We humans usually bring our shiny new lists into a shiny new year, hoping for the best, but, very often, not expecting much.  After all, the first day of the new year is just a flip of a page on a calendar, and it is also the next day in a long line of days in which our habits have accumulated and settled in with us.  Still, it is a treat to hit that mental “reset” button.  In order to truly reset, we have to do some different things and not just vow to “do things differently.”

I am a firm believer in MLK Jr.’s “inescapable network of mutuality” and “single garment of destiny,” and not just for human beings who share the same time period, but for us and those living before and after us.  In fact, this web of mutuality binds us to all of creation.   In this same way, all of art is bound together in the way it speaks to us, teaches us, comforts us, challenges us, sees us.  And, like us, art is bound to everything else and everything else to it.

So, with that in mind, I am vowing to crawl further out on the web this year … and I am dragging my mother with me.  She and I have agreed to meet every Tuesday at the same time in order to briefly explore some endeavor that either we have left dormant for too long or have never experienced before.  At any rate, the very intentionality of the encounter will automatically change the experience.  It is to be a process of both learning and doing.  Field trips will be required.

January’s Tuesdays will be devoted to the visual arts.  Yesterday, for the first time in a very long time, my mother and I visited a museum together; we went to The Mint Museum.  It was a good start to the month.  I was inspired especially by the Lois M. Jones “A Life in Vibrant Color” exhibit.

One particular “aha” moment connected me back to poetry.

Continue reading “The Tuesday Project” →

In my Poet’s Dictionary (by William Packard), poetry is defined simply as, “The rhythmic creation of beauty in words.”  Naturally, there is more to say, so the entry goes on for a full two pages, and includes some definitions that poets, like Wordsworth and Dickinson among others, have offered throughout history.

I find poetry easier to experience than to define.

This past week, I had the opportunity to travel to the mountains.  Whenever I can do so, I like to take detours … the more lonesome the detour, the better.  One of my favorites on this particular trip takes me off an annoyingly busy mountain highway and onto a two-lane, sometimes one-lane, sometimes partially unpaved road.  It is full of hairpin curves and mostly empty of other travelers.  I like the curves not only because they force me to slow way down, but also because it seems to me that everywhere I go lately, curves in the road are being made straight (pick your own metaphorical application).

Continue reading “Poesy …” →

There is something to be said for not sharing a poem that is just hours old.  Like all newborns, perhaps it should be sheltered from the outside world for a little while.  And there certainly is something to be said for not sharing a poem that made the poet cry before she had even finished writing it, a poem so fraught and wrought with emotion that a Wordsworthian cooling off period is advisable.  In fact, it would not surprise me to learn that all those “somethings to be said for not” such a sharing are right in line with conventional wisdom.  Well, as I like to say about writing sometimes, “Rules were made to be considered.” Continue reading “Today, and other conundrums” →

My grandfather’s house
was small. Since his death
it has been shrinking.

Barely taller than grass
vanishing height, breadth.
Like a boat, sinking.

My grandfather’s porch
where he often sat –
archaeology.

My grandfather’s door
stands closed, at a slant
without eulogy.

No place to enter
No one to listen.
Nowhere to sit down.

No man’s voice gentler
than a child’s whisper.
Only the walnuts

untended, falling
must miss Pappaw’s hands
opening their husks

yellow green, sticky.

I visited a friend of mine this past Saturday, whom I had not seen in over 20 years.  We were in high school and at college together.  She lives about an hour and a half west and north of here.  When I left my friend’s house on Saturday, I was feeling nostalgic.  No surprises there.  I took the Hwy 127 exit off of I40 and decided to go home by way of my childhood.  I guess I covered 37 miles of Lincoln County, starting near Vale and ending at the McGuire dam.  I stopped and took photographs along the way.

One of the places I stopped was the house near Vale where my Pappaw Punch lived.  I am writing a poem about what I saw there, how it made me feel.  As I think about him – about all my grandparents, really – it makes me even more embarrassed about the assumptions I find myself making about others.  I, of all people, really should know better.

My mother’s father was a trenchant observer of people; he was wise, and he was gentle.  I loved him and he loved me.  I wish I were more like him.  I wish I had bought him some Moravian cookies in Old Salem when I was in law school at Wake Forest, and taken them to him.  As far as I can recall, that is the only thing he ever asked me to do for him, and I didn’t do it, but he didn’t hold that against me.  He just loved me.  Continue reading “The Smartest Man I’ve Ever Known” →