Thinking About Song Lyrics

We go to sleep at night with something on for noise. This might be an audio book (Lynda's preference when she's reading one) or the variety music station on the radio (my choice all the time). Right now, since Lynda's between audio books, we have the radio on. We keep it low. When the furnace comes on (or the AC in warm weather) you can barely hear it. When the HVAC unit is off, it's still pretty low, but if you happen to be awake, you'll hear what's playing or being said.

This station we have on is a mixture of oldies and newer songs, trending toward slow songs and what could be called easy listening. Absent are the hard rock, acid rock, rap, and most of the "peppy" songs. Not that they are all ballads, but they definitely tend to the quieter, slower songs.

I recognize and know well most of the oldies they play; and I'm learning a number of newer songs, including some newer artists. If I had to guess I'd say the Carpenters are played more than any other artist. Next is Willie Nelson. I don't see a third favorite after that, unless it's either Michael Buble or Colbie Callat. Both of them are okay, though Colbie can be tiring at times. The Carpenters are always good. The less said about Willie Nelson the better. As often as not, when one of his starts when I'm in the car, I turn to another station.

One favorite artist I learned of from this station is Katie Melua. Maybe four years ago I heard her song "Nine Million Bicycles", and liked it. Slowly over time I heard other of her songs on this station, and came to like them all. I looked her up, learned about her circumstances and career, and liked her even more.

Another song that I heard first on this station is "Perhaps Love", a song written by John Denver and recorded by him with Placido Domingo. I find it quite enjoyable, and consider it a plus whenever I happen to hear it. Well, Tuesday night I did. I woke up in the middle of the might, maybe around 4:00 a.m. The furnace wasn't running, and I heard that song start on the radio and stayed awake through the end. So that was an excellent time to wake up. Then, this morning on the way to work, a song started for which I couldn't place the song. It was "Nine Million Bicycles", but it had been so long since I've heard it I had forgotten the musical intro. So I heard both of these songs a day apart, and that helped the days to be good days.

This got me to thinking about song lyrics. What makes these songs "tick" for me? Is it the lyrics? The tunes? The combo of the two? And that led me to think of this blog and what to write about and, well, since I've dabbled in song lyrics a little over of the course of my poetic endeavors, I thought perhaps discussing the lyrics of those songs would be a good thing.

So, that's what I'm going to do, probably in the next two posts, but for sure over the next two weeks. I'm at work as I write this and it's time to be heading home. This evening, time allowing, I'll edit in links to where the lyrics can be seen and to where the songs can be heard. That will give anyone interested a chance to read and hear the songs before my next couple of posts come.

Trying to Write One More Poem

I used to write a lot of poetry. Now, not so much.  Some time around 2008 I laid aside my poet’s quill in favor of a prose keyboard. Up until then I’d been doing both together. But it seemed that my creative juices had dried up as far as poetry is concerned.

While my poems cover a range of topics and forms, including a few free verse attempts, my main work to date is my book Father Daughter Day. It comprises 39 poems that tell the story of a day a dad promised to spend with his daughter, then did so after some hesitation. It’s not a heavy conflict story, but rather a feel good story. The only real conflict is in the two longest poem: one a saga told by a mistral at a state park they visit; the other a whimsical personifications of animals, plants, and rocks at the same park as they watch humans on their turf.

I started this around 2003 (though one or two of the poems pre-dates that; I just didn’t know they would fit into this book) and finished it around 2006. I say finished, because I always planned on adding one to three more poems. Why didn’t I do it right then, in 2006, instead of setting poetry aside in favor of prose? The short answer is I probably should have just kept going. The longer answer relates to those creative juices. I needed to do something else. Who knew that, when the time came to get the last little bit done, eight years would have passed?

Now, since I’ve decided to self-publish FDD without messing with getting it illustrated, the decision on these poems has become critical. How many of these do I actually need to make the story complete? Can I get them done in a reasonable period of time? Will the story be “seamless” with them—or without them? And will they stand alone as well as fit seamlessly into the story?

I’ve about decided I only need one more: a bedside prayer poem by the daughter. I had thought of adding one more by the father (I already have two by him). I have a couple of poems in the daughter’s voice, but not prayers. I think I really need that one, and probably another haiku or cinquain along beside it. I even know what form I want the prayer poem in.

But I can’t seem to write it. I’ve started it multiple times, but never seem to get more than a couple of lines into it before the ideas die. Is it because I’m so distracted by my prose projects that my mind can’t shift to poetry? If so, maybe I just need to get these other works done and up for sale, and then take the time I need for the poem and its book. The problem is there are a hundred prose projects waiting in the wings after I finish these. Who’s to say I’ll ever be able to push them from my mind long enough to concentrate on the poems?

No, I think I need to somehow carve out poetry time in the midst of prose, and somehow get the poem done. Or maybe the lack of inspiration shows I 1) don’t need the poem, or 2) I’ve chosen the wrong form for it. Maybe I need to just write the poem out in prose and see how it sounds, then see if I can write a poem based on the prose. I don’t know for sure what I should do.

What I need is an evening when I’ll be sitting in a City Council meeting, waiting for a presentation our firm will make. I shouldn’t be the presenter, but be there to support the presenter and answer questions if he can’t. We might be sitting there an hour before getting up to speak. While the city fathers drone on with their routine business waiting to get to us, perhaps I can write the prayer out, see what the girl will say in her prayer about the day, where they went, what she did; about her mom and baby brother; about other things. From there, I need some time where I’ll be forced to be away from the computer to see if the poem will flow from that short prose. Yes, I’ll look for these times, then I’ll report back.

Over and out for now.

Once Again, an Idea Lost

"That would make a great blog post."

That's what I said to myself at some point yesterday. Knowing that today was my day to blog here, I was looking about for an idea of what to write about. Something came to me that I knew was a good idea for a post, and I spent a little time trying to lock it into my mind. I don't remember where I was, but I guess I was at a place where I couldn't write it down.

Then, last night at home, while I was fighting through a low blood sugar episode, and the usual stuff an evening brings, I realized the idea was gone. I tried to remember what it was, but nothing. I tried to remember where I was when the idea came to me, but nothing.

This is the second time I've written about this, the other time not so long ago. And to think that, just a little before that, I had been thinking that I was doing a good job of capturing ideas. I really do need to get some kind of notebook that I keep with me, to jot down important items that I want to act on at some point in the future, especially writing ideas.

