Meme Guilt

I wish I were a better sport about memes. The tasks are interesting—even if they’re challenging—and I like reading other participants’ responses. Plus, memes are blogosphere-specific. I approve of anything calving posts from other sorts of writing. But the meme I received from G at How To Survive Suburban Life (via TIV)is hard. The request [...]

14 Years Later

My older brother is a physician and told me once I shouldn’t expect to remain slim forever. Most men, he said, gain one pound for every year after 35. At the time I resisted—an inveterate athlete, I told him I’d be the exception—but, as with most of his statements about aging, he’s proven prophetic. He [...]

Haiku Sonnet: On Reviewing Fagles’ Homer*

We’ve read the story, should know. Amid the weapons hung an unstrung bow— Odysseus’s— old but turned in servants’ hands, oiled for use, waiting for its moment in a tale already written. It couldn’t harbor a deep, unseen crack, wouldn’t snap in his hands, or bend like one finished with resisting. Only we can picture [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Ready

Every haiku a vessel, rooms of buckets wait for a leaky roof. But there will be no rain tonight. Tonight the moon, through the window, sends crescents of half-light to illuminate buckets’ mouths, mouths that couldn’t be any more open, any more set to receive life—too bad they’re mute, deaf to summons. They’ll sit and [...]

Bobbing in the Ocean

Derek Gordon, vice president of Technorati, reports that just over 99% of blogs receive no hits. If he isn’t pulling the statistic from his posterior, it’s a mighty sad fact—the blogosphere is a sea of bottled messages. Technorati is tracking the sum of blogs—a figure that increased by 16% in the last two months—and Gordon [...]

Finds: Thanksgiving in Perspective

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, I thought I’d include three sites about the holiday. Warning: approach them in the sequence they’re offered, and you may have a different vision of the day…or develop a different way to commemorate the day. Here is a video from The History Channel, an account of thanksgiving and the [...]

On Wanting Something

Henry Ward Beecher, the 19th century preacher and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe once said: A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Riding

On the L, I glanced at faces and discovered reiterations like me, a few more divisions of one first man and one first woman who walked together in a gorge carved from time, aged in time, filling with silt, clay, stone. Fossils don’t speak any more than L passengers do— Neither sees what they’ve lost [...]

The Story in Outline

Linda McClinton sat in front of him in fifth grade, and every day he hoped she might turn all the way around to hand him a mimeo or, if she wouldn’t turn around, look at him with her peripheral vision the way he’d heard her tell a friend she could. Had she smiled at him [...]

Me-me-ing: On Poetry

When my memory stretches back to first times, the germ of the present is there. I don’t recollect my first poem exactly, but my feelings about writing poems haven’t changed much. For me, poems are elevated expression—part venting, part vision, part visit with the unknown. I’ve used up hour upon hour thinking about what poetry [...]