text […]
Dream Poem #4: Dreaming With Darwish
Well, things have been a bit quiet around here (the blog) for several weeks, and I don’t know where the summer has gone. My daughter is still displaced and dealing with insurance after her house fire. We’ve been working slowly on some house projects, and there have been a few trips out of town, […]