So what do I write about today? I thought of the weather. I heard the wind in the night, which I thought would be a good first line of a haiku. Today it was cloudy and sprinkling as I left for work. I could write about my health, and the fact that my weight is down to the lowest it's been since 1992. Just another pound or two and I'll be passing through another weight loss milestone. With my blood sugar readings being mostly good, and the doctor putting me on a six-month appointment schedule instead of quarterly, there's much to tell about health. But how boring that would be for you all.

I could talk about writing. But that's what my other blog is for. I finished some song lyrics yesterday. I should say that I don't really write song lyrics. What I do is improve lyrics in songs that I think can be improved; I add verses to songs that need another verse; and I take rock and roll songs and write Christian lyrics for them, typically following the same theme of the original song. Some time ago (meaning perhaps a year or so), I began working on Christian lyrics for Chuck Berry's "My Ding-A-Ling". When I say "working" I mean when I'm walking, especially my noon walks on weekdays. I sing or hum, which is why I walk alone, I suppose.

Yesterday, after singing the usual songs on the first lap, I wanted to "write" on the second lap. That song came to mind, so I started working on it. By the end of the second lap I had recalled what I'd done with it before, and finished the five verses I wanted. All in my head, of course. I would have to write them out when I got to my desk after walking. At that time I first went to the break room and drank a glass of water to re-hydrate, then went back to my desk and...forgot that I had something to write down. Can you believe it? Two minutes and 50 feet to and from the break room, and I forgot what I had to do. Kind of like an idea for a blog post.

By mid-afternoon I remembered that I had forgotten to write the lyrics down, so I took a break and re-created them. As best I could. I'm sure they aren't the same as the brilliant ones I had when I was walking, but they aren't bad. Now that I have them on paper I can continue to refine them into perfect lyrics.

But, how interesting will it be to bore you all with the story of how I came up with some song lyrics? So, I apologize, everyone who reads this blog. I guess I don't have a post for today.

Images of Bubble wrap and Corrugated Cardboard

Tuesday, March 5, 2013
4 years, 9 months, and 26 days

Such a blustery day today! And exactly as forecast. The weather people said it would be 15-20 degrees cooler than yesterday, and very windy. I considered not taking my noon walk, as I had only a light jacket to protect against the wind. But I want to get 50 minutes of walking in this week during the work week, so I walked. By the end of the lap (one "lap" in the commercial subdivision takes me about 10 minutes) I was frozen, so didn't try to add any extra minutes. I suspect the wind chill was around 30 degrees, and I definitely needed a hat or hood or even earmuffs.

At the end of the lap two items blew by that stuck with me. First was a cardboard box, flattened and probably from the recycling hopper next to the dumpster. I blew by slowly, in front of the first building downwind of ours, barely leaving the ground. I considered diverting the thirty feet necessary to pick it up and put it back in the recycling area, which I would walk by. But as cold as I felt I decided to just head to the building as quickly as I could.

The second was a piece of bubble wrap, maybe 2x3 feet. I was actually inside the building and walking past the door nearest my office when I saw it through that glass door. It momentarily hung up on the outside door handle. Possibly, had I been quicker, I might have been able to open the door and grab the wrap before the wind carried it off to the south. Alas, in that second where my embedded cache was slow process the bubble wrap freed itself, as if it had hands to push off the grabby handle, and off it went, four feet off the ground and climbing in the last view I had of it.

Today I critiqued a poem over at AbsoluteWrite.com, I think the first poem I've critiqued in more than a year. It's a poem by a man from Wales that I've interacted with on the site from time to time. I'd consider him a friend, though not a correspondent. His poem was rich in images, but so obscure as to meaning that I couldn't sense any meaning from it at all. He made good use of poetic structure, ending words, variety of line conclusion types. But I couldn't understand the poem. And what I don't understand I don't generally like. That was the gist of my critique. I posted this in the evening here, probably after he had retired on the English isle, so it will be tomorrow before I see his reply.

So what do these things have in common? A flattened box scooting before the wind, a piece of plastic beginning to soar, and a Welsh poem too obscure for me to understand? I suppose they are linked by my writing desires. While imagery and metaphor are needed most in poetry, they are still needed in prose. And this is a weakness of my writing. I can't figure out how to best work images into my prose, and I can't figure out how to make my poetry consistently metaphorical.

Consequently my writing doesn't soar like bubble wrap. It rather scoots along the ground like flattened cardboard, moved by the wind but not going places in a hurry. I need to do more to achieve the bubble wrap effect, to soar, and to give the reader places to press harder and pop open some hidden meaning.

Obviously I'll keep working on it. I'd like to think I was already there, however,

Still trying to write poetry

This morning, as I walked from the house to my pick-up, parked up on the street, the sky held a moon glow in front of me. The moon was in the west, a half moon, not yet close to setting, with clouds between me and it. The clouds must have been kind of thin and moving briskly across the sky, for before long the white glow turned into the full half disk, only to disappear again in a few second and the glow resume.

I knew I had to write a haiku about this. That's the only kind of poem I can compose as I drive. I'm not saying haiku are easier to write, but just that the shorter length makes them easier to remember. The last few steps to the truck had me trying to form the first line.

Let me interrupt to give my "rules" for writing haiku. I've given them before on this blog, but I'm too lazy to find the link. I basically follow the Lee Gurga rules. Lee was editor of one of the two main haiku mags, and has studied the haiku in Japanese and how to adopt the rules into English. What he says the Japanese haiku requires is (not in any order of importance):

• a reference to nature
• a reference to a season of the year
• two images
• the images are linked, yet at the same time distinct and of different subjects
• the link and division is done with syntax only. I suppose that would include punctuation.

That's a lot to put into three lines and 17 or fewer syllables. To these, I have added one more rule that I follow most of the time.

• The first and third lines contain the two basic images, and the middle line contains description that could apply to both images. Thus the reader won't really know if the poet intended for that description to go with the first image or the second.

That's an added degree of difficulty. I don't always follow it, but I usually do. Here's an example.

parking asphalt weeps
days after strong spring rains
bank dwelling bugs drown

I won't explicate this. The reader can take the time, if desired, to see how all the rules apply to the example.

