the real deal

Clouds, a poem by Wisława Szymborska.

2012-02-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

Post 654 - Sad news today about Wisława Szymborska (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012). Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent in Western Poland, she lived in Kraków from 1931 until the end of her life today when she died peacefully in her sleep.
Some of her prizes and awards include:
• 1954: The City of Kraków Prize for Literature
• 1963: The Polish Ministry of Culture Prize
• 1991: The Goethe Prize
• 1995: The Herder Prize
• 1995: Honorary Doctor of the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań)
• 1996: The Polish PEN Club prize
• 1996: Nobel Prize for Literature

Clouds by Wisława Szymborska.

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don't care
what they're up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Three in the Morning, a poem by Judith Viorst.

2012-01-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

Post 653 - Judith Stahl Viorst was born in Newark, NJ in 1931. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1952 and subsequently from the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute in 1981 where she’s now a research affiliate. She lectures widely on topics, ranging from the subjects of loss and control to children's literature. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband Milton, a political writer.
Viorst received an Emmy Award for poetic monologues written for a CBS television special, Annie, the Woman in the Life of a Man, in 1970. She received the Foremother Award for lifetime achievements from the National Research Center for Women & Families in 2011.
She says her first writing attempt when she was seven or eight was a poem to her dead mother and father - who were both actually alive and not particularly pleased with their poetic fate!

Three (O'Clock) in the Morning.

At three in the morning I used to be sleeping an untroubled
sleep in my bed.
But lately at three in the morning I'm tossing and turning,
Awakened by hypochondria, and gas, and nameless dread,
Whose name I've been learning. (worry)

At three in the morning I brood about what my cholesterol
count might reveal,
And the pains in my chest start progressing from gentle to racking,
While certain intestinal problems make clear that the onions
I ate with my meal
Plan on counter attacking.

At three in the morning I look toward the future with blankets
pulled over my ears,
And all of my basic equipment is distinctly diminished.
My gums are receding, my blood pressure's high, and I can't
begin listing my fears
Or I'll never get finished.
At three in the morning I used to be sleeping but lately I wake
and reflect

That my girlhood has gone and I'll now have to manage without it.
They tell me that I'm heading into my prime. From the previews
I do not expect
To be crazy about it.

The Contortionist’s Wife, a poem by Bill Meissner.

2012-01-16T12:37:00.000-08:00

Post 652 - Bill Meissner is the Director of Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota and the author of seven books. His writing has appeared in more than 200 journals, magazines and anthologies. His numerous awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Fiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and five PEN/NEA Syndicated Fiction Awards. He's one of my favorite poets.

The Contortionist’s Wife.

She knows him, yet she doesn’t always recognize him -
some mornings she finds him in the kitchen cupboard
flattened among the cereal boxes,
some evenings, he’s folded beneath her chair
when she sits down for dinner.
Once he surprised her when he rose from the washing machine tub
like a genie, gave her three wishes
and a box of Cheer.

Some days she doesn’t know if he’s shaping himself
or if she’s shaping him. All she knows is the way
he twists her emotions: he makes her laugh, he makes her cry.

She’s not sure if it’s funny that he
could be lying between the sheets of her bed without her
noticing him.
Some times he’s closer to her than she ever imagined, like the
tub full of warm bath water she slides herself into.
Sometimes he’s distant, pinpricks of stars in the night sky.
But most often he’s both near and far, lifting himself
from the vase in the corner, his smile full of flowers.

Ah, she wishes she could be a contortionist, too.
She wishes she could be the one to surprise him
some morning, disguising herself as the wheat bread
popping from the toaster
or the coat rack as he reaches for his jacket.
She gazes at her stiff flesh with the brittle bones inside,
thinking if only she could slip herself around his finger
like a ring he didn’t know he was wearing
for the rest of his life.

Awkward Party Talk, a poem by Tanya Davis.

2012-01-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

Post 651 - Tanya Davis is a Canadian poet, storyteller, musician and a singer-songwriter. Since bursting onto the Halifax music scene in 2006 with her debut, Make a List, Tanya has garnered praise from industry, audience, and peers, as well as multiple award nominations, including one for her sophomore release, Gorgeous Morning, for the 2009 ECMA Female Recording of the Year. She is a two-time winner in the CBC National Poetry Face-off as well as the Canadian Winner of the 2008 Mountain Stage NewSong contest. In 2009, with support from Bravo, she collaborated with independent filmmaker Andrea Dorfman to produce a short videopoem entitled How to Be Alone; the short has since been featured at numerous film festivals, including The Vancouver Film Fest, The Worldwide Short Film Festival, and the VideoPoetry Festival (Berlin). It also has 1.8 million views on Youtube.

Awkward Party Talk by Tanya Davis.

Hello. Do you wish to make small talk?
ok. my name is tanya, i am 30 years old
oh, that is not appropriate information to lay out on the table
okay then, my name is tanya and i am an adult
who are you?
I mean.. and your name? Is?
And what do you do?
Oh, i see, you are a job
well, i have a job, too
i also eat and sleep and breathe and drink and poo
you know, the essentials
i am, after all, merely a mammal
oh, your drive is here and you gotta run?
Ok, nice talking to you

hi. i am a child of the age of aquarius
and i wish my parents had named me something more daring and glamorous
like tatianna
which means princess in russian but they just named me tanya
what is your name?
Oh, hi bob.
And why did you come to this party?
Oh, you know so-and-so, well that's neat
i came for the chips and dip
i knew they'd be here
i also think i should go out more, so people don't forget me
and also, i don't like bars but i do like company
and i like to watch people dancing and humping
oh, i don't mean, like, people having sex in the living room
although i would watch that, too, if it was happening right now
no, i mean dancing to attract mates
there's interesting dynamics at house parties, don't you think?
Oh, you need to go get another drink?
Ok, nice talking to you

hi. tanya.
Nice to meet you
oh, that's a great handshake
do you have strong arms, too?
Hahahah.... ooooh
those are nice
i like where biceps connect to shoulders
i like strong and defined shoulders
girls or guys, i like both
to have them over me at night, i like them to hold me down like i am the project and they are the vice
oh, am i making you shy?
never mind, i talk too much
no? you don't think?
Okay, great, well my boyfriend in high school
caused me internal ridicule
when i told him i wanted to have strong shoulders
and he said “what kind of guy wants to date a girl with strong shoulders
that won't do”
and so now when i love strong shoulders on the bodies of my lovers
i can't tell if i want them
or want to be them, you know?
Oh, you have to go?
Ok, nice talking to you.

hi. (eat a chip)

I Will Wade Out, a poem by E.E.Cummings.

2011-12-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

Post 650 - Here's a poem for the New Year.

I Will Wade Out by E.E.Cummings.

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body

Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery

with chasteness of sea-girls

Will i complete the mystery

of my flesh I will rise

After a thousand years

lipping

flowers

And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

A wedding is the entrance to a marriage by William Byrd.

2011-12-22T12:29:00.000-08:00

Post 649 - William Byrd (born in London in 1543, died in 1623 at Stondon Place in Essex) was the son of a musician, and studied music principally under Thomas Tallis. Byrd was the most prolific composer of his time in England and was known as the English Palestrina. Here is his wedding poem:

A Wedding Is.. by William Byrd.

A wedding is the entrance to a marriage:

One drives through, and suddenly one's there!

Stepping from a fairy tale carriage 

Into quite ordinary air.

Life is now a dance, though beautiful,

Requiring intense coordination;

Each self becomes, in ways inscrutable,

More fully what it is in combination.

And we who love you wait, of course, outside 

As you become through love that mystery:

One flesh made whole of separate groom and bride;

Two selves, one life; two notes, one harmony.

When you are one, we then may cherish two:

Loving not just one, but both of you.

Beannacht, a poem by John O'Donohue.

2011-12-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

Beannacht ("Blessing") by John O’Donohue.

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

Interview with the Wind, a poem by Alice Oswald.

2011-12-06T15:36:00.001-08:00

Post 646 - Alice Oswald was born in 1966. She read Classics at New College, Oxford, has worked as agardener at Chelsea Physic Garden, and today lives with her husband, theplaywright Peter Oswald (alsoa trained classicist), and her three children in Devon. In 1994, shewas the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her debut collection, TheThing in the Gap-Stone Stile, won the 1996 Forward Best First Collectionprize and her second collection, Dart, won the 2002 TS Eliot prize. In2004, Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's NextGeneration poets. Her collection Woods etc., publishedin 2005, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collectionof the Year). In 2009 she published both A sleepwalk on the Severn and Weedsand Wildflowers, which won the inaugural Ted HughesAward for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the T. S.Eliot Prize. In October 2011, Oswald published her 6th collection, Memorial.

Interview with the Wind by Alice Oswald.

Once the Wind existed as a person 

Carrying its unguarded inner mouth wide open . . .

And I notice a kind of girlish nervousness 

Sensitive to any tiny shock, tell me,

When did it lose its mind?

I love the kind of sounds it carries.

I think of the Wind as the Earth's voice muscle,

Very twisted and springy, but is it tired?

What happens to bells for example

Being lifted over hills?

And prayers?

There are millions of grass-nibs trying their names on theair.

There are phrases not fully expressed, shaking the bars ofthe trees.

Never any conclusion. Every decision being taken back againinto movement.

Why?

And on a long road on a hot day,

When the Wind gets under the Wind 

And blows up a mist of dust,

Obviously it speaks in verse, obviously 

It inhales for a while and then describes by means of breath 

Some kind of grief, what is it?

A kind of kiss. A coldness.

And yet not uptight, not afraid to fondle.

Is it blind is it some kind of blindness 

The way it breezes at Dusk 

And goes on and on turning over and over 

More and more leaves in the darkness?

A kind of huge, hushed up,

Inexhaustible, millions of years old sister.

Would she describe herself, when running over grass forexample,

Would she describe herself as a light breeze?

Or is she serious?

If You Forget Me, a poem by Pablo Neruda.

2011-11-24T15:17:00.001-08:00

Post 645 - If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda.

I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Thanksgiving, a poem by Edgar Albert Guest.

2011-11-21T16:01:00.001-08:00

Post 644 - Eddie Guest (1881– 1959) was a prolific English-born American poet who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People's Poet. In 1891, Guest came with his family to the United States from England. After he began at the Detroit Free Press as a copy boy and then a reporter, his first poem appeared on December 11, 1898. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1902. For 40 years, Guest was widely read throughout North America, and his sentimental, optimistic poems were in the same vein as the light verse of Nick Kenny, who also wrote syndicated columns during the same decades.

From his first published work in the Detroit Free Press until his death in 1959, Guest penned some 11,000 poems which were syndicated in some 300 newspapers and collected in more than 20 books, including A Heap o' Livin' (1916) and Just Folks (1917). Guest was made Poet Laurate of Michigan, the only poet to have been awarded the title.

Thanksgiving by Edgar Albert Guest.

Gettin' together to smile an' rejoice,
An' eatin' an' laughin' with folks of your choice;
An' kissin' the girls an' declarin' that they
Are growin' more beautiful day after day;
Chattin' an' braggin' a bit with the men,
Buildin' the old family circle again;
Livin' the wholesome an' old-fashioned cheer,
Just for awhile at the end of the year.
Greetings fly fast as we crowd through the door
And under the old roof we gather once more
Just as we did when the youngsters were small;
Mother's a little bit grayer, that's all.
Father's a little bit older, but still
Ready to romp an' to laugh with a will.
Here we are back at the table again
Tellin' our stories as women an' men.

Bowed are our heads for a moment in prayer;
Oh, but we're grateful an' glad to be there.
Home from the east land an' home from the west,
Home with the folks that are dearest an' best.
Out of the sham of the cities afar
We've come for a time to be just what we are.
Here we can talk of ourselves an' be frank,
Forgettin' position an' station an' rank.

Give me the end of the year an' its fun
When most of the plannin' an' toilin' is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin' with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An' I'll put soul in my Thanksgivin' prayers.

That Sure is My Little Dog, a poem by Eleanor Lerman.

2011-11-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Post 643 - Eleanor Lerman (1952 - ) is an Americanpoet and author and a lifelong New Yorker, born in the Bronx. Lermanwas the recipient of the inaugural Juniper Prize,the 2002 Joy Bale Boone Award for Poetry, the 2006 Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize,and a fiction grant from the New YorkFoundation for the Arts. In 2007, she received a LiteratureFellowship from the NationalEndowment for the Arts. In 2011, she was awarded a GuggenheimFellowship. She currently lives on Long Island, in Nassau County.



That Sure is My Little Dog by Eleanor Lerman.
Yes, indeed, that is my house that I am carrying around on my back like a bullet-proof shell and yes, that sure is my little dog walking a hard road in hard boots. And just wait until you see my girl, chomping on the chains of fate with her mouth full of jagged steel. She’s damn ready and so am I. What else did you expect from the brainiacs of my generation? The survivors, the nonbelievers, the oddball-outs with the Cuban Missile Crisis still sizzling in our blood? Don’t tell me that you bought our act, just because our worried parents (and believe me, we’re nothing like them) taught us how to dress for work and to speak as if we cared about our education. And I guess the music fooled you: you thought we’d keep the party going even to the edge of the abyss. Well, too bad. It’s all yours now. Good luck on the ramparts. What you want to watch for is when the sky shakes itself free of kites and flies away. Have a nice day.

Nearly A Valediction, a poem by Marilyn Hacker.

2011-10-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

Post 642 - Marilyn Hacker (born 1942) is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award and was also a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Winter Numbers (1996), details the loss of many of her friends to AIDS and her own struggle with breast cancer, garnered a Lambda Literary Award and The Nation's Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker.

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that aloneagain,
inventing life left after you.

I don't want to remember you as
thatfour o'clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You've grown into your skin since then; you've grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days' routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She'll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn't know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek's nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

The Ball, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska.

2011-10-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Post 641 - Here's a poem by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska. which was published in the New Yorker in 2003.From Monologue of a Dog: New Poems, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

THE BALL.

As long as nothing can be known for sure(no signals have been picked up yet),as long as Earth is still unlikethe nearer and more distant planets,as long as there’s neither hide nor hairof other grasses graced by other winds,of other treetops bearing other crowns,other animals as well-grounded as our own,as long as only the local echohas been known to speak in syllables,as long as we still haven’t heard the wordof better or worse mozarts,platos, edisons, elsewhere,as long as our inhuman crimesare still committed only between humans,as long as our kindnessis still incomparable,peerless even in its imperfection,as long as our heads packed with illusionsstill pass for the only heads so packed,as long as the roofs of our mouths alonestill raise voices to high heavens –let’s act like very special guests of honourat the district firemen’s ball,dance to the beat of the local oompah bandand pretend that it’s the ballto end all balls.I can’t speak for other –for me this is misery and happiness enough:just this sleepy backwaterwhere even the stars have time to burnwhile winking at usunintentionally.

We Are Always Too Late, a poem by Eavan Boland.

2011-10-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Post 640 - Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat and her mother was an expressionist painter. At the age of six, Boland and her family relocated to London. She later returned to Dublin for university and received her B.A. from Trinity College in 1966. She was also educated in London and New York.
Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, a Jacob's Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio, and an honorary degree from Trinity. She's taught at Trinity College, University College, Bowdoin College, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She's also a regular reviewer for the Irish Times.
Boland and her husband, the author Kevin Casey, have two daughters. She's currently a professor of English at Stanford University where she directs the creative writing program.

We Are Always Too Late by Eavan Boland.

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

RAIN, a poem by Don Paterson.

2011-10-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

post 639 - for Alysia.

RAIN by Don Paterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Is it a month? a poem by J. M. Synge.

2011-10-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

Post 638 - Is it a month? by J. M. Synge

Is it a month since I and you

In the starlight of Glen Dubh

Stretched beneath a hazel bough

Kissed from ear to throat to brow,

Since your fingers, neck and chin

Made the bars that fenced me in,

Till Paradise seemed but a wreck

Near your bosom, brow and neck

And stars grew wilder, growing wise

In the splendor of your eyes!

Since the weasel wandered near

Whilst we kissed from ear to ear

And the wet and withered leaves

Blew about your cap and sleeves,

Till the moon sank tired through the edge

Of the wet and windy hedge?

And we took the starry lane

Back to Dublin town again.

Curtains, a poem by Ruth Stone.

2011-08-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

Post 637 - Ruth Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia and today lives in Vermont. In 1959, after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. As she once pointed out, her poems are all “love poems, written to a dead man” who forced her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters. She's the author of thirteen books of poetry and the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Writers' Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house), two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house), the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which the poet shared with her: "As she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming ... cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, 'run like hell' to the house as she would be chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would 'continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.'"

Curtains by Ruth Stone.

Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, "No pets! No pets!"
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

A Short History of the Apple, a poem by Dorianne Laux.

2011-08-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Post 636 - Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She’s the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her other collections, What We Carry (1994), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. Among her other awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves on the faculty of North Carolina State University's MFA Program. Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection,The Book of Men, is now available from W.W. Norton & Company.

