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A Poem for a Thursday #307
I have featured William Stafford’s poetry a number of times before. You can use the search bar if you want to read the other poems. I enjoy his down-to-earth style and frequent use of nature images. He has been compared to Robert Frost and I can see why that is true. Someone you trusted has treated you bad.Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.Did you expect anything different?Your work—better than some others'—has languished,neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luckspoiled what you did. That grudge, held against youfor years after you patched up, has flared,and you've lost a friend for…
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Simply a Rant
I hate summer. I hate the heat. I hate the humidity. I hate the glaring sunshine. I hate that all of these things give me migraines. I hate that a large proportion of people believe not loving summer is a sin. I hate sweating. I hate the endless need for sunscreen. I hate public pools. I hate summer. (Brought to you by a week of temperatures in the 90s F and a dew point so high it makes you feel like you are swimming through the air. Maybe if this ever breaks I will remember that I like summer berries, days by the ocean, and pretty flowers but I’m not…
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A Poem for a Thursday #306
Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. She and her family had to flee the Nazis and settled in Indiana, USA. Mueller won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her writing has “been praised for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd anglesand pulls you back into childhoodand you are passing a crumbling mansioncompletely hidden behind old willowsor an empty convent guarded by hemlocksand giant firs standing hip to hip,you know again that behind that wall,under the uncut hair…
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A Poem for a Thursday #305
Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and then worked in advertising. He discussed how he switched from advertising to writing poetry in an interview with Poets and Writers. My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of becoming like the men who were around me. So I quit and went to Spain to write a novel, and wrote a bad one. But I was trying to write poetry too, and those efforts seemed more promising. The rest, as they say, is…
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Bookshop Visit//The Book Loft of German Village
It is an incontrovertible fact that any visit to a new town, city, or country demands that you visit a bookstore or two. Therefore, when my husband and I spent a few days in Columbus, OH last month I was forced to visit The Book Loft. After all, how could I possibly resist 32 rooms of books? It was an absolute maze of tiny, interconnecting rooms. The store provides maps so you can find your way around if the idea of being eternally lost in a bookstore overwhelms you though I can’t imagine why it should. Each room, for the most part, is its own category. The Book Loft also…
