Those of you who know me personally, know that my monkey mind just cannot stand the thought of something incomplete.  I never finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.  The novel is 535 pages in length, and I quit with 120 pages to go.  Stopped.  At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do.  I found the novel exhausting and frustrating, and finally reached a point at which I decided no “conclusion” was going to be satisfactory to me.  Now, at that time, I was the already-exhausted mother of a toddler.  I needed “beach lit,” not Ishiguro’s astonishingly complex, mysterious Sartre-like journey.  Anyway, at the time, I knew quitting it was the right thing to do … and the fact that I did quit haunts me to this very day.

So here we are:  I have been absent from this blog for several days, the second such period of quiet, and I had committed to myself that I would write or share a poem every day, using William Packard’s book, The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Prose, as a jumping off point.

Well, please don’t think I have been neglecting poetry.  In fact, I was too tired to write here on Sunday because of preparation for an upcoming ensemble reading that I have been asked to be part of (more on that later), and I have also been neck deep dealing with the poetry that is “family.”  Enough, however!  I must set this thing aright.  I said there would be 30 posts in April, and 30 posts it shall be.

Watch this space …