A Short History of the Apple by Dorianne Laux

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve's knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber's bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain's honeybees:
white man's flies. O eat. O eat.

See and hear her read her wonderful poetry at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIlX8f2TtJE&feature=related

What Work Is, a poem by Philip Levine.

2011-08-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Post 635 - Philip Levine, known for his detailed and personal verse about the working class, has been appointed the US's new poet laureate. The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that the 83-year-old Levine will succeed fellow Pulitzer winner WS Merwin this autumn. The laureate, who receives $35,000 and is known officially as the poet laureate consultant in poetry, serves from October through May. Richard Wilbur, Joseph Brodsky and Robert Pinsky are among the previous appointees.
Levine has received virtually every literary honor, but he is the least rarefied of poets. A Detroit native who as a young man worked in automobile plants, he has for decades chronicled, celebrated and worried about blue-collar life. Levine's awards include the Pulitzer in 1995 for The Simple Truth and the National Book award in 1991 for What Work Is.
The laureate has few official duties and poets have used the job to pursue a range of personal projects, from Billy Collins's Poetry 180, which encourages the reading of verse in high school, to Robert Hass's Watershed conference on nature writing. Levine says, "There's a great deal of American poetry that's hardly known and that should be known. As a poet who didn't get published for a long time, I know what it's like not to be read. The other thing I'd like to do is reach out to readers. I would like to bring attention to the kind of people I've written about."

What Work Is by Philip Levine.

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

High Flight, a poem by John Gillespie Magee.

2011-08-07T21:31:00.000-07:00

Post 634 - John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922 – 1941) was an American aviator and poet who died at the age of 19 as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. I came across this poem last night while watching a lovely Canadian film, The Snow Walker, where it was recited in its entirety by James Cromwell.
It put me in mind of those 30 brave young Americans who lost their lives fighting on our behalf when their helicopter was shot down last week in Afghanistan. May they rest in peace.

High Flight by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high unsurpassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

In Millstreet Hospital, a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue.

2011-08-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

Post 633 - Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork, in 1945, later moving to Manchester. He studied Medieval English at Oxford University, where he's a teacher and Fellow in English at Wadham College. He's the author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). His poetry collections are Poaching Rights (1987); The Weakness (1991); Gunpowder (1995), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award; Here Nor There (1999); and Outliving (2003). His work of verse translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in 2006 and a Selected Poems in 2008.
Bernard O'Donoghue received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. His most recent poetry collection is Farmers Cross (2011).

In Millstreet Hospital by Bernard O'Donoghue.

My cousin, they tell me, doesn't wake up much,
nor does she seem to see the green mountain

framed in the window of this chapel of ease
for travellers booked in for their long pilgrimage.
When I leave at the end of visiting-hours
a small, tidy man is sitting by the door:
stick, well-knotted tie, watch-chain, tweed jacket.
He gets to his feet, raises his hat and enquires:
'Excuse my troubling you, but would you be
going anywhere near a railway station?'
The young smiling nurse bends over him,
and takes him by the elbow, saying:
'Maybe tomorrow, James. Maybe tomorrow
we'll take you to the station.'

What to Remember When Waking, a poem by David Whyte.

2011-08-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

Post 632 - The celebrated writer and teacher David Whyte explores the cyclical, conversational nature of reality and the disciplines that allow us to create an identity robust enough to meet its gifts and demands. An inspiring poem.....

What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte.

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a trouble guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

The Mad Cow Talks Back, a poem by Jo Shapcott.

2011-07-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Post 622 - Jo Shapcott FRSL, (born March 1953, London) is an English poet, editor and lecturer who’s won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. She’s Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and is the current President of The Poetry Society.
But if it hadn't been for "the intervention of really important teachers" in her life, she might well have ended up not in poetry, but in synchronized swimming. She started writing stories and poems as a child, at a time when "playing with the language" is "almost like Plasticene or mud or clay." When her focus shifted, first to synchronized swimming and then to boys and dancing, good teachers kept bringing her back to poetry and "chance and luck" kept her on track. She read English at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford, came to America to do a PhD on Elizabeth Bishop and started attending writing workshops. One of these was taught by Seamus Heaney. Shapcott was hooked and "poetry won, the PhD lost." She’s highly engaging as a poet, luminously intelligent as a critic, anthologist and broadcaster, and a widely admired and influential figure in British poetry today.

The following poem first appeared as the concluding sequence of Phrase Book (1992), a brilliantly imaginative response to the-then crisis over Mad Cow Disease.

The Mad Cow Talks Back by Jo Shapcott.

I'm not mad. It just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I'm a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It's risky when
you're good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there's the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it's glorious
because it's always when you're travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain's like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.

Some Kiss We Want, a poem by Rumi.

2011-07-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

Post 621 - Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic (September 1207 – December 1273). Rūmī is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he lived most of his life in an area called Rūm (then under the control of Seljuq dynasty) because it was once ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. He was actually born in Afghanistan. Following his death, his followers founded the Mawlawīyah Sufi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, famous for its Sufi dance known as the samāʿ ceremony.
Although a number of major Islamic poets easily rival the likes of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton in importance and output, they still enjoy only a marginal literary fame in the West because the works of Arabic and Persian thinkers, writers and poets are considered as mere sideshows beside the grand narrative of Western literature. Rumi's poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. In 2007, he was described as the "most popular poet in America."

Some Kiss We Want by Rumi.

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

Advice to a Poet, a poem by Patrick Galvin.

2011-07-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Post 620 - Patrick Galvin, one of the leading Irish poets and dramatists of his generation, was born in Cork City in 1927 and died recently in May 2011. He was the son of Patrick Galvin, a docker and a leading local boxer, a colorful character who had fought Jack Dempsey. Paddy was one of 12 children who grew up in a tough, militant environment, and he left school at 12 to become a delivery boy. After he ran away to join the Foreign Legion, he joined the RAF in 1942 and fought in Libya and Palestine. He worked for the Irish Times as a war correspondent in Korea, and then became part of the group around Brendan Behan who were to do so much to revitalize Irish, then English drama. He disliked the new suburban middle class in Ireland and in his poetry and his plays, he held an uncomfortable mirror up to his fellow countrymen. He loved the public role of the disorderly poet, but played it creatively, without falling into the self-destructive booziness of Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. He renewed himself by periodic disappearances into the Munster countryside, the most productive of which was a sojourn with the tinkers wandering around Waterford and Kerry. In his last years, he spent much of his time in Belfast as resident dramatist at the Lyric Theatre.

Advice to a Poet by Patrick Galvin.

Be a chauffeur, my father said
And never mind the poetry.
That’s all very well for the rich
They can afford it.
What you need is money in your belt
Free uniform and plenty of travel.
Besides that, there’s nothing in verse.
And all poets are raging homosexuals.

I’d still like to be a poet

Another thing: don’t ever marry
And if you do, then marry for cash.
Love, after all, is easily come by
And any old whore will dance for a pound.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
The uniform will suit you a treat
Marriage and poems will blind you surely
And poets and lovers are doomed to hell.

I’d still like to be a poet

But where’s the sense in writing poetry?
Did any poet ever make good?
I never met one who wasn’t a pauper
A prey to bailiffs, lawyers and priests.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
With your appearance you’re bound to do well
You might even meet some rich old widow
Who’ll leave you a fortune the moment she dies.

I’d still like to be a poet

Well, blast you then, your days are darkened
Poverty, misery, carnage and sin.
The poems you’ll write won’t be worth a penny.
And the women you marry will bleed you to death.
Take my advice and buy a revolver
Shoot yourself now in the back of the head.
The Government then might raise a subscription
To keep your poor father from breeding again.

“El Siete Mares,” a poem by Bradley Paul.

2011-07-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

Post 619 - Bradley Paul was born in Baltimore in 1972. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Boston Review, and other journals. His first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize, and his second book of poetry, The Animals All Are Gathering, won the 2009 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul, and their dog, Violet.

“El Siete Mares” by Bradley Paul.

Not Los Siete Mares.
Though there are seven seas
there is only one restaurant.
Octopus with Veracruz sauce.
Pulpo.
Like pulp? Like from a tree?
Beaten and bleached into paper?
But what comes is not pulpo.
Nor is it takonigiri,
white ellipse with a purple edge
and wrapped with a green-black band,
pretty shapes and colors.
Nor meunière nor paillard nor confit.
They grabbed an octopus from the tank
and chopped it up and got it hot
and here in a mound on a plate
is a hot chopped up octopus.
There is saltwater still in its flesh.
My wife meanwhile
orders fried catfish,
which is a catfish thrown whole into oil
and brought out to stare at her.
Which is not how they do it
in Tennessee.
Can’t pretend now, friend.
You know you’re eating me.

Bradley Paul explains, "One day, I ate at El Siete Mares, a family-owned place down on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the scene described above took place. My wife grew up in Tennessee, and fried catfish there means a filet of catfish, breaded and fried in oil. The final product doesn’t even look like a fish. But the fried catfish at El Siete Mares is quite literally a catfish thrown whole into oil. When it’s brought out, it has a horrifying look on its face. The abstraction is gone; there’s no illusion that you’re eating something other than an animal that was alive a few minutes earlier and was then fried to death. It’s not a totally new experience — I grew up in Baltimore, so I’ve watched my fair share of live blue crabs go into a pot and come out a few minutes later with their eyes still in place, only red and covered in Old Bay (hell for them; heaven for me). In this instance, however, I think I was expecting one thing, while another, more scary thing arrived on my plate. Out of that jarring experience came this poem. Maybe that’s where all poems come from."

Träumerei, a poem by Philip Larkin.

2011-06-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Post 618 - Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was born in Coventry, England in 1922. He attended St. John's College, Oxford and his first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945. After college, he served as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull for 30 years. During that time, he was the recipient of many honors, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman. Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer.
Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and lived out his days in the provincial city of Hull, where he died from cancer in 1985.

He once said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth!

Philip Larkin - Träumerei.

In this dream that dogs me I am part
Of a silent crowd walking under a wall,
Leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit,
All moving the same way. After a while
A second wall closes on our right,
Pressing us tighter. We are now shut in
Like pigs down a concrete passage. When I lift
My head, I see the walls have killed the sun,
And light is cold. Now a giant whitewashed D
Comes on the second wall, but much too high
For them to recognize: I await the E,
Watch it approach and pass. By now
We have ceased walking and travel
Like water through sewers, steeply, despite
The tread that goes on ringing like an anvil
Under the striding A. I crook
My arm to shield my face, for we must pass
Beneath the huge, decapitated cross,
White on the wall, the T, and I cannot halt
The tread, the beat of it, it is my own heart,
The walls of my room rise, it is still night,
I have woken again before the word was spelt.

Of Politics, & Art, a poem by Norman Dubie.

2011-06-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

Post 617 - After finishing high school, Norman Dubie (1945 -) had hoped to play football for West Point, but instead, following his father's wishes, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire at Durham. There he failed every subject except English and Geology and was then rejected by the draft due to high blood pressure. After taking some time off, he enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont where he received his BA in 1965. He subsequently received a fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned his MFA in 1968, as well as an invitation to stay on as a member of the program's regular faculty. In 1975 he was invited to establish an MFA program at Arizona State University in Tempe and accepted a position there as consultant in the arts. He currently lives and teaches in Arizona. Dubie's poetry has received the Bess Hokin Award from the Modern Poetry Association, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I love this poem - it reminds me of when I attended a one-room country schoolhouse some sixty years ago in Killesk and first learned to love poetry.

Of Politics, & Art by Norman Dubie.

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God rendering voice of a storm.

Wait for me, a poem by Konstantin Simonov.

2011-06-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

Post 616 - The Soviet poet and novelist Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov (1915 - 1979) is best known for his patriotic verse dealing with World War II and for his vivid prose descriptions of Soviet troops in action during the war. He was born in St. Petersburg and received a degree in literature from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow in 1939. Simonov then became a member of the Communist party, and in 1941 was called to military duty as a correspondent for the journal Red Star. His wartime dispatches were read by a wide audience, and he was awarded several medals for his work, including the Stalin Prize. After World War II, Simonov traveled extensively as a member of various literary and journalistic delegations, visiting Japan, China, the United States, and Western Europe. A member of the editorial boards of various Soviet journals and publishing houses, he twice served as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. In 1968, he and other high-ranking members of the Union of Soviet Writers refused to sign a statement of official support for the government's invasion of Czechoslovakia; yet he remained an esteemed member of the Soviet literary establishment. Throughout the 1970s, he served as secretary of the Union of Writers. He died in Moscow in 1979.

Wait for me by Konstantin Simonov.

Wait for me and I’ll return, only wait very hard.
Wait when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain.
Wait when the wind sweeps the snowdrifts.
Wait in the sweltering heat.
Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.
Wait even when from afar no letters come for you.
Wait even when others are tired of waiting.

Wait for me and I’ll return, but wait patiently.
Wait even when you are told that you should forget.
Wait even when my mother and son think I am no more.
And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory
Wait and do not hurry to drink to my memory too.

Wait for me and I’ll return, defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death
You with your waiting saved me.
Only you and I will know how I survived:
It was because you waited as no one else did.

Walking Through a Wall, a prose-poem by Louis Jenkins..

2011-06-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

Post 615 - When Mark Rylance accepted a Tony Award as Best Actor in a Play for Jerusalem last night, he shared this poem with the expectant crowd. In case you missed it — or tuned out in confusion in the middle — the complete poem is below:

Walking Through a Wall by Louis Jenkins.

Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, 'Say, I want to try that.' Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren't so good. They won't hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren't pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it's the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don't know, but I've torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it's a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side.

When Rylance accepted his 2008 Best Actor Tony for his Broadway debut in Boeing-Boeing he shared another Jenkins poem, The Back Country.

Louis Jenkins (1942 -) is a prose poet from Enid, Oklahoma. He's lived in Duluth, Minnesota, for over 30 years with his wife Ann. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. Jenkins has been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion numerous times and has also been featured on The Writer's Almanac. The author's book, Nice Fish, was winner of the Minnesota Book Award in 1995. His book Just Above Water won the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award in 1997. In 1996, Jenkins was a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Night on the Island, a poem by Pablo Neruda.

2011-06-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

Post 614 - Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet and politician. He’s famous for his romantic love poems, specially for the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair or Veinte Poemas. These poems have a very sensual and erotic touch to them which was one of the reasons for their great popularity. Most of Neruda’s writing was in Spanish but this has been translated into English.

Night on the Island by Pablo Neruda.

All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,
between fire and water. Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
Up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.

Perhaps your dream
drifted from mine
and through the dark sea
was seeking me
as before,
when you did not yet exist,
when without sighting you
I sailed by your side,
and your eyes sought
what now--
bread, wine, love, and anger--
I heap upon you
because you are the cup
that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.

Neither night nor sleep
could separate us.

I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
gave me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.

Self-Portrait, a poem by Chase Twichell.

2011-06-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

Post 613 - Chase Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1950. She received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College (Hartford) in 1973 and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1976. From 1976 to 1984 she worked at Pennyroyal Press, and from 1986 to 1988 she co-edited the Alabama Poetry Series, published by University of Alabama Press. She also co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach with Robin Behn (HarperCollins, 1992).
She's won awards from the Artists Foundation (Boston), the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She's recently won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University for Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, her seventh book of poetry. She's taught at Princeton University, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Alabama, and Hampshire College. In 1999, Twichell founded Ausable Press, which she operated until it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. A practicing Buddhist, she lives in Keene, New York, with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks.

In a Fall 2003 Tricycle magazine interview, she said, "Zen is a wonderful sieve through which to pour a poem. It strains out whatever's inessential." This is very evident in the following short poem.

Self-Portrait By Chase Twichell.

I know I promised to stop
talking about her,
but I was talking to myself.
The truth is, she’s a child
who stopped growing,
so I’ve always allowed her
to tag along, and when she brings
her melancholy close to me
I comfort her. Naturally
you’re curious; you want to know
how she became a gnarled branch
veiled in diminutive blooms.
But I’ve told you all I know.
I was sure she had secrets,
but she had no secrets.
I had to tell her mine.

Two Menus, a poem by Rachel DeWoskin.

2011-06-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Post 612 - Rachel DeWoskin (1972-) is an American author and screen actress. She spent her twenties in China as a consultant, writer, and the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera called "Foreign Babes in Beijing." Her memoir of those years, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her novel Repeat After Me, about a young American ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese radical, and their unexpected New York romance, won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year award. Her third book, the novel Big Girl Small, was just recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rachel has a BA in English from Columbia and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She now divides her time between NYC, Chicago, and Beijing with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two little girls.

