Venice in (unintended) verse

I haven't been to Venice. After reading the National Geographic story (Vanishing Venice, August 2009) on the Italian city wrought with tourists, I have lost desire.

But I am enamored with the writing of Cathy Newman, whose prose is poetry without the linebreaks. Every paragraph sings. Like the Found Poetry Project, I find myself breaking up blocks of text to fashion poems. For example:

Here, where everything anyone
needs to live and die must
be floated in, wrestled
over bridges, and muscled
up stairs, time is measured
by the breath of tides,
and space bracketed
by water.

The story concludes just as poetic:

Kisses end. Dreams vanish, and sometimes cities too. We long for the perfect ending, but the curtain falls along with our hearts.

Beauty is so difficult.


Skip the trip to Venice. Read Cathy Newman’s work instead.


Photograph by Jodi Cobb, for National Geographic.

first fruit

apricot in july

the first bite
is deep, past
the soft nap

of summer
inside, orange
is more than color

turns mealy, less
than expected
like this season

that grows
warm in
short bursts

turns cloudy
and quiet
this fruit with its

inviting orange
says savor
but slowly

enjoy this
palm-size treat
traveling from soil

to tree
to market
to me

There were a lot of firsts with the Seashore Summer Camp Writers last week: clam digging, poetry poker in the park, book bingo. The group of youngsters, ages 9 to 13, tried many new things, including tasting apricots for the first time, and then writing about the experience. I ate my first apricot and wrote my first fruit poem, too.

Say Yes

In addressing college graduates, University of Connecticut President Michael J. Hogan offered wise counsel. "Say yes," he urged.

His suggestion echoed that of Judyth Hill, my first poetry teacher, and applies not just to students but to all who seek to live life fully.

“My first word of advice is this: Say yes,” said Hogan. “In fact, say yes as often as you can. Saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to new experiences, and new experiences will lead you to knowledge and wisdom. . . an attitude of yes is how you will be able to go forward in these uncertain times.”

Crawl into quiet

Poetry is everywhere, I tell my young students. On cereal boxes, billboards, advertisements. Look to road signs, announcements, sidewalks. Search your lives, I say, in the quiet space life expands.

I spent last week in a summer camp that combined outdoor adventures with writing activities. Every day offered field trips with opportunities to reflect and write. We explored spaces and places, by turns busy and giddy, quiet and thoughtful.

We walked the span of a historic bridge, hiked from forest to sea, strolled through a working bayfront, kayaked a bay, and bicycled around town.

Between hikes, bikes, walks and talks, we played poetry poker, wrote on rocks and shells, collected words, and made fruit verse (or, as Ian wrote on his banana peel, “We created edible poetry.”)

Though the week was full of laughs and adventure, we also made room for quiet. We invited our minds to question and wander.

Rayn, 11, wondered why firetrucks are red. Is red, she wrote, the color of trust?

While hiking, Ian, 12, heard nature talking:

The trees make secrets and gossip
as we admire their beauty.

While kayaking for the first time, Kala, 13, reveled in the stillness:

When you bottom out
all you can do is push with your paddle,
or hands, or your mind.

The sound of the birds,
mixed with the beautiful beating hot sky
is almost enough to put you to sleep.

When you catch the breeze you feel fresh.

When you stop to take it all in and close your eyes
you feel like it is all a dream. At any moment you
could wake up and it would be gone.

Between the busy adventures, the Summer Camp Writers crawled into quiet to find beauty tucked around and within them. And I, grateful and encouraged, applauded their every word.

How 'bout you?

I never thought I’d reach this point. A year ago, I was tentatively embracing — a forced hug, really — the creation of this blog. I got in the groove and grew to enjoy the format. Now I maintain a steady flow of postings and follow other blogs, too.

How about you?

Like a good book, a great movie, or a new cool dive, it's nice to savor a discovery but even better to share it with others. In that spirit, here are a few of my regular reads:

How to Party with an Infant
http://partywithaninfant.blogspot.com
Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants, offers sassy observations on literature, life and modern motherhood.