So I began trying to form a haiku, and found it a little difficult. The haiku is all about images, not metaphor. I've been concentrating on metaphor of late, so dropping that in favor of images was more difficult than I expected. I suppose a real poet will glide between both with a seamless ease, but not me. Here's what I wrote so far.

backlit clouds race
across the bright half moon

That's as far as I've come. I made the mistake of leaving the radio on, multi-tasking by driving, writing the haiku, listening to the radio, and not being able to put the coming work day out of my mind. I have the first image. Maybe I'll work on it some more today, when work becomes wearying. Or tonight, when I should be adding to my work-in-progress, or alternatively taking the next steps on my income taxes. Having gone this far, I'll finish it.

It's good to have some poetry come to mind, even if it's just a haiku.

Life is a Whirlwind

This is one of my favorite metaphors to describe life: a whirlwind. Every day is packed with activity, some days almost to the breaking point. The whirlwind isn't a tornado, with its damage. Perhaps it's more of a waterspout, a whirlwind over water. It throws up a lot of spray, but in the absence of a man made object it doesn't cause damage.

Of course, the whirlwind is to some extent our own making. We crowd life with all kinds of non-essential activities. Young parents make sure their kids are involved with team sports and gymnastics and dancing and church activities and...whatever else you can think of. Teens continue the practice, adding dating to it. Club sports become school sports. Naturally when they become adults they continue the cycle of endless activity.

I have done the same thing. I don't remember my childhood years being a whirlwind. We came home from school every night. The only evening activity was boy scouts, which began in 5th grade. I didn't start school sports until sophomore year in high school. Didn't even try out in junior high. In college the busyness began, mainly due to working to pay the college bill. Even the early adult years weren't all that bad. Lots of church activities, and raising kids, but not really a whirlwind. Even the overseas years, in retrospect, seem leisurely. Maybe not right at vacation time, the planning, packing and going, but the day to day life was a breeze.

Now the kids are out of the nest, and the last way I should describe life is as a whirlwind. But that's exactly what life has become. It's all my own doing. Wanting to be a published author has added complexity to life that is most easily described as a whirlwind, two orders of magnitude added to what could otherwise be a leisurely life. The writing isn't too bad. It's more the promotion that adds to the to do list. I'm not handling it very well.

Of course, many other things dare to tread on the path I've established for myself, such as funerals in southwestern Kansas one Saturday and in Rhode Island the next. Kind of hard to get any real writing work done in the car, or on a plane. Concentration at those times is rather difficult.

So I think that is an apt metaphor. Not a simile. Life is not like a whirlwind, it is a whirlwind. Possibly this poem somewhat describes it.

Conflicted

I long to live that day when I will rest,
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die
and stand before my Maker. Yet, I'm blessed.
I long to live! The day that I will rest
is somewhere out there, far beyond the quest
that now demands I try, and fail, and try.
I long to live that day when I will rest
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die.

More on Lit Crit

After my previous post on literary criticism, my friend Gary comments, then we exchanged some e-mails about it. Gary is, among other things, a literary critic. Not for a career, but he does this. Where I would critique a poem or book of poetry, he would provide a traditional literary criticisms of it, interpreting the poem or book according to how it spoke to him.

They used to have us do that in school It seems for several years in a row we studied Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". Each year the teacher would say how this was a suicide longing poem, or a death wish poem. The narrator—whom they always said was Frost speaking autobiographically—wanted to lie down in the woods and die instead of facing his heavy responsibilities. Well, I don't see that in that poem. I see a pretty picture, a farmer, laborer, or businessman in olden days returning home late from some engagement, taking a moment to enjoy a thing of beauty. That was never good enough for those teachers, however. If you didn't see the suicide wish in it, you were stupid. That killed poetry for me for thirty years.

Then there were the questions on the quizzes, or in class. "What was the poet thinking when he wrote this?" Or, "What is the poet's intent with this stanza?" Hey, stupid teacher, the poet's dead. He died before I could talk to him. How the hell do I know what he was thinking or what his intent was? I can't know that. All I can do is say what the poem says to me. I guess that kind of questioning was another thing that helped kill poetry for me for those several decades.

So where does that leave me relative to literary criticism? The teachers wanted me, the whole class, to write our answers with certainty. "This is what the poet was thinking...." "This is the poet's intent...." "The poet added this hidden meaning...." And I think that certainty is what bugs me most. Interpret the poem all you want. Unless you talked with the poet, or unless he left a documented trail of explanations, it's all personal interpretation. It's a guess. You can't state it with certainty. Yet, that's exactly how you are supposed to do it.

Confidence is one thing. How you state that confidence is something else. To say, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a suicide poem seems to me not confidence but hubris. To say, In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" I see a man contemplating suicide" is confidence. The critic is confident in what he sees in the poem. To say what the poet mean, in terms of absolute certainty, is wrong—again, except when the poet has left a paper trail saying "this is what I meant in that poem."

I suppose this applies to all lit crit, not just poetry. I've seen interesting things in my own poems. When I post them for critique, not criticism, I often get critiques that are more like criticism. I was especially amused when one critter described one of my poems as referring to death. As the poet, I know what I meant, and it was far, far from being about death.

Have I sufficiently flogged this horse? I hope so. Maybe on to other subjects with my next post.

I Don't Get Literary Criticism

File this under "old news", but I'm just getting around to it due to some recent reading that reinforces my old prejudices.

A couple of years ago at the Absolute Write poetry forum we had a thread about critique vs. criticism. Now I enjoy poetry critique, but I've never really liked literary criticism. I contributed to the thread, including this:

Criticism, on the other hand, is evaluating completed poems and comparing them to some standard that the critic holds regarding poetry. We might not state the standard, but it's always there in the background.

To this a most learned lady replied, a professor of some sort, obviously highly educated, also very sure of what she says. Her reply to the above was:

Be careful about conflating the common use of criticism with literary criticism; they are not the same. Literary criticism, and critical theory, are ways of reading texts that are interpretive, rather than evaluative.



One way of thinking of criticism is to look at it as a reader attempting to find personal meaning in a text, to discover how, and why, a text (a poem, a song, a novel, a letter, an advertisement) does or does not "work" for that reader.

Which brings me to the reading I did that finally spurred me to write this post. At the Chicago Publishers Row Lit Fest in June, I picked up the book The End of the Poem by Paul Muldoon. There were drawn from a series of 15 lectures Muldoon gave at Oxford University in the first decade of this century. Now I don't know Muldoon, had never heard of him before. But the book was marked down from $17 to $4, I liked the title, the TOC looked interesting, and so I bought. About two weeks ago I finally got it out of the bag and began reading it.

