Summer

My first poetry collection…

Click here:  Announcing….

Coming February 2013 by Liquid Paper Press

And this, on the shortest day of the year…

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude. ”
~William Shakespeare

October

“Then summer fades and passes and October comes.  We’ll smell smoke then,
and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation,
a sense of sadness and departure.”
–   Thomas Wolfe

“Posey Magazine”

I have a poem in Posey Magazine.  Thank you to Editor J. Bruce Baumann!

www.poseymagazine.com

The Cost of Distraction: What Kurt Vonnegut Knew (via The Frailest Thing)

I’ve never re-posted from another blog before… but this one needs to be read by everyone…
Kudus to Michael Sacasas and his blog “The Frailest Thing.” Thank you … and congratulations to you for being “Freshly Pressed.”

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal." So begins the late Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story, "Harrison Bergeron." In 2009, Chandler Tuttle released a 25 minute film version of the story titled 2081, and you can watch the trailer at the end of this post. Vonnegut goes on to describe the conditions of this equality: They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. N … Read More

via The Frailest Thing

William Shakespeare

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

– William Shakespeare

Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory”

A yearly tradition, I pull Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” from my bookshelf just before Christmas.  If I am in a foul mood from fighting for parking spaces in the local mall, I remember what is real and important each time I read this wonderful story.  Here is a portion:

“A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window.  She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched.  Her face is remarkable – not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid.  “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather.”  The person to whom she is speaking is myself.  I am seven; she is sixty-something.  We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together – well as long as I can remember.  Other people inhabit the house, relatives and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them.  We are each other’s best friend….”

Copyright 1956 by Truman Capote, published by Random House

Winter…

Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.

Quotation by Pietro Aretino

“To the attentive eye….”

By Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.”