“I dwell in Possibility -- / A fairer House than Prose,” quoth Emily Dickinson. I always stop and look at that juxtaposition: possibility vs. prose. Not poetry vs. prose, nor yet again possibility vs. certainty — negative or positive certainty. I suspect Dickinson wanted me to look at it. To think that somehow she means…
glimpes
This evening we drank hot chocolate and decorated the Christmas tree which has been fragrancing our living room for a week now all unadorned. I unpacked memories with the ornaments: all the little woodland creatures that used to talk to one another in the hollows between the tree branches, the cat and dog that always hang…
a longer Lover
Mornings when the alarm wakes you from a dream of grief so poignant that you shrink from the waking world, bent over your pillow for a moment: Father, I can't. Father, help me. Honeysuckle grows thick in the fence-rows and the trees -- I've only begun to notice it, and already it yellows. You smell…
Unintended: Word-Wonder Day 28
I once participated in a poetry writing class. It was primarily workshop-style, with all of us students bringing poems for reading and critique each week. I remember that one of the first poems I took frustrated me greatly, because the class read it and interpreted it in a way I had not begun to imagine.…
Incarnation: Word-Wonder Day 27
As I've thought about what poetry is this week, I've realized that there are parallels to be drawn between poetry and the Incarnation. I've been thinking about them all week, but hesitating to draw them, lest you walk away from this post with some sentimentalized notion of Christ as God's poem to the world or…
Together (Five Minute Friday): Word-Wonder Day 26
Today is Friday, and Lisa-Jo Baker has a prompt on her blog, and I made an effort to combine it with this week's Word-Wonder theme (poetry) in some way, and it took more than the requisite Five Minutes. But here it is, nonetheless: Together. Together. I usually do poetry on my own -- certainly write…
Experienced: Word-Wonder Day 25
Along with the compressed-ness that belongs to poetry, there's also this: understanding poetry is an experiential rather than a cognitive process. Pastor and author Eugene Peterson explains that "We do not have more information after we read a poem, we have more experience" (Reversed Thunder, 1988). Certainly, we can, with some poems, distill a meaning…
To Be a Stone: Word-Wonder Day 24
Re-posting an old poem of mine today, in the interest of Wednesdays in which I run out of me before I run out of day. “I am happy to be a stone.”* One of a long tradition, honored and terrible. Stained with the blood of martyrs in Jerusalem, licked by the fire of God on…
Polyphonic, a poem: Word-Wonder Day 23
Since this week of Word-Wonder deals with poetry and song, I decided to use at least some of the days to actually write poetry. Poetry is a thing that usually requires time: it follows that poetic products of only one day's growth may not be so developed as they might have been. But practice is…
Poetry: Word-Wonder Day 22
Outside the world of sentences, organized essays, blogposts, stories, and other kinds of prosings, there's another way of putting words together: in poetry and song. I've heard poetry defined as "compressed language." Having recently taught some epic poems -- Beowulf, Paradise Lost -- I cannot call that an all-inclusive definition, but it works much of…
Between Blue Rocks 