Two Menus by Rachel DeWoskin

i.
Outside McDonald’s downtown
in Beijing, I board a bus bound
for mountains with Xiao Dai
who carries equipment, asks why
I have to be so headstrong.
I say nothing. We belong
to a climbing club. Sheer rocks.

ii.
It is better to be the head of a chicken
than the tail of an ox. Men mention
wisdom whenever I disagree
with them. I am roped in, belayed. If we
fall, we all fall. My fingers are between
a thin ridge, sideways, gripping. I lean
down to tell Xiao Dai it’s better to be
neither chicken nor ox. He can’t hear me.
The rope swings, flicking sparks off cliffs.

iii.
Translation is insurance. With just
enough to cover what we must,
we speak only where there’s overlap, conserve
our syllables, expressions, every move.

iv.
The restaurant in Beijing called “Bitterness
and Happiness” has two menus: one of excess,
the second, scarcity. We order grass
from one and from the other, flesh.
The Chinese language has
77,000 characters Xiao Dai regards as
evidence. When I ask of what, he is putting
roots on my plate. Love, he says. My footing
gets rocky around these matters of fact.
A word for each affair? The waiter is back.

Reluctance, a poem by Robert Frost.

2011-05-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

Post 611 - Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, MA. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree from either.

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was there that Frost was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also became friends with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. He and his wife returned to the United States in 1915.

By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book — including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962) — his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. He died in Boston in 1963.

About him, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
I think this is a particularly beautiful poem.

Reluctance by Robert Frost.

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The Journey, a poem by Mary Oliver.

2011-05-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

Post 610 - Mary Oliver (born in 1935) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet." Oliver briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college. She’s since received Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston, Dartmouth College, and Tufts University.
Oliver has given very few interviews, saying she prefers for her writing to speak for itself. While she’s produced many memorable poems, this is one of my favorites.

The Journey by Mary Oliver.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

We Saw A Vision, a poem by Liam Mac Uistin.

2011-05-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

Post 609 - The following poem, in English and in Irish, was read today at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin in the presence of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who laid a wreath in memory of those who died in the struggle for Irish freedom. The Garden commemorates freedom fighters from various uprisings, including:
- the 1798 rebellion of the Society of United Irishmen
- the 1803 rebellion of Robert Emmet
- the 1848 rebellion of Young Ireland
- the 1867 rising of the Fenian Brotherhood
- the 1916 Easter Rising of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army
- the 1919-21 Irish War of Independence of the IRA.
The Garden was opened in 1966 by President Eamon de Valera on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, in which he had been a commander. Its focal point is a statue of the Children of Lir by Oisín Kelly, symbolising rebirth and resurrection.

We Saw A Vision by Liam Mac Uistin.

In the darkness of despair we saw a vision, We lit the light of hope, And it was not extinguished. In the desert of discouragement we saw a vision, We planted the tree of valor, And it blossomed.

In the winter of bondage we saw a vision, We melted the snow of lethargy, And the river of resurrection flowed from it.

We sent our vision aswim like a swan on the river, The vision became a reality, Winter became summer, Bondage became freedom, And this we left to you as your inheritance.

O generation of freedom remember us, The generation of the vision.

In Irish, the poem reads as follows:

An Aisling.

I ndorchacht an éadóchais rinneadh aisling dúinn. Lasamar solas an dóchais. Agus níor múchadh é.

I bhfásach an lagmhisnigh rinneadh aisling dúinn. Chuireamar crann na crógachta. Agus tháing bláth air.

I ngeimhreadh na daoirse rinneadh aisling dúinn. Mheileamar sneachta táimhe. Agus rith abhainn na hathbheochana as.

Chuireamar ár n-aisling ag snámh mar eala ar an abhainn. Rinneadh fírinne den aisling. Rinneadh samhradh den gheimhreadh. Rinneadh saoirse den daoirse. Agus d'fhágamar agaibhse mar oidhreacht í.

A ghlúnta na saoirse cuimhnígí orainne, glúnta na haislinge...

A sonnet by William Shakespeare.

2011-05-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

Poet 608 - How that man could write.....

Shakespeare's Sonnet 30.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

To My Mother, a poem by Christina Rossetti.

2011-05-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

Post 607 - The English poet Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote poems of love, fantasy, and nature, verses for children, and devotional poetry and prose. This is Rossetti’s first poem, written on April 27th, 1842, when she was 11 years old.

To My Mother by Christina Rossetti.

To-day’s your natal day,
Sweet flowers I bring;
Mother, accept, I pray,
My offering.

And may you happy live,
And long us bless;
Receiving as you give
Great happiness.

A poem by Emily Dickinson.

2011-05-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Post 606 - Emily Dickinson (1830–86).

Complete Poems. 1924.

Part One: Life

XCVII

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.

The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king.

A Vow, a poem by Wendy Cope.

2011-04-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Post 605 - With the royal wedding coming up later this week, a poem on the subject of marriage seemed most appropriate. So I thought immediately of Wendy Cope.

Cope was born in Kent in 1945 and studied History at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She trained as a teacher at Westminster College of Education, Oxford, and taught in primary schools in London from 1967 - 1986. She became Arts and Reviews editor for Contact, the Inner London Education Authority magazine, and continued to teach part-time, before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. She was television critic for The Spectator magazine until 1990. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1995.She was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2001.

Cope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and currently lives in Winchester, England. In 1998 she was the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate. Her poetry is perhaps best known for its humor and wit. For example, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis takes up just four lines and captures the irreverent mood of her writing:
It was a dream I had last week
And some sort of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem,
But I love the title.

I think this would be a great poem for William and Kate to read to one another during the ceremony on Friday next.

A Vow by Wendy Cope.

I cannot promise never to be angry;
I cannot promise always to be kind.
You know what you are taking on, my darling –
It's only at the start that love is blind.
And yet I'm still the one you want to be with
And you're the one for me – of that I'm sure.
You are my closest friend, my favorite person,
The lover and the home I've waited for.
I cannot promise that I will deserve you
From this day on. I hope to pass that test.
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best.

Easter, 1916, a poem by William Butler Yeats.

2011-04-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

Post 604 - William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored.

Easter is always a special time for me, not just as a symbol for resurrection and renewal, but because it's the anniversary of the time where the Irish people asserted their coming of age and finally broke free from English rule. Given the current focus on freedom and rebellion in the Middle East and elsewhere, it seemed to be an appropriate choice this year.

In this poem, Yeats memorializes the leaders who sacrificed their lives in the Easter rebellion of 1916 and pays tribute to their ability to transform themselves and the history of Ireland through the "terrible beauty" of insurrection. I love the beautiful use of language and metaphor in this poem.

Easter 1916, by William Butler Yeats.

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The Owl and the Pussycat, a poem by Edward Lear.

2011-04-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Post 603 - Edward Lear (1812 - 1888) was a British poet and painter known for his absurd wit. His father, a stockbroker, was sent to debtor's prison when he was thirteen and the young Lear was forced to earn a living. He quickly gained recognition for his work and in 1832 was hired by the London Zoological Society to execute illustrations of birds. His first book of poems, A Book of Nonsense, (1846) was composed for the grandchildren of his patron, the Earl of Denby. Around 1836 Lear decided to devote himself exclusively to landscape painting (although he continued to compose light verse). Between 1837 and 1847 Lear traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. After his return to England, his travel journals were published in several volumes as The Illustrated Travels of a Landscape Painter. Lear's travel books were popular and respected in their day, but are largely forgotten today. Instead, he's remembered as the creator of the modern limerick, and for his many humorous poems. This is one of my own favorites:

The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are, you are,
What a beautiful Pussy you are."
Pussy said to the Owl "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long we have tarried;
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?"
Said the Piggy, "I will"
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

By the way, a runcible spoon is a small fork with three prongs, one having a sharp edge, that is curved like a spoon. This spoon is used to eat pickles, etc., and presumably sliced quince as well.

How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.

Broken Promises, a poem by David Kirby.

2011-04-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Post 602 - David Kirby was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1944. He received his B.A. from Louisiana State University, and earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. He's taught all over America and at international programs in Italy, England, France, and Spain. He's now the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and writes distinctive long-lined narrative poems that braid together high and popular culture, personal memory, philosophy, and humor.
He believes that, "no poem speaks to us as directly as a stop sign or a Star of David. But nobody listens to a Jay-Z song and says, 'Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that,' and a well-made poem works the same way."

Broken Promises by David Kirby.

I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;
I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb
and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,
knowing I would only let them win.
I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,
coming back late from the interval

long after the others have taken their seats,
and in deserted shopping malls late at night,
peering at things they can never buy,
and I have found them wandering
in a wood where I too have wandered.

This morning I caught one;
small and stupid, too slow to get away,
it was only a promise I had made to myself once
and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me
and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach
in their long, sad faces.
When I drew near them, they scurried away,
even though they will sleep in my yard tonight.
I hate them for their ingratitude,
I who have kept countless promises,
as dead now as Shakespeare’s children.
“You bastards,” I scream,
“you have to love me — I gave you life!”

Those Who Do Not Dance, a poem by Gabriela Mistral.

2011-04-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

Post 601 - Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, in 1889, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended the Primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. In December 22, 1914, Mistral was awarded first prize in a national literary contest Juegos Florales in Santiago, with the work Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death). She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing. After winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. She formed her pseudonym from the two of her favorite poets, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral or, as another story has it, from a composite of the Archangel Gabriel and the Mistral wind of Provence. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She played an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile, was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations, and was Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She held honorary degrees from the Universities of Florence and Guatemala and was an honorary member of various cultural societies in Chile as well as in the United States, Spain, and Cuba. She taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico.
In her later years, poor health slowed her traveling and during the last years of her life she made her home in Roslyn, New York; in early January of 1957 she transferred to Hempstead, New York, where she died from pancreatic cancer on January 10, 1957, aged 67. Her remains were returned to Chile nine days later. The Chilean government declared three days of national mourning, and hundreds of thousands of Chileans came to pay her their respects.

Those Who Do Not Dance by Gabriela Mistral.

A crippled child
Said, “How shall I dance?”
Let your heart dance
We said.

Then the invalid said:
“How shall I sing?”
Let your heart sing
We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,
But I, how shall I dance?”
Let your heart fly to the wind
We said.

Then God spoke from above
“How shall I descend from the blue?”
Come dance for us here in the light
We said.

All the valley is dancing
Together under the sun,
And the heart of him who joins us not
Is turned to dust, to dust.

Father’s Day, a poem by James Tate.

2011-03-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

Post 600 - Six hundred entries, another minor milestone achieved. Someone emailed me today and asked me if I liked my work. The answer was yes, very much, especially since I stopped working for a living. James Tate would understand this. In a 1998 interview, he pointed to one unifying element in his work: “My characters usually are — or, I’d say most often, I don’t want to generalize too much — but most often they’re ... trying to find some kind of life.” Today, I feel I have more freedom to explore and find the more satisfying aspects of life. I like writing and exploring poetry better than anything I've found so far.

Father’s Day by James Tate.

My daughter has lived overseas for a number
of years now. She married into royalty, and they
won't let her communicate with any of her family or
friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips
of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband,
the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming.
Fierce guard dogs won't let her out of their sight.
I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to
rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters
to the State Department. They have written back
saying that they are aware of the situation. I
never saw her dance. I was always at some
convention. I never saw her sing. I was always
working late. I called her My Princess, to make
up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me.
Birdseed was her middle name.

Meditations on Saint Patrick, a poem by John Cotter.

2011-03-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Post 599 - When my kids first went away to college, I used to send them a poem a week, reflecting on life at home and sharing some thoughts about appropriate behavior when living away from home for the first time. Here is a composition that I sent off in 1991. Since we're rapidly coming up on Saint Patrick's day, there's no time like the present to send it out again.

Meditations on Saint Patrick by John Cotter.

Saint Patrick was a normal guy
A bit like me and you,
And he ended up in Ireland
In the year four thirty two.

He was hung-up on religion
From the stories I hear tell,
‘Cause he didn’t want the Irish,
When they died, to go to hell.

So, he traveled through the countryside
Converting all the kings.
To hear the places that he went,
I’m sure the man had wings.

He loved the birds and animals
But snakes he couldn’t stand,
So he prayed to God to take them,
And they exited the land.

Please remember this, your heritage,
When March hits seventeen.
Celebrate the fact you’re Irish,
And dress up in something green.

First Child ... Second Child, a poem by Ogden Nash.

2011-03-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

Post 598 - Ogden Nash was born in 1902 in Rye, New York, and educated at St. George's School in Rhode Island and, briefly, at Harvard University. His first job was writing advertising copy for Doubleday, Page Publishing in 1925 and he published his first collection of poems in 1931. He joined the staff at the New Yorker in 1932 and quickly established himself as a very popular writer of light and funny verse. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1950. His principal home was in Baltimore, Maryland, where he died in 1971. His one-line observations are still often quoted - two examples are;
“People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up,” and “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”

First Child ... Second Child by Ogden Nash

FIRST

Be it a girl, or one of the boys,
It is scarlet all over its avoirdupois,
It is red, it is boiled; could the obstetrician
Have possibly been a lobstertrician?
His degrees and credentials were hunky-dory,
But how's for an infantile inventory?
Here's the prodigy, here's the miracle!
Whether its head is oval or spherical,
You rejoice to find it has only one,
Having dreaded a two-headed daughter or son;
Here's the phenomenon all complete,
It's got two hands, it's got two feet,
Only natural, but pleasing, because
For months you have dreamed of flippers or claws.
Furthermore, it is fully equipped:
Fingers and toes with nails are tipped;
It's even got eyes, and a mouth clear cut;
When the mouth comes open the eyes go shut,
When the eyes go shut, the breath is loosed
And the presence of lungs can be deduced.
Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder,
This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder.
A staggering child, a child astounding,
Dazzling, diaperless, dumbfounding,
Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed,
A child to stagger and flabbergast,
Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn,
And the only perfect one ever born.

SECOND

Arrived this evening at half-past nine.
Everybody is doing fine.
Is it a boy, or quite the reverse?
You can call in the morning and ask the nurse.

Valentine, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

2011-02-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

Post 597 - Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She graduated with an honors degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1977 and now holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews and the University of Warwick. Duffy first reached a wide audience with The World's Wife (1999), a series of witty dramatic monologues spoken by women from fairy tales and myths, and the women usually air-brushed from history, such as Mrs. Midas and Mrs. Darwin. Duffy is also a playwright and her output has included a formidable amount of writing for children. She’s Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University and Creative Director of the Manchester Writing School. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009.

Duffy says of her poetry: "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way."

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
Like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
Like a lover.
It will make your reflection
A wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
Possessive and faithful
As we are,
For as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
If you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
Cling to your knife.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other by William Stafford

2011-02-10T20:39:00.000-08:00

Post 596 - William Edgar Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, on January 17, 1914, the eldest of three children. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1937. In 1939 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to begin graduate studies in Economics, but by the next year he had returned to Kansas to earn his master's degree in English in 1947. In 1948 he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clark College. Though he traveled and read his poems widely, he taught at Lewis and Clark until his retirement in 1980. Stafford won the National Book Award in 1963 and went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose. Among his many honors and awards were a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. In 1970, he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position currently known as the Poet Laureate). He died at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on August 28, 1993.
He believed that “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

A Ritual To Read To Each Other by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider -
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

For My Daughter, a poem by David Ignatow.

2011-02-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Post 595 - David Ignatow (1914 – 1997) was born in Brooklyn and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987. Mr. Ignatow's many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort." He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America.
He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College of the City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University.

Commenting on the life of the poet, he once observed, "There's a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself."

For My Daughter in Reply to a Question.

We're not going to die.
We'll find a way.
We'll breathe deeply
and eat carefully.
We'll think always on life.
There'll be no fading for you or for me.
We'll be the first
and we'll not laugh at ourselves ever
and your children will be my grandchildren.
Nothing will have changed
except by addition.
There'll never be another as you
and never another as I.
No one ever will confuse you
nor confuse me with another.
We will not be forgotten and passed over
and buried under the births and deaths to come.

Lost, a poem by David Wagoner.

2011-01-29T13:17:00.000-08:00

Post 594 - David Russell Wagoner was born in the city of Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the United States Navy. Around this time, Wagoner enrolled himself in the Pennsylvania State University where he earned an M.A. in English in 1949. Wagoner is one of the prolific writers amongst the list of modern American literary scholars. He's been a recipient of many prestigious literary awards.
* The National Book Award for 'Collected Poems,' and the Pushcart Prize (1977)
* National Book Award for 'In Broken Country' (1979)
* Pushcart Prize (1983)
* Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1991)
* American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
* Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award
* Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry magazine
* Fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts
In 1978, he was selected to serve as the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He also served as the editor of Poetry Northwest, until its last issue, in 2002.

Wagoner enjoys a great reputation both as a writer and as a professor. Currently, he lives in Washington and teaches at the University of Washington, as a professor of poetry, fiction and play-writing.

I find this to be a very inspiring and comforting poem.

Lost by David Wagoner.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you,

If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

Pangur Bán, an old Irish poem.

2011-01-21T10:42:00.000-08:00

Post 593 - This poem was written in the 8th century by an unknown Irish Monk, a student at the Monastery of St. Paul on Reichenau Island in Lake Constance where Germany meets with Carinthia, Austria. Little did he know that 1,200 years later, others like me would fall in love with Pangur Bán, too.
This poem bears similarities to the poetry of Sedulius Scottus, leading to speculation that he might have been the author. The Irish loved cats; there's a fine book, The Comical Celtic Cat, by Norah Golden (Mountrath, Portlaoise: The Dolmen Press, 1984). By the way, Bán means white in Gaelic. This translation is by Robin Flower.