This is a book of literary criticism, I guess. Muldoon starts out evaluating Yeat's "All Souls' Night", which he ties line by line to various works of Keats, and to other works of Yeats. He looked at lines, structure, even the date it was written, and showed how this line and that line Yeats had borrowed from Keats, and how he was signalling that he was borrowing from Keats. At the end of the lecture/chapter, I found myself more confused than elucidated.

He then went on to Ted Hughes' "The Literary Life". He evaluated this one all right. It appears to have been about an encounter Hughes and Sylvia Plath had with Marianne Moore in 1958. The poem definitely seemed to be about a real encounter, and hence at least somewhat or maybe entirely autobiographical. At one point Muldoon wrote:

I want to concentrate in this chapter on that aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem" connected to the notion of there being "no barriers" between the poem and the biography of its author—including the hinterland of the letter, the journal, the gossip column....

In addition to this, Muldoon does this same line by line (not every line, but many of them) tying of the poem to other works by Hughes, by Plath, by Moore, and others. I reject this idea that the poem must be autobiographical. That's what he seems to be saying in the quote above. Why must every poem be autobiographical? Why must a poem by a poet be tied to other poems by the same poet? Can he/she not have works totally independent of each other?

Muldoon moves on the Robert Frost's "The Mountain", a poem I discovered three years ago and fell in love with. Muldoon, however, butchers it in his evaluation. The name of the mountain is Hor. This, he says, is a lot like hoar and hoary, which connote white and cold things—frost. Thus Frost is cluing us in to his name through naming the mountain Hor.

Give me a break. Is this what literary critics do? No wonder I never liked it. Could frost never mention ice or frost or cold or white or hoary without some over-reaching critic say it has to be about his own name, and hence autobiographical? This whole the poem must be autobiographical and must be tied to the rest of the poet's body of work and must be tied to poems that poet might have read and must have borrowed from disgusts me.

Give me critique any old day. Literary criticism and me have parted company, and I suspect we will never rejoin, unless those guys who met to define it meet and change the definition.

Thoughts Behind Rejection

our son, Charles, will next Monday begin his professional career. Doctorate in hand, he begins his position as an associate administrator over admissions for the Pritzker Medical School of the University of Chicago. On a phone call this week we talked, not for the first time, about the job and what it entails. Some of it will involve recruiting trips, to various universities, to encourage potential medical students to apply to their school.

In the course of that conversation, he said that Pritzker accepts maybe 10 percent (I think that's about right; don't hold me to that number) of those who apply. For the U of C as a whole, there's also many more applicants than positions. That caused me to ask what to me seemed to be an obvious question: "If you have more than enough applicants, why are you going out and recruiting?"

He explained that recruiting was for the purpose of getting more and more qualified candidates to apply—so that they can reject them. Actually, he didn't say that. He said that universities, and professional schools such as the Pritzker, thrive in part on "exclusivity". The more candidates they reject relative to the number of positions available, the more exclusive the school will appear, and the more better candidates will apply. They will always had a difficult time competing against the good medical schools such as Harvard's, but exclusivity helps. If they can say, "Only 5 percent of those who apply to Pritzker are accepted," that will look better than saying, "Only 25 percent of those who apply...."

I suppose that's true. A med school candidate, planning on applying to Harvard and similar exclusive schools and thinking they can be one of the 1 or 2% who are accepted, might not apply to a Pritzker that accepts 25% of all applicants, but might apply to a Pritzker who accepts only 5%. So off the school goes to recruit. Get the better candidates to apply, accept the best among those, and hope that with each class you'll have a better and better student body. Then, maybe at a point in the future, some of those applicants who are accepted to both Harvard and Pritzker will go to Pritzker

I wonder if writing is a little bit like that, or at least traditional publishing is. The rejection rate is sky-high for most things that a person would want to publish. An agent that is actively recruiting new clients might see 100 query letters and want to see a partial manuscript for only 5 or 10 of those. Of those 5 or 10, the agent might want to see 1 or 2 full manuscripts. Of those 2, an offer of representation might come to only one. At most one. The agent will most likely need many more than 100 queries to find that one writer he/she would want to represent. Yet, the agents invite queries to be sent, and attend conferences and workshops with the intent of recruiting new writers, hoping to find that one writer who can produce a mega-best-seller.

This isn't really the same as the medical school analogy. In writing, it's a buyers market. Too many writers chasing after too few publishing positions. In medical school, it's a seller's market where the best candidates and the best schools are concerned. I'm not quite sure how the bottom 95% of the candidates fit in, and I think my analogy breaks down.

Today I submitted three poems for possible publication. I submitted them to a small-ish periodical, one that I've read from time to time but don't subscribe to. It's a publication for writers and speakers. The have mostly prose, but publish some writing-related poetry. I met the poetry editor of this mag at the Write-T0-Publish Conference, and she suggested I submit some. This might be a better than 1 or 2% chance for garnering a publishing credit. Maybe it's around 10 to 20%. A week or two ago I submitted a haiku to a group that's putting an anthology together to help school libraries that were destroyed in the Joplin tornado. I think that one may have as much as a 25% chance of acceptance.

Clearly I'm not exclusively applying to the Pritzkers and Harvards of the writing world. I've been doing that for about eight years, and getting no where. I may be close with my baseball novel, but I may also be farther away than I thought. We'll see.

The Incestuous Poetry Relationship

I had a one-year subscription to Poet & Writer magazine, six issues at a deep discount of $10. I've always enjoyed this magazine, since it pulls together a broader variety of writers and writing topics than do many other magazines for writers. Often on my travels I will enter a Barnes & Noble, take one from the rack, buy a vente house blend and sit and read it. Usually I find such good things it it that I'll buy the issue and read it in the hotel. So eventually I took the subscription. P&W is heavy on features: the writing life, debut novelists; debut poets. It is short on the writing craft, moderate on industry news, and what news it presents is usually done through features. A little short on regular columns, too, compared to other writing mags.

I read these issues slowly, only on Sunday afternoon, in our sun room, falling asleep and reading in several sequences. I'm currently working through the January/February 2011 issue, the last one of my subscription (which I did not renew). The covers says it is "The Inspiration Issue." Under the heading of "The Literary Life" are many interviews of writers, but a series of short interviews of debut poets especially caught my eye. These are poets who had their first collection published in 2010. What I found instructive was the university attended/degree earned and employment of these poets. Let's see how the columens will format, as I know the spaces will look right on my screen but probably not once published.

