One Poet’s Perspective -
2011 and 2010 Columns
December, 2011 Legacy
Balancing packages in our arms, Mother and I headed toward the car. It was dark and the rain had stopped. Shimmering lights on streetlight wreaths shone soft and surreal, bestowing as much magic as can a California holiday scene for one who remembers the wonder and glow of Christmas lights thrown across Midwestern snows of her childhood.
November, 2011 Autumn Reflections
There is something about autumn that invites reflection. Perhaps it is that the year is winding down and that process summons us to do some inventory work. Or perhaps it is looking toward Thanksgiving and considering what we feel we do or do not have to give thanks for. There's nothing like a Sierra stream clearer than crystal or a mountain pond reflecting the glory of fall, to encourage us to consider how blessed we have been, even in the toughest of times.
October, 2011 Hail to the Great Blue Whale
Since the first time I laid innocent Hoosier eyes on the Pacific Ocean at the tender age of thirteen, I have loved that immense and alluring body of water and its multitude of mysterious and fascinating occupants. It’s said that we have in our own veins, blood, sweat, and tears, the same proportion of salt as ocean water. Perhaps that fact contributes to our natural kinship with the ocean and its liquid lexicon of creatures.
September, 2011 A State Park Paradise
We really do live in Paradise. We've had a comfortable cool summer while much of the country has baked to a crisp. And I don't say that lightly, living in Atascadero where it can get warm enough to singe your eyelashes.
August, 2011 Eastern High Sierra Flashbacks
For over four decades my husband, family, and I have traveled countless times back and forth from our home on the Central Coast to Bishop, California where my husband's parents lived until last year. We haven't been back since his father was lowered into Bishop soil and we tied up loose ends in November. In our minds, however, it will always be home to us almost as much as our beloved Central Coast is home.
July, 2011 My Mother Died in the Phoenix Fire
No, I don't live in Arizona. I live in California in a nice, orderly, middle-
I guess I should have seen it coming, but it was gradual. I didn't notice at first. I mean, she was a good mother. Overtired and harried, maybe, but what can you expect from someone who's trying to do it all?
June, 2011 Summerscapes
If poems are word paintings, we live in a region abounding with paradisiacal pictures to be painted. In the eighties I was privileged to housesit for friends while they traveled the world. Their home clung like a barnacle to a cliff side on Highway One between Ragged Point and Gorda. It seemed to hang there, suspended halfway between the highway and the vast Pacific. Talk about paradise.
May, 2011 Spring Laughter
Lavishing itself upon us without restraint, rain has nourished our hills and valleys to an emerald sheen and countless shades of other greens. Wildflowers swathe meadows and hillsides with a glory of colors that awakens our hearts to the joy that is always there inside us, whether we keep in touch with it or not. And we understand what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he said, "The earth laughs in flowers." It surely does this spring.
April, 2011 The Power of Poetry
I've loved poetry since I met my first nursery rhyme and learned that poetry could make me laugh. Becoming a voracious reader as I grew, my course was set, for I bumped into poems again and again. They taught me poetry could do many things. It could tell a story. Sing a song. Ask an important question. Surprise me. Take my breath away in wonder. Paint a picture. Teach me something new. How could I help but love it?
March, 2011 Shadow Tag
Winter plays shadow tag with spring, nature displays its harshest creations in floods, mudslides, thunder snow, blizzards, droughts. And the world foments revolutions for good and ill with humankind's most recent inventions, the electronic central nervous system of the planet we call Facebook, My Space, and Twitter. Makes a soul yearn for a quiet poem and a spring landscape to inspire, doesn't it?
February, 2011 Mining Poetry and Love
In the heart of winter cold, February finds us celebrating the fire of love and its many permutations. Poet Glenna Luschei's two most recent books offer worthy explorations of that universal theme.
January, 2011 Winter's Harvest
Winter is here. All manner of things, noticed and unnoticed, go on. On December 9th the Atascadero Writers Group convened its annual holiday potluck at Koffee Klatsch where it has met during the last year. The highpoint of the event was the group's presentation of a plaque to owners, Doris Geisen and her husband, John. It states: "With great appreciation the Atascadero writers' group recognizes Koffee Klatsch for their generous support of arts and literature in Atascadero."
December, 2010 A Christmas Poem
Many decades ago, Denise Levertov, one of the first poets whose work intrigued me, wrote of the making of a poem.
She said a poem comes from a constellation of events: what we are observing, experiencing, and feeling about what is going on around us and within us at a given time. This is a rough paraphrasing of the way she said it, but it's as close as I can come today. That definition continued to have the ring of truth to me, because I was aware that the content of a poem had everything to do with what was happening within me when I wrote it.
November, 2010 Last Request
It's near Thanksgiving, a time to inventory people, places, and things that enrich
our lives. About twenty-