Pangur Bán

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Dancing The Boys Into Bed, a poem by Ethna McKiernan.

2011-01-13T16:55:00.000-08:00

Post 592 - Ethna McKiernan is a Minneapolis poet. Her first book of poetry, Caravan, was published in 1990. About her second book, The One Who Swears You Can't Start Over, published in 2002, the Bloomsbury Review wrote, “McKiernan seems to write because she has to, and graces her verse with resonance because she can. She stands out among the ranks of poets for her ability to match language to subject, sound to sense.”

(I was thinking of Carolyn Plumley when I posted this poem....)

Dancing The Boys Into Bed by Ethna McKiernan.

Crazy with giggles, a knee-high tornado
is dancing my skirt into knots.
His younger brother's slung across my shoulder,
bobbing his head to some infant dream.

They are the princes of Baba
and I am the palace queen
with regal peanut butter on her cheek.
We are kissing the world goodnight,

skimming a child's cha-cha
across the wooden floor, prancing our feet
to the beat of the baby's hiccups
in the bedtime world of Baba.

Sway, boys, rock the giddy room
to bits. I'll blanket down the castle
and toss some stars above your cribs,
then gently dance you into sleep.

Two Voices, a poem by Philip Levine.

2011-01-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

Post 591 - Philip Levine (born in January, 1928, in Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. He taught for many years at California State University, Fresno. Until recently he was the Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Levine began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne Wayne State University in Detroit and working days at one of that city's automobile manufacturing plants. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Among his awards:
* 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry - The Simple Truth
* 1991 National Book Award - What Work Is
* 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award - Ashes: Poems New and Old
* 1979 American Book Award for Poetry - Ashes: Poems New and Old
* 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award - 7 Years from Somewhere
* 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize - The Names of the Lost
* 1987 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
* Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry
* Frank O'Hara Prize
* Two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships

He says, "I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong."

Two Voices by Philip Levine.

I heard a voice behind me in the street
calling my name. This was not years ago,
this was yesterday in Brooklyn, late spring
of the new year, the flowers - roses, tulips,
mock orange, pansies- promising their colors
along the promenade. I was on my way
to nothing, just ambling along, my head
altogether empty on a Saturday morning
in my seventy-third year. Not altogether empty,
for the flowers were in it, and the crowds
of kids in bright shirts and sweaters, young kids
with their parents in tow, and across the bay
there were the cliffs breaking through the haze
to call to the Heights, to belittle Brooklyn
as it always does. Then my name, “Philip,”
a huge voice, deep and resonant, unfamiliar
or if heard before, heard on radio or TV,
too sonorous for daily life. So, of course,
I turned to behold more kids on roller blades,
kids on skateboards, kids on foot, no one
especially aware of me. Waiting, awake now
as I had not been, certain the morning meant
more than I’d come looking for. The crowds
passed, the sun grew stronger, the day passed
into afternoon and I gave up at last and turned
for home half-believing I’d missed something.
Let’s say I phone you tonight and tell you
about my little adventure which came to nothing.
What will you think? Not what will you say,
you’ll say it was an illusion or you’ll say
there was a deep need in me to hear
that particular voice, or sometimes the voices
of the air - all the separate voices in so
public a place - can unite for a moment
to produce “Philip“ or “John” or “Robert”
or whatever we expect. I don’t know
what you’ll think, I’ve never known, even
when you and I were together, and I’d
waken in the false dawn to hear you
in the secret voice that was yours crying
out into the dark a name not mine.

Some interesting facts about brass monkeys........

2011-01-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

Post 590 - I never knew this......until today

It was necessary to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannon on old war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about the deck was the problem. The storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen.

Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon. There was only one problem - how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others.

The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called, for reasons unknown, a Monkey. But if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rusting problem was to make them of brass - hence, Brass Monkeys.

Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey.

Thus, it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

And all this time, I thought that this was just a vulgar expression.....

Summer in the country - part ten.

2010-12-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

Post 589 – Undoubtedly, the greatest event of the summer was the threshing season, which I think of as the 'Thanksgiving' of its day. Here, the neighbors always gathered to help each other. The young and the old worked in harmony to the rhythmic drone of the threshing machine that was driven by a long leather belt harnessed to a steam engine. My grandfather’s threshing was a one-day event but for some others, like my cousins, the Harts, the threshing took two or three days to complete. I particularly remember having lunch with the men in Hart’s kitchen, the turf fire blazing, the fresh baked soda-bread, the thick slices of crispy fried bacon, the big mound of boiled potatoes laid out on a sack in the middle of the table, the jugs of buttermilk, and of course, the storytelling. I always felt very big and grownup to be included. Orange squash and bottles of stout were in abundance at the end of the day.

My father was a “machine man” when he was young. He went about the country in the 1920s with his family’s threshing machine, renting it out for a day here, a few days there. All he had to do was to make sure the machine arrived on time in good working order and collect the money (sometimes in gold sovereigns!) when the engagement was finished. He said the machine man was always treated with great respect and he seldom was allowed to do any actual physical work. Instead, he was plied with food and drink and, if he was to be believed, had frequent adventures with the daughters of the farmers he was working with – an ideal job for a good-looking young man who hadn’t as yet any thoughts of settling down. In those days, the threshing was often followed by a barn dance to celebrate another successful harvest – a custom that had largely died out by the time I came along. Probably just as well, as my mother used to talk about some local lads who came to these dances wearing hob-nailed boots with the sole intention of breaking through the barn floor with their “dancing.”

Once the threshing was over, the hay barns were full of loosely packed straw that had just come off the conveyor belt and hadn’t yet had time to settle. I loved to climb up to the top of the barn and then somersault from the rafters, disappearing into the fresh straw like diving into the ocean. It was usually quite a challenge to claw my way out so I could do it over again. The threshing season was usually the end of my summer stay as my parents arrived shortly afterwards to drive me back to Kilkenny, where we lived at that time.

I remember it all as a very free and happy time. Life was good and I hope the same is true for you and yours this holiday season. I wish you all good health, the joy of family, the gift of friends this Christmas, and the best of everything in 2011.

Stuff you may not know...

2010-12-12T16:14:00.000-08:00

Post 588 - Chief Executive magazine's CEO Confidence Index, the nation's leading monthly CEO Confidence Index, increased 14.7 points (14.4 percent), rising to 102.1 following the results of the November elections. All five components of the index showed double-digit gains in November.

Check my math - A clunker that travels 12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year. A vehicle that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons a year. So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year. The government claims 700,000 vehicles were taken off the road, so that's 224 million gallons saved per year. That equates to a bit over five million barrels of oil. Five million barrels is about five hours worth of US consumption. More importantly, five million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars. So, we paid $3 billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million. Bottom line, we spent $8.57 for every dollar we saved. I’m hoping the government will do a better job with our health care, though.

In 2007, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley tried to estimate just how much information had been produced in the previous year. Their answer was five exabytes, equivalent to almost 40 times the contents of the Library of Congress.

An associate and friend of Thomas Edison, Edward Johnson, is recognized as the first person to put electrified lights on a real Christmas tree. It happened in 1882, just three years after the incandescent light bulb was invented. Johnson was an executive of the Edison Illumination Company of New York City. Christmas trees before 1882 were displayed in homes with lighted candles - many tragic fires resulted from this custom. Edward Johnson hand-wired 80 red, white and blue hand-blown bulbs and strung them around a rotating evergreen tree. To quote Johnson from a letter sent to New York newspapers, "Electric trees will prove to be far less dangerous than the wax candle parlor trees." In fact, those first bulbs became very hot and were nearly as dangerous as the candles they were replacing. Still out of range for most American families to purchase, Edison's Christmas tree lights did not immediately catch on. It would take decades for affordable lighting to become available to most Americans.
In 1917, a 15-year-old boy named Albert Sadacca had a "light bulb" experience. Sadacca's family owned a novelty store selling electrified wicker bird cages with lighted imitation birds. Sadacca suggested to his parents that they begin making electric lights for Christmas trees. After a slow first year, the New York City novelty store grew into NOMA Electric Company and quickly became the largest Christmas lighting company in the world.
According to the National Electrical Contractors Association, the bladed wall plug that we use today was actually a development of a device that was originally used to facilitate the interconnection of strings of Christmas lights.

Repelled by Metal, a poem by Roger McGough.

2010-12-09T18:30:00.000-08:00

Post 587 - Roger Joseph McGough CBE (born 9 November 1937) is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 program Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as regularly performing his own poetry. He is a Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University and is a Vice President of the Poetry Society. McGough was responsible for much of the humorous dialogue in The Beatles' animated film, Yellow Submarine, although he did not receive an on-screen credit. McGough won a Cholmondeley Award in 1998, and was awarded the CBE in June 2004.He holds an honorary MA from Nene College of Further Education; he was awarded an honorary degree from Roehampton University in 2006 as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Liverpool in 2006. He was Fellow of Poetry at Loughborough University from 1973 to 1975 and Honorary Professor at Thames Valley University in 1993. In 2005, Random House published his autobiography, Said And Done.

He once said, "Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."

Repelled by Metal by Roger McGough.

I don’t drive I’m afraid.
Never had the inclination or the need.
Being antimagnetic, I am repelled by metal
And unimpressed by speed.

Nor am I being ‘holier than thou’.
Thou are a godsend to be candid
You with the car and the welcoming smile
Without your lift I’d be stranded.

And it’s not that I dislike cars
Though noisy and dangerous I dare say
Monet-eaters and poison-excreters, okay
But I don’t dislike cars, per se.

It’s just that I know my limitations.
I’d be all thumbs behind a wheel.
Don’t laugh. Could you park a poem
In a space this small? Well, that’s how I feel.

Consider this.

2010-12-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Post 586 - Not fully settled yet in the new house but getting there. In the meantime, consider this:

In Australia, all swim teams must reserve one place for asthmatic athletes, a stipulation invoked after the rambunctious Dawn Fraser stormed through world swimming in the 1960s despite her affliction.

A Colorado man thinks he's found a way to protect your private parts from unwanted radiation and government peeping at airports. Jeff Buske of Larkspur is selling tungsten-lined underwear online, with fibers of the X-ray-repelling material strategically placed over the crotch. He says he's seen his sales skyrocket, since the Transportation Security Administration began rolling out full-body scanners at various airports and conducting aggressive pat-downs of people who refuse to use them. Aren't we an innovative people, especially when there's money to be made!

In the US, it’s estimated that on an annual basis:
• 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper are used…
• this results in 15 million trees being pulped…
• 474 billion gallons of water are consumed to produce the paper…
• 253,000 tons of chlorine are applied in the bleaching process…
• which uses 17.3 terawatts of electricity…

I guess WikiLeaks means the day is soon coming when our most private and candid communications will appear somewhere for everyone and anyone to read.

Solitude, a poem by Alexander Pope.

2010-12-02T13:56:00.000-08:00

Post 585 - Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an eighteenth-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Pope's education was affected by the penal law in force at the time upholding the status of the established Church of England, which banned Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, or holding public office on pain of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt, then went to Twyford School and to two Catholic schools in London. Such schools, while illegal, were tolerated in some areas. In 1700, his family moved to a small estate at Popeswood in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal Windsor Forest. This was due to a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles of either London or Westminster. From the age of 12, he suffered numerous health problems which deformed his body and stunted his growth, leaving him with a severe hunchback. He never grew beyond 4 ft 6 in tall.

I came across The Ideal Book of Poetry during my recent move. It was part of my reading requirements for my first year of English at boarding school in 1949. Leafing through it, I remembered that this poem was one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy it too.

Solitude by Alexander Pope.

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years, slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixt, sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Strange, but true!

2010-12-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

Post 584 - I've been saving these up ..........

The safety of most chemicals used in mattresses - or any other consumer product - is simply unknown, because the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 considers all new chemicals safe until proven otherwise, and does not require companies to do any testing of their products. This means that companies such as Naturepedic, which markets non-toxic mattresses, are forced to pay to individually test nearly any component they want to include in a product. This drives up the prices of their products, making a healthy mattress a luxury only the wealthy can afford.

Anne McCartt, co-author of a recent report on older American drivers by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, pointed out that while highway deaths have dropped across the board, the decline in fatal crash involvement from 1997 to 2006 for drivers over 70 was much greater - 37 percent - than it was among drivers ages 35 to 54. Police data from 13 states also suggests that older drivers are involved less often in nonfatal injury crashes and in those causing only property damage. This confounds experts’ expectations that more old drivers on the road would lead to greater mayhem. It’s not clear why this hasn’t happened. “It probably has something to do with the cohort,” Ms. Hersman said. “Folks are more healthy, more active and more active drivers” - less likely to crash and more likely to survive if they do.

The Hindustan Times reported recently that a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing third-generation mobile network service, or 3G, at the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, to “allow thousands of climbers and trekkers who throng the region every year access to high-speed Internet and video calls using their mobile phones.”

In India alone, some 15 million new cellphone users are being added each month.

The U.S. government is currently borrowing $5 Billion dollars every single business day!

More than four Americans out of ten still think that Prohibition was the right way to go. What have they been drinking?

The UK's lowest ever recorded temperature in November was minus 23.3C recorded in Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands, on November 14, 1919.

Meditation at Kew, a poem by Anna Wickham.

2010-11-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

Post 583 - As I'm moving house and home at the moment, my entries have been and will continue to be irregular until I'm settled again.

Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper (1884 -1947), a British poet with strong Australian connections. She was born in Wimbledon, London, and brought up in Australia in a rather disordered existence, mostly in Brisbane and Sydney. She returned to London in 1904, where she took singing lessons and had a drama scholarship at the future Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She pursued her singing in Paris in 1905 and married Patrick Hepburn, a London solicitor, in 1906. Unfortunately, the marriage was not a happy one. During the 1930s, she was well known in literary London but found it hard to get published. However, she wrote a great deal of poetry, much of which was later lost in the war. She took her own life in the very hard winter of 1947.

Anna Wickham, Meditation at Kew, 1921

Alas! for all the pretty women who marry dull men,
Go into the suburbs and never come out again,
Who lose their pretty faces, and dim their pretty eyes,
Because no one has skill or courage to organize.

What do these pretty women suffer when they marry?
They bear a boy who is like Uncle Harry,
A girl who is like Aunt Eliza, and not new,
These old, dull races must breed true.

I would enclose a common in the sun,
And let the young wives out to laugh and run;
I would steal their dull clothes and go away,
And leave the pretty naked things to play.

Then I would make a contract with hard Fate
That they see all the men in the world and choose a mate,
And I would summon all the pipers in the town
That they dance with Love at a feast, and dance him down.

From the gay unions of choice
We'd have a race of splendid beauty and of thrilling voice.
The World whips frank, gay love with rods,
But frankly, gaily shall we get the gods.

As the world turns....

2010-11-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

Post 582 - Here are some items that caught my eye last week:

The Beaujolais Nouveau will be uncorked on Thursday, November 18th.

The Irish State will mark the 88th anniversary of its founding on December 6th.

USA Today reports that the number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office.

By 2020, the U.S. will be spending $1 trillion a year just to pay the interest on the national debt. If nothing changes between now and then, a major catastrophe will surely be upon us.

According to the New York City Planning Department, 46 percent of New Yorkers in their 20s who moved to the city from out of state between 2006 and 2008 lived with people to whom they were not related, up from 36 percent in 2000.

A new federal report projects one in three American adults could have diabetes by 2050. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the number of Americans with diabetes may double or triple over the next 40 years. People with diabetes face medical costs more than twice that of those without the illness. The total costs of diabetes is about $174 billion annually. Currently, roughly 24 million Americans, or one in ten adults have the disease.

According to David Brooks, Howard Gardner of Harvard once put together a composite picture of the extraordinarily creative person: She comes from a little place somewhat removed from the center of power and influence. As an adolescent, she feels herself outgrowing her own small circle. She moves to a metropolis and finds a group of people who share her passions and interests. She gets involved with a team to create something amazing. Then, at some point, she finds her own problem, which is related to and yet different from the problems that concern others in her group. She breaks off and struggles and finally emerges with some new thing. She brings it back to her circle. It’s tested, refined and improved. The main point in this composite story is that creativity isn’t a solitary process. It happens within networks. It happens when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

Poem by e. e.cummings.

2010-11-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

Post 581 - Edward Estlin Cummings, (1894 – 1962), popularly known as e.e.cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He attended Harvard University, from which he received a B.A. degree and a Master's degree for English and Classical Studies. During his life, Cummings was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellowship of American Academy of Poets, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and a Boston Arts Festival Award.

He once said that, "Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit."

Poem by e.e.cummings.

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings; and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
double unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Facts that interest me.

2010-11-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Post 580 - Here are some facts that interested me lately:

Nielsen reports teens sent or received 3,339 texts per month on average for the second quarter of 2010. Put another way, that's six texts on average for every waking hour. Teenage girls are even more active, sending 4,050 texts per month. The number of texts sent by teens in 2010 was up 8% from the year prior.

Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news.

I read about someone who recently went to the Post Office to get a passport. After filling in an application, he wanted to pay for it by credit card but was told that the USPS doesn’t accept credit cards for payment of passport fees. He didn’t have any checks or enough cash with him, so he left that section of the Post Office, stood in line and bought a Postal Service money order, which he paid for with a credit card. He then took the money order back to the clerk and paid his passport fees. Is it any wonder that the Postal Service is losing money and wants to raise its prices as a result? Just another crippled giant that expects its customers to foot the bill for its inefficiencies.

CEOs in October were wary about the economy, but hopes for a better start to 2011 are rising. Chief Executive magazine's CEO Confidence Index, the nation's leading monthly CEO Confidence Index, remained flat in October, rising only 1.3 percent to 87.4. The Business Condition Index showed the largest percentage gain, rising 9.2 percent to 91.5. Gains in this component of the index are the result of a larger number of CEOs expecting to see the business environment and economy to show gradual improvement over the next quarter. While 50 percent of responding CEOs predict no change in the economy over the next quarter, 34.4 percent forecast gradual growth – an increase of more than 7 percent. The Current Confidence Index, a sub index that calculates CEO confidence in current employment, capital spending and economic conditions, fell to 56.2, a loss of 10.9 percent. In the survey, 76.8 percent of CEOs rate business conditions as "bad", 19.0 percent rated business conditions "normal" and only 4.3 percent rated current business conditions as "good."

The total net worth of the Walton family is $89.6 billion. All this wealth was created by a farm boy from Boone County, Missouri. Some people think this a very good thing, others view it as a very bad thing. I'm in the former group, as someone who emigrated here fifty years ago to benefit from this "land of opportunity." I'm curious to know where my readers stand and why. Any comments?

The Tide Rises The Tide Falls, a poem by Longfellow.

2010-11-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

Post 579 - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) was born in Portland, Maine, and studied at Bowdoin College. After spending time in Europe, he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. The rapidity with which American readers embraced Longfellow was unparalleled in publishing history in the United States; by 1874, he was earning $3,000 per poem. His popularity spread throughout Europe as well and his poetry was translated during his lifetime into Italian, French, German, and other languages.

The Tide Rises The Tide Falls.

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls

Sometimes, a poem by David Whyte

2010-10-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

Post 578 - David Whyte is one of my favorite poets. He grew up in Yorkshire, studied Marine Zoology in Wales and trained as a naturalist in the Galapagos Islands. He's also worked as a naturalist guide, leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in various parts of the world. He's one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of work and organizational development, conducting workshops with many American and international companies. He currently lives in the Pacific Northwest. I find he's always worth reading.

Sometimes by David Whyte

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

A summer in the country - part nine.

2010-10-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Post 577 - One of the most exciting events during my summer visit was going with my grandfather to the fair in the village of Campile. Here local farmers brought their animals to sell (mostly pigs as I remember) and the beasts and their owners all clustered around the village street for the best part of the day. The men ducked in and out of the pubs for a quick drink on a fairly regular basis and many were quite merry by late afternoon. This helped to liven up the commercial proceedings and resulted in noisy bargaining. Agreement on a price was followed by a spit on the hand and a handshake to confirm that the deal had been struck. Of course this then had to be celebrated by a visit to the pub once more. So one of the few times I saw my grandfather the worse for drink was when he returned from the fair, much to the disapproval of the women in the house. On Monday, August 26th 1940, the year before my visit, a German aircraft bombed the creamery at Campile and three local women were killed. It’s still not clear why this tragedy occurred.

Another exciting event in the village as far as I was concerned was the showing of movies on a very irregular schedule in a corrugated shed very near my uncle’s grocery store. Seating was set out on wooden benches that radiated back from the screen. The farmers who attended usually brought their dogs with them, and the dogs didn’t always get on as well as their masters. So, every now and then, a great noisy battle erupted beneath the patrons’ legs and the film would have to stop until peace was restored. This added some local color and quite an air of excitement and uncertainty to the proceedings. The door to the building moved on a big metal rail and made considerable noise when it moved back and forward to let people in or out. So there was no sneaking around without being heard and everyone turned to see what was happening whenever it rolled back with a noise like thunder. Since I had no money to pay for admittance, I joined some of the local lads throwing stones on the metal roof until we became enough of a nuisance that we were let in for free. As you can imagine, it was never a dull evening.

Another trip I really looked forward to was taking our corn to the mill at a place called Mulinderry so that the wheat could be ground into flour. This was a water-driven mill and it looked like a Constable painting. Like most other such adventures, it was usually an all-day affair to go there and back. My grandfather was pretty self sufficient as the farm provided his family with their own corn, barley, oats, flour, eggs, milk, meat, sausages, fruit and vegetables. He also had his own fowl and my aunt Stasia made the butter and bread. Fish were delivered every Friday, usually fresh mackerel caught earlier that morning by the fishing boats in Ballyhack nearby, and then brought around for sale in the back of a horse and cart. If fresh fish wasn’t available, we ate salted cod from the village shops instead. I also remember poaching salmon at night with my cousin, Matt Hart, on a neighbor’s land. We used a carbide underwater lamp to attract the fish to the river bank and then forked them out with a big Neptune-like spear. This was a very adventurous escapade as the word was that the neighbor had been known to chase after poachers with a shotgun. And so the potential danger sharpened the pleasure of the evening’s pastime considerably.

More later

After the sale is over.

2010-10-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Post 576 - "One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship is the absence of complaints by customers. Nobody is ever THAT satisfied over an extended period of time," according to Theodore Levitt, who was the editor of the Harvard Business Review and was considered one of the world's greatest marketing experts.

While many of us cringe at the thought of our customers and clients complaining about our products and services, those complaints are, in reality, the lifeblood of our business relationships. Consider these findings from McKinsey, the global consulting firm:

* Customers who have major problems but don't complain about them have a re-purchase intention rate of about nine percent.

* Those who do complain, regardless of the outcome, have a repurchase intention rate of approximately 19 percent.

* Customers who have a complaint resolved have a repurchase intention rate of 54 percent.

* Customers who have their complaints resolved quickly have a repurchase intention of 82 percent.

Note that simply feeling comfortable enough to complain more than doubles repurchase rates - and further note what a tremendous opportunity results when customers can quickly resolve issues that bother them. Levitt points out that customers are either not being candid or haven't been contacted when they don't complain - probably both. An absence of candor reflects the decline of trust and the deterioration of relationships. Impaired communication is both a symptom and cause of trouble. Bad things accumulate. Things fester and get worse. When they finally erupt, it's usually too late or too costly to correct the situation.

Handling complaints properly allows you to turn lemons into lemonade. Here's how:

* When you have irate clients or customers, address the complainants face-to-face and LISTEN! Avoid being defensive and THANK the customers for bringing these matters to your attention.

* Be proactive in seeking feedback. Tell the customers how anxious you are to improve service, and that their feedback would be very helpful. AT&T once had a slogan: "If it's an emergency to you, it's an emergency to us." This meant that even if customers didn't think the complaint was that important, it was probably very important. Otherwise, why would they bring it up?

* A more significant problem or opportunity than complaining customers are the "irate customers." An irate customer is frustrated because previous complaints haven't been successfully resolved. Yet, these customers are still giving you the chance to resolve their problems.

Similar to seeking out and resolving complaints with existing customers is the process of seeking out and resolving objections in the sales process. Objections here are important buying signals. Like the complaining customers, the objecting prospects are inviting you to show them why they should buy from you. If the prospects have no interest in your product or service, they'd terminate the sales call. By raising objections, the customers are looking to get further information to justify a buying decision. By encouraging these objections, you gain valuable insight into the customers' needs.

So don't ever feel smug when customers don’t complain. Because when they stop complaining, that's when you're most likely to get in trouble!

2010-10-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

The author to her book, a poem by Anne Bradstreet.

2010-10-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

Post 575 - Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of 16. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, emigrated to America with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672.

The Author to Her Book by Anne Bradstreet.

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i' th' house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

Some ideas about creating the future.

2010-10-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Post 574 - Reflections on how to think about the future:

We need to step back and learn from history, then learn to manage complexity with simplicity using more general ideas.
Learning from the past gives people security to be able to change. The challenge of learning to be able to go fast slowly.

We need to develop a new kind of complexity rather than just simplifying organizations by downsizing. Organizations must develop a capability to manage complex on-going change at all levels - pretty sophisticated stuff relative to traditional reactive change. This will require a whole new way of teaching employees so it becomes a never-ending ongoing exercise. Strategies now have to be developed on many levels and short term initiatives is as important as long range ones. There's a need to reinterpret the past to make it a part of the future - that is, to integrate the past and the future so people can resolve the split in their head which polarizes their choices between one or the other. A new world view should integrate both. This means reordering of how we in the west view the concept of time, differentiating between where M-time and P-time are appropriate to use, rather than using M-time all the time.

Our most cherished myths are often freely sculpted truths. For confirmation and comfort, we often turn not to a verifiable recording of the past but to a loose rendering of it. That fuzziness is our heritage, the other merely a record of what happened.

We need to learn about the future from the past and the present by looking for the patterns (principles) behind the patterns - these are the principles that endure. There can be no viable future that doesn’t have its roots somewhere in the past. New futures won’t spring into being without honoring the continuities that people value in their lives and their previous work habits. Examining the past is a way to appreciate these continuities in the present and provide a platform to evaluate the current system. The history of a system is as much part of its future as its environment. Strategy development can’t be detached from the system’s culture and history. Examining the past is a way to start dreaming about the future.

A summer in the country - part eight.

2010-10-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

Post 573 - One aspect of spending time in the country that I still remember was the apparent absence of time. Time seemed endless - and very few people ever seemed to be in a hurry. My grandfather used to yoke up the pony and cart and meander off into the village of Campile to do some shopping about every other week. I would usually go along with him. As we went along the road, coming and going, he would stop to talk with other farmers who were working in fields near the road or who were coming in the opposite direction. There seemed to be no hurry to these conversations and the shopping trip to the village usually took the best part of the day to complete. Time in general was viewed as an outcome, as a measure of what had happened, rather than as a criteria for what should happen. Everyone seemed to live according to my grandfather's philosophy that "When God made time, he made plenty of it." I never remember there being a clock in the house although grandfather had a pocket watch that he wore on Sundays. We judged time by how bright or dark the days were depending on the seasons of the year.

We listened to the news on the radio most evenings at about six o'clock. Since there was no electricity, the radios of that time used quite large separate wet and dry cell batteries to supply the vacuum tubes with needed voltages. The news was of particular interest to people because my summer visit took place during the early days of second world war and while I wasn't very aware of what was going on, there were rumors of German spies parachuting into the local area from time to time and then escaping to England. I remember my aunt Stasia took me to the seaside at Tramore for a week's holiday towards the end of the summer. This was a special treat, both to spend time with her like a grownup and to be able to play on the sand for a whole uninterrupted week. On the next to last day, I still remember a dog-fight over the beach between a German plane and two British spitfites. After dodging back and forward for some time, the spitfires broke off and the German plane headed inland trailing black smoke from each side. Going home the next day, we stopped to visit some friends in the nearby town of Waterford. He was a policeman there and told us how he had followed the German plane to where it eventually landed and was instrumental in capturing the pilot. He told me the pilot was wounded and had a bullet lodged between the bone of his finger and his wedding ring. Needless to say, this image made a striking impression on me at the time and I stayed awake many nights thinking about it.

Another distinctive feature of country living at that time was the ready acceptance of supernatural events. My mother, who was normally a very down-to-earth woman, always claimed to have seen someone walking on the road from New Ross shortly after he died, although she didn't know he was dead until she got home later on that night. This wasn't considered a terribly strange occurance as I remember - unusual perhaps but certainly not outside the realm of possibility. My grandfather explained to me that there were four kinds of spirits, starting with those who had just died and I presume were spreading the word, so to speak - anyway, they were generally harmless and didn't stay around long. The second class were those spirits who were called away before they were ready and still had unfinished business to attend to - and they seemed to be able to hang around for quite a long time. While they could cause property damage (think of poltergeists), they too were in general harmless to people although they could be quite scary. The third class however, were evil and were usually viewed as some manifestation of the devil. These were always nasty and dangerous, could cause people to go mad and/or commit suicide, and they had to be exorcized to get rid of them. The fourth kind were the fairies and these could be either good or bad - it was difficult to tell which. Anyway, it was wise never to cross them. My grandfather had a field for grazing cows and horses at the top of the lane that was never tilled in my memory. I was told this was the site of an old fairy fort and that breaking the soil could bring all sorts of trouble - so it was left alone. I saw no reason not to believe it.

In general in those days, my relatives and their neighbors seemed to have a much greater tolerance for ambiguity and variance in both people and events and were prepared to be open to a much wider range of behaviors than we are today.

Looking for luck in Bangkok, a poem by Maxine Kumin.

2010-10-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

Post 572 - Maxine Kumin (1925 - ) was born and raised in Philadelphia and educated at Radcliffe College. She taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University, and from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She has also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities. Kumin was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981-1982. Her many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, the Aiken Taylor Prize, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. She has also published several novels, collections of essays and short stories, and more than twenty children's books.

Since 1976, she and her husband have bred Arabian and quarter horses on their farm in Warner, New Hampshire. The farm, a craggy, heavily forested 200-acre spread, most of which is now in conservation, is the locus of many of her poems and essays. Clearing pastures, building fences, exploring the overgrown trails that wind through the Min Hills, foraging for wild mushrooms, and weeding the beach that fronts on their pond are the physical tasks that free her mind to construct its own paths. "Allegiance to the land is tenderness," she says in one poem.

Looking for luck in Bangkok by Maxine Kumin.

Often at markets I see
people standing in line
to walk under an elephant.
They count out a few coins,
then crouch to slip beneath
the wrinkly umbrella that smells
of dust and old age
and a thousand miracles.

They unfold on the other side
blessed with long life,
good luck, solace from grief,
unruly children, and certain
liver complaints.

Conspicuous Caucasian,
I stoop to take my turn.
The feet of my elephant are stout
as planted pines.
His trunk completes
this honest structure,
this tractable, tusked,
and deeply creased
endangered shelter.

I squat in his aromatic shade
reminded of stale bedclothes,
my mother's pantry shelves
of cloves and vinegar,
as if there were no world of drought,
no parasites, no ivory poachers,
My good luck running in
as his runs out.

A summer in the country - part seven.

2010-10-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

Post 571 - One of the most anticipated aspects of my summer in the country was whole days spent on my own visiting nearby relatives. One of my favorites was my mother’s sister, Nanny, who lived in the village of Campile. Her husband, Mikey Shannon, had a butcher’s shop and general grocery store and all kinds of goodies awaited when I visited there. The Shannons had no children of their own so I got very special treatment. I always looked forward to the time I got to spend behind the counter in the shop being introduced to the customers. Another big attraction was the ready availability of lemonade which only seemed to be available at Nanny’s and was a special treat. They had a big collie called Shep who was great fun to play with (strangely enough for farmers, my grandparents never had a dog that I can remember). They lived next door to a handball alley where I could watch the local men practice in the evenings. I had some cousins who were particularly good at this sport – in fact one that I was particularly close to growing up, Matt Hart, went on to become a national champion in New Zealand during the time he lived there.

Like many young men of his time, his father’s farm went to the eldest son. Unless the younger children could buy a farm or a business or marry into one, their lot in life was usually to work for one of the others who had made more advantageous arrangements. Matt went to New Zealand to earn enough money to set him up with some land when he returned but he could never make a go of it and ended up living with one of his sisters who had married a big farmer in the nearby county of Waterford. His initiative to leave Ireland and seek his fortune in a strange land where he knew no one and no one knew him was a very inspirational example to me when I was young. It drove home the message that you were never trapped in whatever predicament you might find yourself in if you took the initiative to do something positive about it. And it increased my awareness of a whole other world outside of Ireland full of opportunities to be explored and enjoyed.

Aunt Nanny was a great fan of British royalty, and she took a lot of static from the rest of the family for her devotion to the queen. However, since she was the official family photographer (as she was the only one with a camera), her royal idiosyncrasies were readily forgiven. I used to spend a day now and then with another relative, Aunt Jo (Mrs. Henehan), who had a shop and a public house at the other end of the village. On one of these occasions, I spent an afternoon alone in the bar mixing and imbibing drinks using the various liquors available. The result was far from pretty – a very young drunk who was also quite sick. Aunt Jo probably figured that that this was lesson enough as she never reported my transgressions to my parents or grandparents, but just let me sleep it off before sending me home. She was right - I had learned my lesson and never did it again ... at least not until I was much older!

To be continued ...

HP employee morale hits an all time low.