Age         University        Degree        Employment
41           Iowa                 MFA         theatre writer/critic
30           Warren Wilson  MFA         creative writing teacher
39           Columbia          MFA         mother
27           Wisconsin         MA           library worker
34           Iowa                 MFA         PhD candidate
29           New Mexico     MFA        teacher
30           Oregon             MFA        job hunting teacher
32           George Mason  MFA        PhD candidate
39            New York U    MFA       assistant professor
39           Utah                  MFA       associate professor
35           New School (NYC) MFA PhD candidate

All degrees save one are masters of fine arts, and almost all now work at teaching others. Is this the way poetry publishing is going? If so, it's incestuous. Others have said this before me, that the MFA-based system results in inbreeding of poetic technique, begetting the same poetic technique, as those who are taught by MFA profs become MFA profs.

C.S. Lewis had a word to say about this, as I discussed a couple of months ago:

Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always 'breaking fetters' and 'bursting bonds'. They have personality, they 'are themselves'.

We certainly have poetry "schools", in the broadest sense of the word. And we've had 'em in the past, too.

Of course, I admit it's quite possible that this magazine is not all that representative of the full range of modern poetry. It might be only a small part of it. Still, I wonder if this isn't at least in part explanatory of why poetry is so unpopular these days. P&W is a magazine filled with adds for MFA schools and workshops. Every university and college in the country that has a creative writing program has an ad in each issue of the magazine. The ads almost always feature a rustic cottage surrounded by trees and meadows. A photo of some poet who's supposed to be famous but who most likely I never heard of is inset, and the ad includes a list of faculty and visiting professors, almost all of whom I never heard of. Low residency requirements are typically trumpeted.

The ads that are not for MFA programs are for writing retreats or workshops. The ads that aren't for any of those are for contests. The ads are so similar from issue to issue that I pretty much stopped reading them.

So P&W is of some limited use, but I really like it. I'm keeping these issues, and may refer back to them from time to time. But watch out for the problem of the incestuous poetry community I will.

At Sunset

At Sunset

On icy roads I drive with caution toward
my home, still seeing piles of work not done.
With traffic all around I can't afford
to look behind to see the setting sun.

I speed the mower recklessly along
the field and hope the dark holds off a bit
to let me cut it all. A sparrow's song
breaks through—oh, shoot, is that a rock I hit?

The fading light gives me so little time
to harvest luscious berries, blue and black.
I spent the day's best part in corporate climb.
It isn't fruit, but daylight hours I lack.

Oh Lord, you've blessed me much, but tell me when
I'll watch, in peace, an evening sky again.

Why Do I Write?

Two different writers sites/groups that I visit on the Internet asked that question this week. Chip MacGregor, in his blog post on Wednesday, answered the question "Why do I write?" And The Writers View 2, in their Thursday question, asked us to answer, in a sentence, the question, "What is your motivation for writing?" Interesting that these two sites should ask basically the same question at the same time. They set me to thinking about my own motivation for writing, and how I got to the point I'm at now.

It started back in the late 90s, I guess. I wrote some letters to the editor, and a couple of political essays. And a couple of work-place ditties. At the same time an idea for a novel started floating around in my head. Almost instantaneously I saw the beginning and the ending. The connecting scenes came to mind a bit later. I made a start on it, getting 15,000 words typed by December 2000. Meanwhile an idea for a second novel started to come together.

By this time I was attending a writers critique group twice a month, sharing my essays and chapters. I began looking for writing advice on the web. My goal was to complete my novel and have it published. My goal was to tell the world a story; a Christian story that might encourage people and change some lives.

I completed that novel in January 2003, and began to rework it while at the same time market it. I attended my first writers conference in March 2003, just a regional conference in Oklahoma City. I learned a lot there, especially how difficult it would be to find a publisher--unless I wanted to self-publish, which I did not. I learned that publishers really weren't interested in writers who wanted to tell a story. They wanted writers who wanted careers as writers.

So I branched out. I found an outlet for some of my editorials in the local newspaper. When we moved from Bentonville to Bella Vista I changed writers groups to one that met weekly. Through that group I was able to get five feature articles in our local newspaper. I went to other writers conference and read other blogs. Since I prepared and wrote my own adult Sunday school lessons, I began to do these more formally with the intent of making them "publishable". The road to being published looked harder with each conference session I attended and each web page I read. But I began to diversify and write articles. Oh, year, somewhere along the way I became interested in writing poetry, and realized I could write it and should write it. And then in 2006 there was the short biography I wrote of one of Lynda's great-grandfathers.

That brings us to today. Novel 1 is finished, polished four times, and in the drawer biding its time. Novel 2 is at about 17,000 words on its way to 80,000, waiting for me to get back to it. My poetry book is finished, in the drawer waiting for me to decide how to market it. I've got lots of articles written, one published in print and 110 published at Internet sites with more on the way. I'm building a stable of articles. Whether these will develop and demonstrate a platform or simply be an exercise will be seen in the next few years.

So where does that leave me? I wanted to tell a story, but that's not what publishers wanted to buy, so I'm trying to do what the publishers want. But the writing bug has definitely bit me. I want my words to have an impact on the world, specifically to further the cause of Jesus Christ. I want my secular writings to be underpinned by a Christian worldview that comes out in very subtle ways. I want my Christian writings to be directly helpful to those of the faith.

I'm not sure where I stand. It's been an interesting journey so far, a journey that I'm not about to give up, but which I can't tell where I am on it. I hope someday I'll be able to write my autobiography and title it The Journey Was A Joy. Guess I'm still heading in that direction.

A Freelance Success

Good evening, all you faithful readers. I'm just back from writers guild, where I shared my long poem "A Woodland Acre" from my poetry book Father Daughter Day. I'm going through that book four pages at a time (four pages is our limit). Last week this stopped me in the middle of the poem. This week, however, two of our members were gone, and two who were there were not there last week. So they had me read it all from the beginning. Good reviews.

