mimsy and outgrabe

"Be happy; you're writing from the privilege of all your wits about you in your old age, under the thorn acacias by the noon sea, the light on all the places you have painted and hope to paint with the strenuous accuracy of joy, the village houses, the streets untainted by any history, by any thought or shadow on the blank canvas except from the sky; be grateful that each craft stays hard to do. In what will be your last book make each place as if it had just been made, already old, but new again from naming it." -- from "The Prodigal" by Derek Walcott Sure, this little ars poetica at the end of "The Prodigal" is the poet speaking to himself at the end of an illustrious career, and there are few parallels I can draw between the speaker of these lines and myself, but the passage serves as this lovely reminder of the joy found in the act of creation. And that in the end, we fight death by giving birth, over and over again, with new poem...

August is a month for slowing down and resting, or so a pop-up horoscope tells me. And we should all believe and be guided by our internet astrologers, ammaright? (Honestly, what did I click on for astrology ads to start appearing in my web browser?) These may be the only crop from my garden this year. I've spent my morning writing hours this week working on a poem (building and then destroying a sonnet, more or less . . . it's probably gonna take another week). And I reincarnated an old writing group for the month of August -- we'll met once or twice a week at different spots to escape our respective clutter-traps and care-taking responsibilities and concentrate on our work. I've picked up the play I began last summer, Accountability Partners , as my project to concentrate on for this last month of the break. I need to develop Act II of the verse play, too, but I wanted to work on something I have a good chance of actually finishing before school begins...