2010-10-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

Post 570 - I used to take pride in working as a consultant to Hewlett Packard some twenty-five years ago. There was a company that was economically successful while treating their employees in an enlightened fashion by following a humane philosophy called "the HP Way." However, that's all in the past these days and employee morale must have hit an all time low, judging by this employee comment about support for the new CEO which was recently posted on the web:

"What do I or any of us think of the new HP CEO, Leo Apotheker? What does it matter? HP has stopped caring what any of its employees think or how we feel about anything that is done. We are no different than printers or laptops, just covered in flesh. The underlying problem here is unbridled greed - greed of the board, greed of the executives, greed of the shareholders. Did anyone care that when Mr. Hurd was hired by Oracle, its stock rose? Mr. Hurd was responsible for over 50,000 layoffs and massive pay cuts. Does anyone actually believe that morale at HP has been anything but abysmal for a number of years? How can anyone expect "quality" work from such people?"

"From reports and past performance, Mr. Apotheker appears to be a "cost cutter" (yes, some of us do read more than technical journals). We may not be rocket scientists, but please give IT professionals a bit of credit - we know exactly what that means. More layoffs and pay cuts via reorganization. When HP bought EDS and "moved" some HP people to EDS/ HP Enterprise Services, THEIR pay was cut using the justification that they were being placed into new roles. Of course, this is what HP has been known for - just ask those former Compaq employees who are still around."

"Certainly, a pay cut is better than a layoff, but it is like a water torture. Drip by drip, dollar by dollar, we await the next slash with dread. Customers are starting to feel the difference, although they may not care, at least not yet. IT work still requires "brains," which I think requires some level of enthusiasm. When you cannot afford to care for your children or pay your mortgage, it is difficult to be enthusiastic. The value loss is immeasurable - how can one determine what someone might have been able to do if his heart was in it? I see many employees trying, but only they know if is their "best work."

"Of course, Mr. Apotheker would know nothing about this. A $1.2 million salary, plus a $4 million signing bonus, PLUS a $4.6 million dollar "relocation package"? I won't even get into the tens of thousands of restricted stock he'll be getting, and he's not even started work yet. For those of us who've gone for years with no raises and worse (pay cuts of 25-30% and more after years without raises) despite quality performance, it is clear signal that things will not be getting better, at least for us. But who cares, as long as stock values rise?"

I know that there are many other 'wounded giants' in the same boat as HP. It's time for another industrial revolution to lead our executive class back to the first principles that America was founded on.

The Planters Daughter, a poem by Austin Clark.

2010-10-07T15:49:00.000-07:00

Post 569 - Austin Clarke (1896 – 1974) was one of the leading Irish poets of the generation after W. B. Yeats. He also wrote plays, novels and memoirs. Clarke's main contribution to Irish poetry was the rigor with which he used technical means borrowed from classical Irish poetry when writing in English. Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said "I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free."

Born in Dublin, and educated by the Jesuits and at UCD, he fell unhappily in love with the playwright Geraldine Cummins, and suffered a mental collapse. On New Year's Eve 1920, he and Cummins married in a registry office, and he lost his post at UCD, apparently because of the civil marriage. In 1922 Clarke left for London and worked as a book-reviewer there for fifteen years. In 1937 he returned to Ireland with his then wife Nora Walker. As he had failed in a divorce action against Geraldine Cummins, his marital position was irregular, and he suffered another nervous breakdown. Clarke then began a prolonged silence as a poet, not broken until Ancient Lights (1955). He later wrote two volumes of autobiography, Twice Round the Black Church (1962) and A Penny in the Clouds (1968).

I just love the last two lines in this poem of his.

The Planters Daughter by Austin Clark.

When night stirred at sea,
An the fire brought a crowd in
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went -
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

A summer in the country - part six.

2010-10-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Post 568 - There was no electricity in our part of the country that summer – rural electrification didn’t come to Campile until about 1947. So I always went to bed by candlelight and my aunt Stasia read to us at night using the light of an oil lamp. Later on that summer, we got a Tilley paraffin pressure lamp which was a big improvement since it gave a much brighter and more intense light. There was also no running water in those days and my grandfather was always looking for somewhere close to the house where he could sink a well. He had many water diviners come to visit to locate where to drill. Some used hazel twigs and others used two bicycle spokes tied together at one end. They’d walk around the yard holding the twig or the spokes in their hands parallel to the ground and we'd watch and wait for it to dip down when they located water below the surface. They always found water but could never figure out how to get it to the surface economically.

The conventional wisdom at the time was that my grandfather’s house was perched on top of a hill of solid granite and so drilling through it to the significant distance required was a very difficult and expensive feat. However, there was a good well by the road across a neighbor’s field and one of my tasks was to draw water from that well as often as it was needed using two white enamel buckets. So I fetched the water across Ned Cahill’s field several times every day, rain or shine, and tried not to spill it. Some years later when I lived close by with my parents in a haunted house called Silvercrest, I still had the water duty and this time the well was about half-a-mile away. But that’s a story for another day . . .

Since nobody had a phone in those days, it was quite normal for people to drop in unexpectedly for a visit, usually on weekends. Sometimes, they came in quite large numbers too – whole families of them – and the custom was that whenever people came to visit, you had to feed them. So my aunt Stasia would have to bake some bread and my grandfather would kill a chicken for dinner. In addition, the men drank Paddy’s whisky and Guinness’s stout while the women and children drank Sandeman's port wine (I still have a soft spot for port today and like a glass regularly after dinner). Of course, we sometimes went out to visit others as well – usually relatives of one kind or another. So I guess it all evened out in the end. I always looked forward to these visits because it usually meant I had someone my own age to play with.

Living in the country was a relatively solitary experience that summer since neighbors with children my own age lived quite a distance away. As a result, I spent quite a bit of time entertaining myself, often by climbing some very big trees that grew in the lane at the entrance to the yard. In retrospect, this was quite dangerous as a fall of 50 – 60 feet or more was indeed a possibility. I remember when a visitor pointing this out to my mother once, she replied, “Sure if he falls once, he won’t do it a second time.” Thus I was encouraged to grow up adventurous, self-sufficient and unafraid. And thank goodness, I never fell out of the trees.

To be continued....

Multitasking - a short cut to poor performance?

2010-10-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

Post 567 - Is the power of multitasking a myth? Is multitasking a short cut to poor performance and disappointing results? It seems likely.

In an article by Joeann Fossland, “Multitasking: Smart or Dumb?” published
on line in realtytimes.com, a few revealing studies are presented that
clearly indicate multitasking could be the way to serious problems. For
example, in a study by Carnegie Mellon University subjects were asked to
listen to sentences while comparing two rotating objects. This research
found the resources available for the brain to pay attention visually
dropped 29 percent and the listening brain activation dropped by 53 percent.
Another study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology revealed that the
more complicated the tasks, the more time was lost.

Fossland reports that according to David Meyer, a psychology professor
(University of Michigan), “Intense multitasking can induce a stress
response, an adrenaline rush that when prolonged can damage cells that form
new memory.”

In a nutshell, Fossland concludes, “multitasking is actually inefficient and
will, in the end” waste time, adversely impact quality of results, and
undermine employee well being.

One can argue that multitasking is an unavoidable consequence of the
heightened level of competition. But this raises the question of whether or
not forcing employees to engage in multitasking is the right approach to
meeting competition.

Additionally, we should recognize that there is an enormous range of degrees
of multitasking. And that you need to look at what is meant by multitasking
in a given situation. Context is critical. That said, multitasking still
should not be assumed to be working in the best interests of the
organization. Research and experience suggest it may very well be an
appealing road to follow to unexpectedly costly outcomes.

Those who have some say in organization planning, staffing or work
design, should take stock of the research findings. It seems that as
organizations try to streamline and become ever leaner, they are walking out
further and further on thin ice.

For much of the work in organizations, research evidence, hands-on
experience and common sense shows that focusing on one thing at a time
remains the way to get the most out of people, as well as giving them the best
opportunity to enjoy their work and to give their all.

Some more strange facts and figures.

2010-10-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

Post 566 - Some more strange facts and figures…….

Shawn Tully has been trying to popularize his acronym: HENRYs, for “high earners, not rich yet.” Only about 2% of American households take in more than $250,000 a year in taxable income, so while there are many words that can be used to describe this income group, "middle" clearly isn’t one of them. Somewhere in the top 1% (those making more than $410,000 in adjusted gross income as of 2007) things start to turn regressive because the top federal income tax bracket of 35% kicks in at an adjusted gross income of $373,650. So if you make $20 million a year, you probably pay out a smaller percentage of your income in taxes than if you make $500,000. This is because investment income - capital gains and dividends - is taxed at lower rates than earned income. If you want an up-to-date rundown of effective federal tax rates at the top end of the income distribution scale, check out:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html

Several private universities have endowments that would be the envy of many national treasuries. Harvard, has the largest with $27.4 billion. Last year, it lost more than the entire endowment of Cambridge University, Britain’s largest at $1.5 billion. The current return for Harvard is 11 percent, while Cambridge reports it made 19 percent on it’s investments.

Dr. Tom Hill reports that based on the percentage of citizens who are overweight, the U.S. ranks number one out of the 33 most advanced countries in the world. The next four are Mexico, Chile, New Zealand and the U.K. Who are the healthiest based on the same criteria? The least overweight of course - Japan followed by Korea, Switzerland, and Norway.

Marriage rates among young adults have been dropping for decades. But data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau show that for the first time the proportion of people between the ages of 25 and 34 who’ve never been married exceeded those who were married in 2009 - 46.3 percent versus 44.9 percent, according to Mark Mather, at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC. The long-term slide in marriage rates has pushed the proportion of married adults of all ages to 52 percent in 2009, according to the Census, the lowest share in history. In 1963, when I came to America, 72.2 percent of adults over 18 were married. I remember being very surprised at how difficult it was to meet single women in Los Angeles. However, as marriage rates have fallen, the number of adults living together has skyrocketed, according to Mr. Mather's analysis. Men and women are living together as an alternative or a first step towards marriage. The probability of getting married at some point in life still remains at about 90 percent.

The worsening economy in Ireland has again raised the specter of emigration with workers fleeing to the UK, Australia, USA and Canada in search of a new life. Excluding non-nationals who moved into Ireland during the boom years and who are now returning home, the number of Irish citizens leaving has risen dramatically to over 27,000 annually, up by 42% since 2008.

Five things alone are necessary for the sustenance and comfort of the children of the earth according to Zuni belief:
The Sun, who is the Father of all
The Earth, who is the Mother of men
The Water, who is the Grandfather
The Fire, who is the Grandmother
Our Brothers and Sisters, the Corn and Seeds of growing things.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz by Pablo Neruda.

2010-09-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

Post 565 - Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile. He studied in Santiago in 1920s. From 1927 to 1945 he was the Chilean consul in Rangoon, in Java, and then in Barcelona. He joined the Communist Party after the Second World War. Between 1970 and 1973 he served in Allende’s Chilean Government as ambassador to Paris. He died shortly after the coup that ended the Allende Government. Love, like life, can't ever be fully defined, but Neruda captured it quite nicely in this poem.

Neruda once observed that: "Latin America is very fond of the word 'hope.” We like to be called the 'continent of hope.' Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves 'candidates of hope.' This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century."

Reminds me of the US politicians of today.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Steinhardt's six rules for successful investing.

2010-09-29T12:36:00.000-07:00

Post 564 - Michael Steinhardt was one of the first, and most successful, hedge fund managers. From the late '60s through the mid-'90s, Steinhardt's hedge fund compounded money at 24 percent annually after fees. Here are Steinhardt's six rules of success:

1. Make all your mistakes early in life: The more tough lessons you learn early on, the fewer (bigger) errors you make later. A common mistake of all young investors is to be too trusting with brokers, analysts, and newsletters who are trying to sell them something.

2. Always make your living doing something you enjoy: Then you can devote your full intensity for success over the long-term.

3. Be intellectually competitive: Do constant research on subjects that make you money. Plow through the data so as to be able to sense a major change coming in the macro situation.

4. Learn to make good decisions even with incomplete information: Investors never have all the data they need before they put their money at risk. Investing is all about decision-making with imperfect information. You will never have all the info you need. What matters is what you do with the information you have. Do your homework and focus on the facts that matter most in any investing situation.

5. Always trust your intuition: Intuition is more than just a hunch -- it resembles a hidden supercomputer in the mind that you're not even aware is there. It can help you do the right thing at the right time if you give it a chance. Over time, your own trading experience will help develop your intuition, so that major pitfalls can be avoided.

6. Don't make small investments: You only have so much time and energy when you put your money in play. So, if you're going to put money at risk, make sure the reward is high enough to justify it.

Peter Lynch says: "I've always believed that searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you'll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you'll find two. During [some market stretches], I’ve had to turn over thousands of rocks ..."

A summer in the country - part five.

2010-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Post 563 - Some Sundays, I was allowed to sleep in and go to second mass, which started at 11am. This meant I had to walk all the way to Horeswood, a distance of about three miles, a trip that took about an hour if I didn’t get a lift from a neighbor. The custom in the church was that the women filled the pews on the right-hand side, the men filled those on the left-hand side, and young children like myself knelt in the space in front of the pews close to the altar. This meant kneeling up straight for over an hour with no support on the cold, hard flagstone floor of the church. After the long walk and since I was usually still fasting in preparation for receiving Holy Communion, I usually fainted away about the first gospel. Some nearby adult would then carry me out and set me down to revive myself in the church grounds, sitting among the monkey-puzzle trees. I think I set a record at the time for fainting at late Sunday mass.

Sometimes, when the weather was fine, I stayed out in the sun rather than going back into the church and sang out loud to amuse myself until mass was over. On several occasions, my singing disturbed the worshipers inside the church so much so that the priest sent someone out to ask me to tone it down. When I did return to mass, I stayed with the men who congregated around the door at the back of the church.

Priests had tried for years to entice these individuals to join the rest of the congregation in the pews but had never succeeded. No matter what the weather, these men stayed, grouped around the door but outside rather than inside the building. Some of them had attended mass every Sunday for 30 years without ever setting foot in the church itself and had the reputation of being as close to sinners as you could come in those days. It always felt a little dangerous and subversive to join them, like being a member of some band of outlaws. Although they were attentive to the mass in a general sense, they were not above talking and smoking on occasion, especially during the sermon. The sermon usually detailed the wages of sin and seemed to urge people to feel guilty and do penance for all the bad things that had happened in the world since the beginning of time. As a result, sermons were a bit of a downer and had the overall effect of lowering most people’s spirits even if they felt good when they came to mass in the first place.

But these sermons did little to diminish the good humor of the fellows at the back of the church who clearly refused to be intimidated into feeling guilty about anything. The men at the back were always in a good mood, telling jokes and laughing quietly among themselves. They usually arrived a little late and they seldom stayed past the beginning of the last gospel. But they always seemed happier than most of the other, more pious people and I could never understand why this was or why God didn’t strike them dead or exact some other retribution for their irreverence.

Once mass was ended, I could usually get a lift most of the way home with a neighbor or with someone I knew. This was especially welcome when it rained, which was a relatively frequent occurrence. No wonder visitors commented - and still do - on the many different shades of green in the Irish countryside.

To be continued.....

And so we start yet another week....

2010-09-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

Post 562 - Here are some data to start another week:

In 1957, United Airlines advertised its “executive” service between New York and Chicago, promising comfortable slippers, a steak dinner and “no women on board except for two stewardesses.”

The cost of the typical American wedding has risen to about $28,000 from $11,000 between 1980 and 2007 after adjusting for inflation.

Only 26 percent of US adults eat vegetables three or more times a day - and no, that doesn’t include French fries. These results fall far short of health objectives set by the federal government a decade ago. The amount of vegetables Americans eat is less than half of what public health officials had hoped. Worse still, it’s barely budged since 2000. According to a new report, Eating Patterns in America, only 23 percent of meals include a vegetable. (Again, fries don’t count, but lettuce on a hamburger does). The number of dinners prepared at home that includes a salad is 17 percent; in 1994, it was 22 percent. At restaurants, salads ordered as a main course at either lunch or dinner has dropped by half since 1989, to a mere 5 percent today.

According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents. However, there is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls! Maybe because these parents pay considerably more attention to how their children spend their time.

Drink featured heavily in the life of George Brown, a British Labor foreign secretary in the 1960's, who is once said to have stumblingly invited a guest in flowing purple robes at a reception in Peru to dance. But it was not to be. "First, you are drunk," the guest is said to have replied. "Second, this is not a waltz; it is the Peruvian national anthem. And third, I am not a woman; I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima."

The unexamined life is typically one where we're living the life of others. Truly examining our lives and paying attention to the truth within is one of the most valuable pursuits. However, it takes real courage. Winston Churchill once said, "Most men, when encountering the truth, shake it off and walk on as if it never happened."

6 February, 1946
To the Editor of The Times.
Sir,
I have just written you a long letter.
On reading it over, I have thrown it into the waste paper basket.
Hoping this will meet with your approval,
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
A. D. Wintle

The Brook, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

2010-09-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

Post 561 - Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language. He authored a number of phrases that have become commonplaces of the English language, including: "Nature, red in tooth and claw," "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all," "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die," "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure," "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers," and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new." He’s the second most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations after Shakespeare.
I especially love the flow of language in this poem.