Tonight I had an e-mail from the editor at BiblioBuffet, and on-line magazine featuring reading and books. One of my February freelance submittals was an article titled, "When the Vehicle Will Be Worthy of the Spirit," about the beginning of Carlyle and Emerson's correspondence. They are going to publish it in their guest column section, probably a month or so from now. The pay is small, but there is pay. I don't know what the exposure will be, but it can't hurt. It's possible that, after a few guest columns, I could become a regular columnist at an increased pay. Once the article goes up I'll post a link on Arrow. I worked hard on that article, and to have it accepted is gratifying.

Every small writing success puts me on the upward track of the roller coaster. Or is it the downward track (the metaphor being reversed of the real life experience)? The one that is more pleasurable. There are enough rejections in writing to cause misery and despair that you need to latch on to the few successes and ride the wind with them. Hmmm, was that enough metaphors to mix?

So I'm happy tonight. I'll probably read twenty pages in the Coulson book, four pages in an alumni mag, and who knows what else. A couple of articles for Suite 101 are turning over in the gray cells.

Oh, today was also good because I finished my paper for my March 31st presentation, only one day behind the deadline. Also I finished a work related article on erosion and sediment control at construction sites that I'll probably submit tomorrow. It's not a bad article, somewhat of a rebuttal of an article a year ago in that mag. I suspect there's no pay involved, but it's another credit. Oh, and I had a lunch meeting with a woman I met at the Dallas conference. She is with a business right here in the area, and it looks as if she'll have some work for CEI. Not right away, but it would be nice to get enough business to justify the cost of the trip.

So, all in all a good day. I'll take 'em any chance I can.

R.I.P. Hunter, 1997-2009

I have a picture of him somewhere, though I don't think I can upload it to any of the computer I normally work at. If I can find the card, I'll add a picture later.

Hunter was our dachshund. He joined our family in the fall of 1998, age 18 months. We had not had a dog for several years, and he was a delight from the start. He was friendly to a fault. One time when he wandered from our yard, he gladly hopped in the dog-catchers car. Anything to go for a ride.

He loved to hop up on the couch when I sat there, or when I lay there taking a nap. He would wedge himself between me and the back of the couch. That was his favorite position, to be wedged in behind someone. He seemed to enjoy the television, though possibly what he enjoyed most was his human company.

In the yard he loved chasing squirrels and digging after moles. If he found a carcass of any kind in our field, he would role on top of it. He especially liked to do this right after we gave him a bath. Running in the field was a favorite pastime of his.

In March 2003, at a time when we had another, more quiescent dog, and four foster children, we gave Hunter (I should say my wife gave Hunter) to her step-sister's family in Oklahoma City. That meant we got to see him from time to time, and he even came back for one or two visits to Bella Vista. He had a good life there, and they took good care of him. But at 12 years of age he was beginning to suffer. We learned in their Christmas letter that they had him put to sleep a few weeks ago.

This is not as sad as a human death (I'll be writing about one of them soon), nor as if he had been with us these last six years, but still it is sad. Hunter was the inspiration for the following poem, a parody of Leigh Hunt's famous "Jenny Kissed Me".

Hunter Licked Me

Hunter licked me on the nose,
showing me his deep affection.
Whimpering, this dachshund knows
who provides food and protection.
Tell me that my poems won't sell,
that no muse has ever picked me.
Call me crazy, but then yell
"Hunter licked me."

I Should Be Writing

Back from the funeral, no major household projects going on, reasonable workload at the office, no upcoming trip to prepare for, the checkbook mostly up to date, household finances needing only 30 minutes to bring them up to date. I should be writing. But I'm not.

Yesterday I posted one of my older poems for critique at the Absolute Write poetry forum. Three crits later it's sinking and will hit the oblivion of page 2 today. That caused me to pull out Father Daughter Day yesterday and go through it last night and mark edits that had either accumulated in my mind or that I saw as I read. That's done, and I'll type those edits today sometime. And I did a very minor critique of another person's poem yesterday.

More than a week ago I began a new article for Suite101.com, about preparing for a deposition. Since I had just done that, I thought it would make for a good article, quickly written. Then the funeral trip interrupted me, and I haven't felt like getting back to it. I even did some key word research using some Google tools, and it looks as if it will be a profitable article. Yet, I just don't feel like writing it.

I suppose I'll snap out of it soon. Maybe if I get those few entries made in my financial spreadsheet I'll feel freed-up to write again. I think what's holding me back is the utter futility of it all. And the realization I'm trying to build a platform that may or may not grow to the size I need. My articles on Suite 101 are getting page views at a current rate of 80,000 per year. That's good! Eighty-thousand people a year are reading my stuff. But almost none of those people are looking for my writing. They are looking for information on something, and happen to find mine by a search engine. So will an editor see all those hits and all those people reading my writing as evidence of a platform and quality writing, or as an accident?

Still, I've nothing else to do but plunge back in and get some more articles up. Three more and I begin earning a ten percent bonus. I could have three articles up in three days. I'll do it. I'll probably get that one article finished and post it tonight, and shoot for having two more up by Sunday. During our weekend trip I worked on the analysis of another Robert Frost poem. That will give me at least three articles.

I still need to articulate steps two and three of my platform-building plan. Maybe I'll make that my next post.

'Tis the Season - for Submittals

I had good intentions of blogging over the weekend. The wife is away, I've kept the house neat, and had no major yard work to do. But a summer cold hit, and I found myself with no gumption to write much of anything. By Sunday evening I felt much better (thought my scratchy voice belied that), and I finished a difficult article at Suite101.com and came close to finishing a second. Today I'm much better, at work, and have energy for writing.

At the Absolute Write forums I responded to a post titled "when you fell in love with poetry...". I explained my hatred for poetry for many years, brought on by a series of English teachers who insisted on interpretation of poems I didn't see--but I don't really want to get into that today. I got over my hatred of poetry, rather late in life I'm afraid, but not too late to embrace it for appreciation and try it for a writing outlet. As I wrote that post at AW, and as I thought about when it was I began enjoying and then writing poetry, it suddenly dawned on me that it was August 31, 2001 that I began writing my first serious adult poem. Eight years ago today. I remember it well, sitting out in the grassy area near the pines on the north side of our former house. But I prate.

The other important thing about this date is actually tomorrow, September 1. That is the day that many, many literary magazines open up again to submissions. Most of these are associated with universities and colleges, and close down during summer. September through May submission periods are quite common. Last spring I sent out six submissions for my short story, "Mom's Letter". I think I missed the submission window by a couple of days on one of them. Heard back on three or four--rejections.