200 Words
http://jackcantey.wordpress.com
A photographer and poet, Jack Cantey’s tanka poetry packs a punch.

The Found Poetry Project
http://www.foundpoetry.org/blog
Writers Timothy Green (editor of Rattle) and Megan O’Reilly Green find poetry everywhere, and encourage others to do the same.


How about you? Care to share your favorites?

Big, new normal

Several years ago, a friend turned me onto Iconoculture, a consumer research company that delivers a savvy, sharply-written newsletter that informs, questions and illuminates.

Today, after a full day of summer camp kids, I returned home, dove into a tall drink and a bag of chips, and discovered I am (frighteningly) not alone in my tendency to binge.

We Are All Fat Now

By Josh Kimball

The economy continues cascading. Unemployment’s ugly, retail sales are rank, the housing market is still homely. But there’s one reliable metric in America; one number that, year over year, keeps right on growing — our waist size. Lost, as our attention focuses on more immediate events, is an unsettling phenomenon that isn’t new, but isn’t going away, either: the fact that we’re still fat.

According to statistics released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 26% of adults in the U.S. were obese in 2008 (WebMD.com 7.8.09). Not only is that national number higher than in 2007, obesity is holding steady or growing in each and every state of the union.

Five or more years ago, the “globesity” epidemic was on many lips, as experts pondered the effects on our health foremost, but also contemplated what a larger populace would mean to society at large. Beyond healthcare and food, what does a spreading population mean to how we travel, how we work, how we play? Seven years later the conversation has slowed, but our growth hasn’t.

The future, though, holds some tasty nuggets of possibility. Might morphing cultural factors finally cut into our collective growth? Would a long-term shift in our broader consumer culture mean we not only buy less, but eat less, too? Might finally adding to our savings accounts correspond to a greater investment in our health? Our path out of this recession may eventually be tied with our long-term physical health. Or maybe this is just the way things are — the big, new normal.

Under the Influence

What are your influences?

That's always the question writers get asked, or ask of others. In seeking an answer to how the magic happens, 'influences' are shorthand for how do you do it? We want the recipe, or at least a taste, for what shapes and impresses those we admire.

Though no one is asking, I've been contemplating poets that move and mark me. There are poets — Tony Hoagland, Adrienne Rich, Julia Levine — whose work I read again and again, hungry to absorb and understand the agile way they thread emotion and message with a subtle but strong stitch.

Today, when I stumbled into this Tony Hoagland poem, I fell happily under the influence again.


How It Adds Up

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.
And the day I quit the job my father got me.
And the day I stood outside a door,
and listened to my girlfriend making love
to someone obviously not me, inside,

and I felt strange because I didn’t care.

There was the morning I was born,
and the year I was a loser,
and the night I was the winner of the prize
for which the audience applauded.

Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can’t forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
of a crazy song.



How It Adds Up by Tony Hoagland.
Reprinted from What Narcissism Means to Me (2003)

Letter never sent

"I wrote you a letter, actually. Two. Though I didn't know where to send it."

She said nothing in response to the opening.

"How did it make you feel?"

"On the surface, calm. Deeper than that, abandoned."

—from Abandon, a novel by Pico Iyer


For years I've written letters. Some get sent. Most do not.

A few years ago I began using letters as a writing prompt with students: Write a letter to your younger self. To someone you love. To someone you don't.

The exercise is cathartic, and creates a calm but poignant sadness. And almost always, the letters I do not send are seeds for the letters I finally do.

Tender willing

Today the world is full of words. Every line a message, every phrase a faint clue in a map made just for you.

A poem — read at the right time, in the right light, and then read aloud a second time to be sure the magic is real and not some trick of mood and light (but all art, she says, is trick, all timing and tender willing) — plucks a string still so long that just the pull is a motion aerobic in its relief.

It adds ups.

These words float across water like cotton from the tree. They skim the surface of invitation, land lightly in a pose of patient calm.

This landscape of message and meaning, direction and delivery, does not disturb as much as nudge -- just enough -- the root of desire. Calls to you softly, says grow.