The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorpes, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

A summer in the country - part four.

2010-09-21T17:13:00.000-07:00

Post 560 - Every Saturday night after dinner, my grandfather started his preparations to attend mass the following morning. This was the highlight of the evening and involved a series of rituals where everyone was involved. First, came the shaving ceremony. My grandfather only shaved on special occasions, and Saturday night was usually his only shave of the week. So, a space had to be cleared the pantry and a washbowl and towel provided. Water had to be heated on the fire to just the right temperature and the shaving mirror was hung in just the right spot by the lamp. Then came the sharpening or “stropping” of the razor, using a wide leather belt that was kept in the kitchen specially for that purpose. The open razor was drawn back and forth across the leather until it could cut paper. The final test was a flick of my grandfather’s thumb to sense the quality of the edge. I always wanted to do this part but wasn’t allowed to because it was judged to be too dangerous.

Next, the shaving brush was loaded up with shaving soap and the bristly beard was properly lubricated and lathered. Then came the shaving itself, and I listened with fascination as the razor cut through the bristles - you could hear them being cut, one by one. Any nicks were covered with little pieces of newspaper until the blood dried, but accidents were few and far between.

After the shaving was done, Stasia ironed a blue-and-white striped dress shirt for my grandfather to wear on Sunday. The shirt had a detachable white starched collar, but the collar was seldom worn except on very special occasions such as weddings or funerals. I never remember seeing my grandfather wearing a tie - in fact, I don’t believe he ever owned one. For Sunday mass, a front collar stud sufficed.

Finally, my grandfather’s suit had to be produced from the cardboard box which was stored under his bed during the week. The box was placed on the kitchen table, the suit was unwrapped, carefully inspected, and hung up to air overnight. This dark grey woolen suit had been tailor-made years ago and was always treated as a special possession. During the week, it was kept in the box, wrapped in brown paper - no other kind of paper would do. The box also contained some camphor balls to ward of the moths, so the suit smelled quite strongly when it emerged into the light of day - hence the airing to dissipate the smell somewhat. Better a camphory smell then a suit full of holes.

Finally, my grandfather’s good boots appeared and he carefully polished them until they shone like a drill sergeant’s. This whole process took most of the evening to complete and was treated with great seriousness. I don’t remember anyone else preparing or getting ready for Sunday’s outing. Saturday evening, the whole house revolved around helping my grandfather look his best as he drove the mare to mass on Sunday morning. And, off he went to first mass, which started at 8am every Sunday morning, sick or well, come rain or shine, every Sunday of his life. I don’t remember him as an outwardly religious man. In fact, he was quite bawdy and irreverent at times. But he was devout and disciplined in his own way.

A summer in the country - part three.

2010-09-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

Post 559 - As I mentioned before, my grandfather was a blacksmith as well as a farmer, the same as his brother, and sometimes worked in a forge beside the house. Here, he put shoes on horses or made iron gates or put iron rings on cartwheels for the local farmers. It was always very dark in the forge, except for the light of the fire. Pieces of iron were thrust into the fire until they were glowing red hot and ready to be worked on. Then they were beaten into shape with a hammer on an anvil. Men came by during the day with their horses and carts and spent many hours sitting around talking together as my grandfather took care of their needs. Much of the talk was about the crops and the weather, as I recall, and about the prospects and exploits of the local hurling and football teams.

There was another similar blacksmith about five miles away, and as a matter of professional courtesy, he and my grandfather put shoes on each other’s horses every year. That summer, I was responsible for taking the black mare to the other blacksmith to be shod. This turned out to be a scary trip because, riding bareback, half way there I slipped off her back. I wasn’t hurt, but the mare was so big that I couldn’t climb back on again. When I tried to position her near a gate where I could climb up and remount her, she stepped on one of my feet and wouldn’t move. She stayed standing on my foot for the longest time and no amount of hitting and screaming would persuade her to move. Eventually, in her own good time, she changed her position and freed me to continue my journey. This was especially painful as I wasn’t wearing shoes at the time it happened. Like most young people in the country, I usually went without shoes all during the summer months. Initially, the soles of my feet were soft and I had to walk very carefully to avoid sharp stones and thorns. But after a couple of months, my feet became as hard as leather and by the end of the summer, I could walk across the stubble of a freshly mowed cornfield without any discomfort. I was treated like royalty at the Flaherty’s forge while they put new shoes the mare. Each blacksmith did their very best work in these circumstances, as they knew another professional would carefully evaluate their efforts.

My aunt Stasia was still in her thirties and single at that time. She'd spent most of her life at home looking after my grandmother, except for the time she went to England to train as a midwife. She practiced as such for many years, serving the people in the surrounding area. In those days in the country, women usually had their babies at home and a doctor would only be called in if something didn’t appear normal or went wrong during the birth. Women seemed to go into labor only in the middle of the night, seldom in the daytime, at least that’s how I remember it. Many’s the night when a bicycle would arrive in the front yard at two or three in the morning and a knock on the door would announce the arrival of a weary husband asking Stasia to come back with him. Stasia never took kindly to being woken up in the middle of the night, especially if it was windy and raining, as it often was, even in summer. So she usually gave the poor man “a piece of her tongue” for getting her out of bed as she got her bicycle ready to journey back with him - sometimes a journey of up to 10 miles in the driving rain. Usually she was back the next day, but on occasion, she could be gone for a few days in the case of a difficult delivery. Even though she was widely known for her outbreaks of temper and especially for her sharp tongue, she was greatly respected for her skill and was widely liked in the local community. Years later, when she finally got a car, she never really learned to drive properly. People said they were afraid to meet her in the middle of the night, barreling along, usually in the center of the road and unlikely to give way to any man or beast that crossed her path. Miraculously, she never hit anything that was alive although the car did collect a very interesting collection of dings and scrapes over the years.

More about our summer rituals next week......

A chronicle of continuing uncertainty.

2010-09-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Post 558 - Instead of letting these observations plant visions in your sleepless future, remember that correlations deduced from observational studies do not - in fact, cannot - prove causation. All you can really do with data from an observational study is to form a hypothesis, which must then be tested in randomized, controlled trials, to ferret out the truth about whether or not x actually causes y.

These weekly collections aren't always cheerful. However, as Berthold Brecht wrote,
And in the dark times
Will there be singing?
There will be singing.
About the dark times.

U.S. Hotels have been hit hard by the recession. Hotel occupancy fell 8.2 percentage points between 2007 and 2009, and revenue per room fell 18.3 percent, according to Smith Travel Research.

Despite small gains from the previous month, Chief Executive Magazine's CEO confidence in the economy continued to be weak. The monthly CEO Confidence Index rose slightly in August, gaining 9.4 points to 89.2. Apparently, the government stimulus package failed to stimulate CEO confidence.

Almost no one (<1%) trusts company advertisements or statements made on packaging when trying to understand if a product or company is or does what it says. Consumers are much more likely (57%-100%) to trust third parties or themselves 'a lot/the most' than company ads. And 73% consider both product and company claims when making a purchase.

Time spent on Facebook was greater than time spent on Google sites in the U.S. in August 2010 for the first time in history, according to fresh data from comScore. Meanwhile, Yahoo continues its slide from the top of the heap to the bottom.

Make sure your home is properly covered for a disaster For many people, their home is their greatest asset. Yet studies show that 59 percent of today's homes are underinsured by an average of 22 percent.

The number one source of calories in the U.S. comes from high fructose corn syrup primarily in the form of soda. Americans drink an average of one gallon of soda each week, and this excessive fructose consumption is a driving force behind obesity and chronic degenerative disease in this country.

OnePoll.com surveyed 5,000 women worldwide on the sexiest accents around the world. Here are the results....
1. Irish
2. Italian
3. Scottish
4. French
5. Australian
6. British
7. Swedish
8. Spanish
9. Welsh
10. American

38 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions come from commercial buildings and homes. The market for green construction should reach $140 billion by 2013, up from 49 billion in 2008.

A popular estimate of the number of human beings who have ever lived on the planet earth is around 106 billion.

Apple is selling just as many computers to college students as Dell, according to a survey from Daniel Ernst at Hudson Square Research, via Fortune. Ernst says 38 percent of students that bought a computer in the last three months bought a Mac, up from 14 percent in 2007. Ernst surveyed 212 students at seven different universities. It would be easy to dismiss these numbers based on small sample size, but Ernst's research matches a report from Student Monitor which surveyed 1,200 students at 100 schools.

somewhere i have never travelled, a poem by e.e. cummings

2010-09-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

Post 557 - e.e. cummings (1894 - 1962) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to liberal, indulgent parents who from early on encouraged him to develop his creative gifts. While at Harvard, where his father had taught before becoming a Unitarian minister, he delivered a daring commencement address on modernist artistic innovations, thus announcing the direction his own work would take. In 1917, after working briefly for a mail-order publishing company, the only regular employment in his career, Cummings volunteered to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance group in France. At the end of the First World War Cummings went to Paris to study art. On his return to New York in 1924 he found himself a celebrity, both for The Enormous Room, a witty and absorbing account of the experience in France, and for Tulips and for Chimneys (1923), his first collection of poetry. A roving assignment from Vanity Fair in 1926 allowed Cummings to travel again and to establish his lifelong routine: painting in the afternoons and writing at night. In 1931 he published a collection of drawings and paintings, CIOPW (its title an acronym for the materials used: charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, watercolor), and over the next three decades had many individual shows in New York. He enjoyed a long and happy third marriage to the photographer Marion Morehouse, with whom he collaborated on Adventures in Value (1962), and in later life divided his time between their apartment in New York and his family's farm in New Hampshire.

somewhere i have never travelled by e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Instructions for life.

2010-09-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

Post 556 - “Your life isn't about how to achieve your dreams, it’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you ... Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." – Dr. Randy Pausch.

Here are 19 time-tested instructions for how to live a good life:

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three R’s:
- Respect for self,
- Respect for others and
- Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.

7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Can anyone contribute number 20?

A summer in the country - part two.

2010-09-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Post 555 - The continuing saga of my trip from Kilkenny to my grandparent's home near Campile, County Wexford, in the southeast corner of Ireland almost 70-years ago.

After lunch at the Savoy, back I went along the quays of Waterford, stopping to look at the ships that were anchored there loading or unloading cargo. Then, back across the bridge to the train station where I reported once more to the station master’s office. Since I had a couple of hours to spare, the station master gave me a tour of the station, visiting the signal shack and explaining what all the levers were for and how the signal system worked. He also showed me the train to Campile, which seemed asleep at its platform, all empty and deserted, quiet and dark. Then we went back to the office where I was had books and comics to read until train time. When it was time to leave, I boarded the train and took off on my journey again. It was getting dark by now, so there wasn’t much to look out at anymore. The most exciting part of the trip was going through a long tunnel under the river Barrow. Here, it was totally dark for about five minutes and all you could do was listen to the noise of the train and wait for the whistle that signaled we were approaching daylight again.

The trip to Campile was a relatively short one and it was dark at night when we arrived at the station. I got off onto the platform, wondering if anyone would be there to meet me. But I didn’t need to worry for there waiting for me on the platform was Dada, my grandfather. Together, we got my luggage and put it in the pony and cart for the drive home. The night air was chilly, so I was wrapped up in a woolen blanket and snuggled cozily into the straw that lined the bed of the cart. My grandfather regaled me with stories about the animals at the farm and we made plans about what we would do together for the rest of the summer as we slowly wended our way home. Looking back, it seems like slowly was certainly the appropriate word as Dolly, the pony, walked more than she trotted and it took the best part of an hour to make the relatively short trip. But I didn’t care. The stars were shining, I felt quite grown up as I’d made my train trip successfully, and I was warm, cozy and loved in the cart.

When we arrived at my grandparent’s house in Carrownree, I was tired and sleepy but my grandmother and my aunt Stasia were all excited at my arrival. So I had to bring them news of my parents in Kilkenny and recount the adventures of the day several times as they prepared supper. Then, off I went to sleep in my grandfather’s bed above the kitchen. It was always lovely and warm in that room. Once Stasia tucked me in among the heavy bedclothes, it was impossible to move again even if you wanted to. So, I drifted off to dreamland lulled by the soft indecipherable hum of conversation coming from the kitchen downstairs.

Most of the land my grandfather farmed was adjacent the house but he also owned other farmland about five miles away. Some days, when he worked over there, he was gone all day from early morning until night. However, most of the time, he worked in the fields close to the house and several times a day, I brought him a thermos of tea and some sandwiches. He mostly worked alone, with a black mare harnessed to pull whatever plough or harrow or other farm implement he was using at the time. The mare had no formal name other than “the mare.” Animals were mostly just animals on the farm, with a few rare exceptions such as Dolly, the pony. Strange to recall, I never remember my grandparents having a dog, which was quite unusual as most of their friends and neighbors had many dogs, usually including at least one big sheepdog. The mare worked in the fields during the week and was harnessed to a big black cart with a high seat on Sundays to take us all to first or second Mass in Horeswood church, about three miles away. All, that is, except my grandmother, who was paralyzed and couldn't do much of anything for herself except eat. She slept downstairs and was carried into the kitchen every morning where she sat on the left side of a couch that had been cleverly fashioned from the rear seat of a car. There she spent the day until it was time to go to bed, when she was again carried back to her room. In the evening, I loved to snuggle in between her and my grandfather in the couch by the big open fire, listening as my aunt Stasia read us articles from the local paper, The New Ross Standard, or ghost stories about a woman called Kitty the Hare from a monthly magazine called Ireland’s Own.

And yes, there's still more to follow......

World view September 2010.

2010-09-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Post 554 - Here are some more interesting facts, figures, observations and predictions:

In February of 2010, British scientists reported that a protein found only in a chicken’s ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg. According to the scientists, the egg can only exist if it has been created inside a chicken. This protein is fundamental in the development of the shell. Of course, you may now be wondering, if the chicken came first, then where it come from? Let’s leave that mind-bender for another day….

“In Texas, we don’t carry guns because we have to,” a friend of mine told me recently. “We carry them because we're allowed to.” There’s no telling how many Texans actually walk around armed, but by Department of Public Safety figures, 247,345 men and women, more than one percent of the population, may legally carry a handgun provided it's truly concealed and not out in mischievous view. A majority of states - 36, including Texas - require the authorities to issue a concealed-handgun license to anyone who meets certification and is not ineligible, like felons. Two others, Vermont and Alaska, don’t require a license to carry a concealed weapon. Ten states, including New York, are “may issue” states, where applicants must demonstrate a special need. Two - Wisconsin and Illinois - prohibit concealed weapons altogether. Local laws also vary. Nationwide, for better or worse, Americans own some 220 million guns, and half the households in the country are believed to be armed.

Los Angeles pensions are likely to consume a third of that city's general fund by 2015.

As a percentage of the population, Spain, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the U.K. all have a greater level of home ownership than the U.S.

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of 100 people, with the relative size of human groups remaining the same, there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 people from the Americas (North and South), and eight Africans. Seventy would be non-white, 30 white. Seventy would be non-Christian, 30 Christian. Fifty percent of the world's wealth would be in the hands of six people. All six would be citizens of the United States. Seventy people would be unable to read. Fifty would suffer from malnutrition. Eighty would live in sub-standard housing. Only one would have a college education.

Here are some tantalizing predictions from Laurence C. Smith in The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (Dutton Books), scheduled for publication Sept. 23.

* New shipping lanes will open during the summer in the Arctic, allowing Europe to realize its 500-year-old dream of direct trade between the Atlantic and the Far East, and resulting in new access to and economic development in the north.

* Oil resources in Canada will be second only to those in Saudi Arabia, and the country's population will swell by more than 30 percent, a growth rate rivaling India's and six times faster than China's.

* Northern rim countries - or NORCs as Smith calls them, such as Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and the northern United States - will be among the few place on Earth where crop production will likely increase due to climate change.

* NORCs collectively will constitute the fourth largest economy in the world, behind the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the European Union and the United States.

* NORCs will become the envy of the world for their reserves of fresh water, which may be sold and transported to other regions.

For more information, see http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/global-warming-s-silver-lining-169919.aspx

Opening the mail, a poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

2010-09-03T10:17:00.000-07:00

Post 553 - Minnie Bruce Pratt was born September, 1946, in Selma, Alabama. She graduated from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and took her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s published six books of poetry, and has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Pratt emerged out of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s and has written extensively about race, class, gender and sexual theory. She’s currently Professor of Women’s Studies and Writing at Syracuse University.

Opening the mail by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

She used to work down in the copy center, and,
don't get her wrong, she liked it, she did. The big
Xerox engines purred, paper rolled out like money
and shot into slots like a casino payoff. But this job,
there's something new every day, the letters come in,
hundreds, thousands, from all over the place, and she
gets to open every one. The message in a bottle, the note
slid into the cashier's cage, the letter left on the bed
when she walked out the door, the handkerchief dropped
behind him during the game at recess. She slices each
open with her knife, logs it and routes it to the other girls.