With the new submissions season, I need to decide what to do about the short story and about submitting some poems. I didn't submit any poems anywhere in 2008. I think I need to make some submissions this year. So over the next couple of weeks I'll be reviewing my inventory, seeing which ones seem most promising to me. Then I'll have to get back to work researching markets and see which ones look most promising to me. Then I'll have to marry the two.

This isn't the type of work I enjoy about writing, but it's necessary, so I will do it. Now, back to engineering for a couple of hours.

Robert Frost on Poetry

Last night I was dead tired when I got home, for some reason. Was it the emotional letdown after the successful class I taught during yesterday's noon hour? Or was it my bagworm ministry for 35 minutes before church yesterday evening? Or might it just be over-eating and under-sleeping while the wife's away? For whatever reason, I slept the sleep of the dead last night--until about 3:30 AM, when I woke up and felt something crawling on me, something insect-sized. I pulled it off, squished it between fingers, and rolled over. I suspect a tick picked up from the bagworm infested bush. Of course, after that I imagined every little itch to be a tick and probably pulled off several imaginary ones. Still, I got back to sleep and slept well.


I'm working on several articles for Suite101.com, including one on a book I checked out from the Bentonville library, The Notebooks of Robert Frost. I waited for this book to come in, then was somewhat disappointed in it when I finally got it. I guess I expected to see drafts of all of Frost's famous poems and observe how he went about his compositions. Or maybe I expected copious notes of his poetic philosophy, or preparation for his many lectures.


The book has little of that. I'm going to write a review of it for Suite101.com, so I can't put all of what I want to say here. But I did find an interesting segment with some quotes on poetry. Quotations allegedly from Frost about "Poetry is..." are rampant, such as "Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Maybe he said this, maybe he didn't. I never see those with source citations. But this book documents some things Frost wrote about poetry. In his Notebook 38, he wrote the following under the heading "Poetry":

• Poetry is prowess
• Poetry is the renewal of words
• Poetry is the dawning of an idea
• Poetry is that which tends to evaporate from both prose and verse when translated.
• Poetry is the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are Poetry.
• A poem is a momentary stay against confusion
• Poet is a master of sentiment

According to footnotes in the book, the prowess comment would be related to Frost's lecture titled "Poetry as Prowess", and the renewal comment is related to his lecture titled "The Renewal of Words".


Now, I have not yet studied these sayings of Frost. Perhaps he wrote them together in notebook 38 as a list of lectures given or that he thought he might give someday. I see that he repeated a couple of these in notebook 26.


The notebooks are hard reading, and I can see I would need to own a copy to really get much out of them, for in the little time I have the book for (actually, it's already three days overdue), and as difficult as it is to read for long sittings, I'm not getting all that much out of it. But he has some gems in it that are worth thinking and remembering. In the same notebook 38, after his list of what poetry is, he has this statement, evidently intended to be another statement of what poetry is:

• Difference between smoke and smoke rings.

That's good enough for me. Off to the library now to beg forgiveness and hopefully renew this overdue book for a couple of more weeks. I need to see a few more gems in it.

Of Bagworms and Blackberries

Don't confuse the title of this post with my sonnet "Of Bollards and Berms" (which garnered a bit of critique and discussion at AW-password is citrus. No, this is about my war against the bagworms and my quest for blackberries--the edible kind.

My first experience with blackberry picking was in Snug Harbor, Rhode Island, on a vacant lot, or couple of lots, right behind the stony beach we went swimming at when we didn't drive over to East Matunuk. They grew right next to a cleared field, so getting them was easy. As kids we probably ate as many as we brought home. The fun was in the picking, not in the having. Years later, on a return to Rhode Island, the blackberry patch was gone, torn out to make room for waterside houses. Alas.

Now I pick blackberries both for enjoyment and for food. I love the taste, and they taste even better because they are free. The cost for a half-gallon: an hour and a half on a Saturday morning, a few scratches, two chigger bites, and maybe a pound of water sweated away. I'm having some right now, as I write this, with lunch. Now, a quart of blackberries won't stretch the budget a whole lot, but it will help. Especially if we get another quart this Saturday, when the temperatures are supposed to be fifteen degrees cooler than last Saturday.

Now, as far as bagworms go, I am at war with them. Not at home, but at church. There we have four evergreen bushes of some type, a cedar relative, kept neatly trimmed but not otherwise maintained--except by me. Every May the first bagworms appear. I pick them off and squish them under foot. But I never take time to go through the bushes thoroughly. So they are back in June and abundant in July. No one seems to see them or care about them except me.

I'm enough of a HEED-onist (only URI grads will know the background of that) to not want to spray some kind of chemical on the plant to kill them. So I pick the bags off the bush. I used to do that at our property in Bentonville, and never lost a bush. Did that back in Kansas City too, if I remember correctly. It's more work than spraying, but it has to be environmentally friendly.

So I pick, and pick. Yesterday I got to church 30 minutes early to have 20 to pick bag worms. I came with a doubled plastic sack (that's a bag to your Rhode Islanders) and had it about 1/3 full when my time was up. I picked one bush clean; it only had a few. I moved to the next one which was fully infested, and could stand in one spot and pick forever, moving branches to get the ones that were hiding. All the time I'm picking, I'm stewing, wondering why no one else cares enough about the poor evergreen bush to rid it of these parasites. People pass me by, heading into church, and ask what I'm doing. No one stops to help, except Jeremy, the grandson of my best friend in these parts. He sees it as a child's game. But, like most child's games, I'm on my own again in ten minutes.

But I've decided this is one of my ministries. It fits my personality. It's solitary. It's mindless, allowing for mental multi-tasking. It is limited in time duration: by the mid-August I'll either have saves the bush or it will be dead. It's a service no one will even know I did, except for those few who saw me--and Jeremy, of course. It doesn't involve any interpersonal relationships--except Jeremy, of course. What better ministry could there be?

Well, my blackberries are fully consumed. They were good, but somehow not as good as they were when eaten straight from the vine on a hot summer day. And, they seemed just as enjoyable as they did when they were a child's game during a Rhode Island summer. The joy is still in the picking, but eating them is nice, real nice.

Miscellaneous Musing on an Unexpectedly Free Lunch Hour

I should probably be writing something that will someday lead to revenue, but I find myself drawn here instead. I had a lunch appointment today, but the other party cancelled unexpectedly. I'll have to go out and buy something shortly, but until then I'll enter a few miscellaneous musings here.