But her dream is to get a camper and follow the NASCAR
races. Six days travel and on Sunday stand inside the final
circuit of sound, inside that belly. It's not the same as on TV
where it seems like they are just going round and round. Not
the same at all, she says. Every moment counts, and the air
smells like burning oil. Any minute it could burst into flames.

A summer in the country - part one.

2010-09-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

Post 552 - Some of you wanted to hear more about my experiences growing up in the 1940s so here you go. This will probably teach you to be more careful about what you ask for.....

When I was four years old, I lived with my mother and father in the city of Kilkenny in Ireland. I had started attending school at the Presentation Convent when I was three so my mother could go back to teaching. As a result, I was very independent for my age and was getting quite used to managing for myself, walking to and from school, sometimes with my father but more often than not on my own. I also looked after myself when I came home until my mother returned from teaching in the evening. In 1941, it was agreed that I would spend the summer with my grandparents on my mother’s side who were farmers in county Wexford. Starting in the beginning of June, I would go down to Campile by train and return with my parents when they came to visit some months later in September. Since it was 1941, petrol was rationed. Although we were one of the few people who operated a car during the war, as my father was a member of the national police force (the Garda Síochána), the car was used sparingly because petrol coupons were hard to come by.

The train trip from Kilkenny involved a stop in the town of Waterford, with a five-hour wait before a change of trains to get to the village of Campile. My parents knew the city of Waterford very well and had many friends there, including the station master. On many previous visits there, we’d always eaten at the Savoy cinema which had a restaurant on the second floor and was much frequented by people from the country who were in town for the day. So the plan was that I would board the train in Kilkenny in the morning, travel to Waterford and leave my luggage with the stationmaster, walk across the bridge and along the quay to the Savoy, have lunch there and return to the railway station in time to board the Campile train. My mother said that this trip would encourage me to be independent and confident and “would help to make a man out of me.” Much of my parent’s actions as I was growing up were intended to encourage this independent streak and the results were very successful. However, my mother never quite adjusted later on to just how independent I actually became.

Arriving at the station in Kilkenny, I was very excited as I hadn’t traveled by train very often prior to this, although I had made this particular trip once before with my parents. I remember being very impressed by the size of the engine and all the hisses and groans and clouds of steam that emanated from it. My father took me along the platform so I could inspect it first hand. I remember we had a conversation with the driver who, although he was busy with last-minute adjustments prior to departure, still explained briefly how a steam engine worked. Meanwhile, my mother had picked out a compartment that had some travelers she thought could look after me on the trip to Waterford, even though she’d never met them before in her life. It was a trusting time when the prospect of dishonesty or violence never crossed anyone’s mind. My luggage was loaded on board in the luggage carriage, tearful goodbyes were said, and off I went happily ensconced in a window seat facing the front of the train. My traveling companions were very impressed by the fact that I could travel on my own - I think they thought I did it every week - and I answered many questions about what I planned to do for a whole summer on the Sutton farm when I finally arrived. I remember being excited about the trip but not particularly scared or uncomfortable about traveling alone since my mother seemed so comfortable with the idea. My father was a very quiet and even-tempered man who always seemed comfortable with just about about everything.

The trip to Waterford was generally uneventful. The countryside was green and pastoral and the train seemed to go very fast. We stopped at stations along the way and people got off and got on amid a general bustle of noise and excitement. When we finally arrived in Waterford sometime about noon, I was met by the stationmaster who was waiting for me on the platform. Having retrieved my luggage, I bid goodbye to my traveling companions. We then went to the stationmaster's office, and left my luggage there where I could pick it up later in the day. Then off I went across the city to lunch at the Savoy. This was the most adventurous part of the trip as far as I was concerned and I have to admit I was a little nervous as I set out to walk all the way across the city of Waterford. To cover my nervousness, I sang out loud as I went along my way, a habit which stayed with me for years afterward. Looking back, I must have been a funny sight, a well dressed little boy, on his own, singing as he marched along, apparently very happy and obviously with a clear sense of purpose about where he was going.

The streets of Waterford were busy as always but I had no trouble finding the restaurant. So I marched in and presented myself to one of the waitresses, told her who I was and that that “I was expected.” And so I was, as my mother had made arrangements the week before and all the waitresses were on the lookout for the little boy from Kilkenny who was coming for lunch. After being shown to a reserved table and seated just like a regular customer, I ordered my lunch. The waitresses all thought I was very cute so I got a lot of service and attention. A couple of hours (and two desserts) later, I was ready to bid farewell to my new-found friends at the Savoy and retrace my steps back to the train station to resume my journey.

More to follow....

How to conduct a personal assessment.

2010-08-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

Post 551 - Next month is my birthday month so I'm drawn to think more actively about just where I am at the moment and where I want to go in the next decade or so. Here, I learn from my colleague, Walt Sutton, who shared his wisdom with my Vistage groups on this topic some years ago. Walt noted that many of us are shoe-horned into our lives, and never experience time as something that can be expanded so that it belongs to us. We have formidable to-do lists that would fell an ox. But there’s no white space on the page, no fresh air in the room, no far horizon in view, no new perspective. And when we're in this mode, we’re not only invisible to ourselves, we’re invisible to the world which would love to engage us in a conversation that could take us farther than we'd ever have imagined ourselves going. When did you last take time to have a heart-to-heart conversation with yourself? Where are you going in 2011? And why? With whom? And how?

Consider your direction, progress, aspirations, dreams, goals, and everything you can think of about your life. One of the biggest reasons we become achievers is to control our own destiny. However, we tend to restrict our vision to our business lives rather than using it to shape our lives as a whole. Stephen Covey uses the metaphor of climbing the ladder of success - only to discover when you get to the top that the ladder is against the wrong wall. A yearly personal assessment is a way to look at all the buildings, all the ladders, and as much of the surrounding countryside as you can see. The desired outcome is to study and get to know yourself a little bit better and see what that suggests you do in the future.

Answering the following questions is one of the most powerful things you can do to impact the quality of your life. Something that successful and happy people all seem to have in common is that they use personal introspection as a basis for making life decisions and for routinely adjusting their life course. The key here is to think energetically, optimistically, critically, and seriously about what you want from life. Then take your thoughts - however you organize them - and compile a series of commitments to make your dreams come true.

Here are some interesting ways to go about this:

- Write a letter back to yourself assuming you're 99 years old and recount what was really important in your life.

- Imagine a perfect day working, playing and continuing to develop yourself... what would these days look like, and what would you look like doing these things.

- Imagine yourself as your own best friend... what would you advise yourself about your life's direction now and how to make your future choices even more meaningful.

Consider this list:

- What do I want to do in the time I have left?

- What do I want to do in the next five years?

- I have six months to live. What do I want to do in those six months?

Take some time alone, schedule the meeting with yourself, ask the questions, and listen only to yourself. As you answer, look for words that wake you up, that appeal to both your head and your heart. While most of us can see at least a portion of the potential in our lives, the story in our mind often gets in the way. The solution is most often right in front of us and it usually involves changing the story.

Have your life partner do their own retreat and compare notes. Categories to think about are: personal, professional, financial, physical, spiritual (including the contributions you hope to make to this planet), and wild cards (the "crazy" things you want to do before you die). The names of the categories should reflect what you care about in life.

Where are we headed?

2010-08-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

Post 550 - Another week, another set of data reflecting where we are now and where we may be headed in the future.

32 percent of U.S. births in 2007 were C-sections, versus 26 percent in 2002, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

When you consider layoffs, downsizing, delayed raises, and reduced hours, more than half of all American workers have suffered losses. Young and Rubicam’s current consumer survey data shows large numbers are now saying money is no longer as important to them. Seventy-six percent say the number of possessions they own doesn't affect how happy they are. And seventy-one percent said, "I make it a point to buy brands from companies whose values are similar to my own." Nearly the same number rejected companies whose values don't match. Kindness and generosity are among the qualities customers increasingly demand most from business. As trust in companies and brands has declined, traditional persuasion tactics no longer work.

It's a mistake to assume that America is composed of big blocs of people who hold wildly differing values. In fact, there’s quite a long list of values held in common across all social and economic groups. Transparency, honesty, kindness, good stewardship, even humor, work in businesses at all times.

A recent San Diego University study anticipates that in only 12 years, Muslims will comprise 25 percent of the European population.

American kids under 18 send and receive roughly 2,800 texts per month, according to Nielsen, or about 93 per day. Assuming 7 hours of sleep per night, on average, that's about 5.5 per hour spent awake, or one every 10 minutes or so. In the next two age brackets, text-message usage falls by more than half each. But it's people ages 18-24 who talk the most on their cellphones, according to Nielsen, averaging 981 minutes per month. These are probably the people most likely to not have landline phones, so this also makes sense. African-Americans use the most voice minutes - more than 1,300 per month, on average, versus 826 for Hispanics, 692 for Asians/Pacific Islanders, and 647 for whites; and they also text the most - 780 per month, versus 767 for Hispanics, 566 for whites, and 384 for Asians/Pacific Islanders.

A recent NAR survey indicates that 35% of realtor business now originates online.

In a Chinese study, the cells of enthusiastic tea drinkers showed about 5 fewer years' worth of wear and tear compared with the cells of people who drank little tea. The enthusiastic tea drinkers averaged three or more cups of green or oolong tea daily, while the group that showed more signs of cell aging averaged less than a cup.

And finally, did you know that one two-stroke gasoline powered leaf blower produces as much pollution as 34 automobiles? That's why the city of Del Mar made it illegal for gardeners to use them. So no more 'blow and go' guys working in Del Mar.

Sonnet 69, a poem by Pablo Neruda.

2010-08-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

Post 549 - Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His original name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he used the pen name Pablo Neruda for over 20 years before adopting it legally in 1946 in honor of the famous Czech poet, Jan Neruda. He remains the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on, his works reflected the political struggle of the left and other socialist developments in South America. He also wrote beautiful love poems - his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) has sold over a million copies since it first appeared.

Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was the color of "esperanza" (hope) He once said, “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

Sonnet 69 by Pablo Neruda.

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
without you moving, slicing the noon
like a blue flower, without you walking
later through the fog and the cobbles,

without the light you carry in your hand,
golden, which maybe others will not see,
which maybe no one knew was growing
like the red beginnings of a rose.

In short, without your presence: without your coming
suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:

since then I am because you are,
since then you are, I am, we are,
and through love I will be, you will be, we'll be.

Lessons from my grandfather.

2010-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

Post 548 - I was thinking this morning about my grandfather on my mother's side, Paddy Sutton. I was very close to him when I was growing up. He was a small farmer and also a blacksmith (as was his brother) and I was remembering how hard he worked with never a complaint. On the farming side, his efforts were always at the mercy of the weather and thus out of his control. So he did his best and always hoped for the best. I don't remember him as a very religious man although he went to mass every Sunday and said the rosary every evening before retiring. (My father went to mass every day and twice on Sundays plus he spent two hours in private prayer and meditation each day of his life - that set the standard for being religious in our house). My grandmother had a stroke in her early forties and lost the use of her left side. So she had to be carried or rolled around everywhere in a wheelchair after that and I'm sure this was a big loss to him. He and my grandmother had seven children before her stroke, one of whom died in the big Spanish flu epidemic around 1918.

But even though he had a hard life, I never remember him complaining about anything. He just worked hard and tried to make the best of whatever came his way. His philosophy was that when things didn't turn out well, you had no one to fall back on but yourself and your family. The time he spent working on the farm was primarily governed by the amount of daylight available and the need to take care of the various animals, all involving tough physical work. This made for very long days in summer when the sun rose early and it didn't get dark until after 10 pm. Of course it was equally short in the winter when it didn't get light until 9 am was dark again by 4 pm. However, the cows had to be milked twice a day, in good weather and in bad. One of my jobs when I visited was to bring in the cows early in the morning so they could be attended to and then herd them back to the field again after they'd been milked. I also helped with the milking which was all done by hand in those days.

My grandfather mostly worked in the fields by himself. I think he enjoyed blacksmithing for the creative and social aspects of it. He always started his day by downing a raw egg in a glass of Paddy's whiskey. I've never tried this myself but it seemed to do him a power of good. He was hardly ever sick, even though he had to be out in both good weather and bad. He said he couldn't afford to be sick and that belief, together with the whiskey, seemed to work for him. Maybe because of my grandmother's condition, I remember him regularly chasing around after whoever was the maid at the time. Screams of delight would ring out from various parts of the house whenever this took place. Whether the maids were actually 'caught' or not I never knew. As a young lad, I just took it all as a sign of high spirits, just another way that grownups let their hair down and had fun.

I slept in my grandfather's bed when I came to stay, in a room over the kitchen which was always warm and cozy. Since I went to bed before he did, I remember being tucked in so tight I could hardly move. I was always asleep by the time he turned in. However, I got up when he got up, usually at 5 am, and he'd sometimes send me out that early to roam the fields and pick fresh button mushrooms which were then cooked in milk for breakfast.

From these early experiences, I learned the comfort of being part of a loving family and the value of independence and hard work. I also learned not to complain when things didn't work out but to roll with the punches and quickly make other plans. And I learned that you can never trust the weather. So the best strategy is to always do your best and stay optimistic.

Are we in for a double dip?

2010-08-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

Post 547 - An interesting read in August 12th edition of The Economist: Is fear of renewed recession in America overblown? And is optimism in the resurgence of the European economy justified?

Seldom does the United States look at Europe with economic envy. The past few weeks, however, have been one of those rare phases. Concern about America’s stumbling recovery has been rising, just as anxieties about the euro area’s economy have faded. The dollar is the weakling among rich-world currencies. But Americans should take a little heart: it's too soon to despair about our economy. And Europeans should show a little caution: it's too soon to be sure that theirs is firmly back on its feet.

Some forecasters believe that America’s disappointing GDP growth in the second quarter, 2.4 percent at an annualized rate, could be the start of a slide towards a second recession. One worry is jobs, or the lack of them. American business created only 71,000 in July, too few to match the growth in the population of those of working age and far too few to shorten the queue of the unemployed noticeably. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, even though corporate America is flush with cash. Companies are still unhelpfully shy of hiring, preferring to squeeze yet more output from fewer people.

Contrast America’s woes with Europe’s renewed hope. Figures published after The Economist went to press were expected to show that the euro area’s economy grew faster than America’s in the second quarter, thanks largely to supercharged Germany. Booming sales to fast-growing emerging markets — notably Brazil, China and India — have brought German industry its strongest quarter in decades. The newly affluent in those countries are rushing to buy Audis and Mercedes, as well as luxury goods from other European countries. German firms that had mothballed factories when global demand for durable goods plummeted have returned to capacity far sooner than they had dared hope. Germany’s unemployment rate, 7.6 percent, is a bit lower than at the start of the financial crisis.

In Europe it is far too early to celebrate recovery on at least two counts. First, Germany apart, the euro area remains weak. Spain, whose economy is barely growing and where the jobless rate is 20 percent, would love to have America’s problems. Second, Germany relies on exports, not spending at home: the home market is one of the few places where sales of Mercedes cars have fallen this year. So its economic fortunes remain closely tied to the rest of the world—including one of its biggest markets, America.

How real are the risks of a double dip recession in the United States? The recovery has lost momentum in part because shops and warehouses are fuller, so that the initial boost to demand from restocking is fading. The housing bust still casts a shadow. Households must save to work off excess debts. Firms fearful of weak consumer spending are cautious about investing. Bank credit is scarce. All this stands in the way of a full-blooded recovery. But a slide into a second recession would require firms to cut back again on stocks, capital spending and jobs. The cash buffer corporate America has built up in case of harder times makes a fresh shock of that kind unlikely.

See the full article at:
http://www.economist.com/node/16791862

Something things to think about.

2010-08-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Post 546 - Here are some things I found out last week, both good and bad, to think about:

Teenagers aren't necessarily tuning out adults these days; they simply might not be able to hear them. The proportion of teens in the United States with slight hearing loss has increased 30% in the last 15 years, and the number with mild or worse hearing loss has increased 77%, researchers said last Tuesday. One in every five teens now has at least a slight hearing loss, which can affect learning, speech perception, social skills development and self-image; one in every 20 has a more severe loss.

One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

People can vote at 18, but in some states they don’t age out of foster care until 21. They can join the military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they can’t rent a car until 25 without some hefty surcharges. If they are full-time students, the IRS considers them dependents until 24; those without health insurance will soon be able to stay on their parents’ plans even if they’re not in school until age 26 (or up to 30 in some states). Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18, but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial aid up to age 24. We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to take on adult responsibilities. But we’re pretty sure it’s not simply a matter of age.

A longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect,” according to Jay Giedd, the director of the study, “the only people who got it right were the car-rental companies.”

It took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do the same. It's no surprise that fewer than 100 of the companies in the S&P 500 stock index were around when that index started in 1957.

Back in the Ordovician period, the earth spun so fast that days were only 21-hours long. With three fewer hours each day, people arrived at old age sooner. But age is better than extinction. The history of human life on this planet has been punctuated by many extinctions. The great Permian Extinction of 250 million years ago was so catastrophic that life was almost brought to a close. Today, many people feel that a comparable man-made extinction is in reckless progress.