• I'm up to 19 articles posted on Suite101.com, and have maybe four in the hopper that may jump out this weekend. The writing is enjoyable. Unlike at some Internet content sites I get to choose my own topics, the articles go life as soon as I post them, and I can edit them as needed. Unfortunately, so far I have earned only $0.03 (not a typo) based on ad clicks, on none for over a week.
• This search engine optimization thing (SEO) is going to have a steep learning curve, I'm afraid. No doubt my failure to do this well is keeping my page views low, thus fewer viewers to click on the ads. But to learn SEO will take hours and hours of reading and experimentation. You have to know this because Google and other search engines are the main way readers find your articles. So titles, subtitles, meta tags (still not quite sure what they are or if they still hold importance or not-the SEO experts seem unsure of this), and image captions all need to be "key-word rich". Yuck. I must now bow down to the Google altar.
• Suite 101 now requires that each article include at least one image, preferably more. This is adding a lot of minutes to the time it takes to ready an article for posting. Yet, the SEO experts say this is part of SEO and I will benefit by doing it. I have to believe the experts, I suppose, but I'll believe it when I see it.
• As expected, writing for Suite101.com is taking pretty much all my creative writing time. I've not even thought about other freelance queries, or novels, or Bible studies. Well, except for the Bible study I'll begin teaching in about three weeks. I have that pretty much completed as much as I need for teaching. And about a week ago I worked on an appendix to the Harmony of the Gospels. I have about an hour to do to finish that appendix, and hope to do it this weekend.
• The good news is that poetry has returned and filled what little time I have for creative writing outside of the Suite stuff. It hasn't returned in a big way, but at least it has returned. Possibly writing the Suite articles on Robert Frost was part of the catalyst for that.

Well, I'm off to either buy a lunch or forage. This weekend may be the height of blackberry season in these parts, and I hope to pick a bunch.

Book Review: "Robert Frost" (a book by that title)

Given that Robert Frost is my favorite poet, and that I've been writing some articles on him at Suite101.com, I decided to do a little more research on him. So I got the book from the public library Robert Frost by Philip L. Gerber, 1982 G. H. Hall & Co. ISBN 0-8057-7348-7. This was originally published in 1966, and is part of the "Twayne's United States Authors Series."

At 171 pages, this is rather slim as Frost career-length reviews go. This is based on the bibliography in the book, which lists several multi-volume studies. As such, I suppose this could be called a Frost primer. That's perfect for me. It is divided into six chapters:

1. Man Into Myth: Frost's Life
2. Poet in a Landscape: Frost's Career
3. The Appropriate Tools: Frost's Craftsmanship
4. The Aim Was Song: Frost's Theories
5. Roughly Zones: Frost's Themes
6. Testing Greatness: Frost's Critical Reception

Each of these presented a pretty good discussion of the subject. Well, to my layman's mind it was a good discussion. I'm sure those more learned in Frost would laugh at the brevity of it. But again I suggest that this is exactly the type of book needed for someone who had never read a Frost criticism or biography. The chapter on his life did a good job of exploding the myth Frost worked so hard to create: that he was a New England farmer. He may have done some of that, but except perhaps for some very early years he never did it to make money. Possibly his living on a farm and resulting observations gave fodder for poems. If so, who cares exactly what his career was? Although he never earned a degree, he spent a lot of years on college campuses, either as poet-in-residence or professor. It would seem his main income came from these, supplemented by book sales. Or maybe the other way around.

My favorite chapters were on Frost's craftsmanship and on his theories of poetry. He alone among the major American poets bucked the trend to imagism and modernism (okay, maybe Edna St. Vincent Milay also). He was called old fashioned for writing in rhyme, meter, and form. Although his first couple of books were highly acclaimed, the "experts" said he would have no staying power. He proved them wrong, and I, in my semi-learned state, believe his staying power was because he wrote in form. People still like that, and are more likely to buy that than other things that pass as poetry.

I especially liked the things Gerber said about "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." While I can't really continue to use this as an excuse, it was this poem, or rather it's treatment by a succession of English teachers in junior and senior high, that ruined poetry for me for thirty years. They said this was a suicide poem. I didn't see it. They said I had to see it. I said I didn't see it. They said I had to see it. I said I didn't. I decided I either wasn't cut out for poetry or it was something I wouldn't get, so from that point on I parted ways with it, building a New England stone wall between us. Here's what Gerber wrote about it:

Critics have from the start appreciated his skill in handling metaphor and symbol. Perhaps it is a part of his basis for protest that in their zeal the critics overdid it, as they have generally overdone so much in the twentieth century and as they have specifically overdone Frost's own "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

To say that "Stopping by Woods" has been one of the most discussed poems of the twentieth century is an understatement. It has been analyzed, explicated, dissected--sometimes brilliantly--but altogether to the point of tedium. ...Proud as Frost was of this lyric, and only partly because it got into the anthologies more frequently than any other, he felt that readers made themselves too busy over "my heavy duty poem" and squeezed it for meanings not present...."

...Frost ordinarily gained amusement from the meanings people located in his work, meanings he claimed to have been totally unaware of. ...he became downright touchy about the "busymindedness" that inspired the ceaseless flow of questions, many of them asinine indeed, concerning the minutiae of "Stopping by Woods."

He was irritated by people who asked to know the name of the man who did the stopping. It appalled him to have someone write inquiring whether those woods really fill up with snow. ...Who would be going home that way so late at night? What did the woods mean? What did the snow stand for? Could a horse really ask questions?

Ah, so I was right and my teachers were wrong! And to think they cost me thirty years--no, can't blame them. But wait, what's that Gerber writes just a little further on?

Like other major poets, Robert Frost writes on multiple levels of meaning. ...Frost's symbols are hidden like children's Easter eggs--barely out of reach and easily found.

...His gift was for creating an artifice so vivid, moving, and significant on the initial level that any probing for further rewards can seem like meddlesome prying....

Well, I guess I'll have to give up and begin looking for those hidden meanings Frost hid like Easter eggs. At least I don't have to go digging holes to do so.

The section "How Poems Arise" is a good two page description of how Frost went about capturing ideas and setting them to verse. I won't go into details, but it's not too far from my own: a long gestation period before anything ever escapes the mind and finds paper.

I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation for all who want to explore Robert Frost and his world and his poetry. It's a shame it has to go back to the library in a few days. I could benefit from a second reading.