August 20, 2013
As we talked more, another woman came by and tried to help me look up information on her computer. As I was spelling out the artist’s name, she exclaimed “Oh! I love Noguchi! I didn’t realize we had a fountain of his here!” She was so taken aback that she covered her mouth with her hand. I learned that she had just returned from New York, and had visited the Noguchi Museum there. I found this to be a wonderful bit of serendipity.
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August 19, 2013
The release of water in the base
so controlled that the surface tension,
tabletop of stability, a mirror,
remains unbroken.
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February 4, 2013
If I die in a combat zone,
as I lay dying:
go ask Alice,
ask the dust.
Love is the crooked thing.
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November 29, 2012
Honestly? This is a pretty scary thing for me to do. I’m incredibly fond of these poems, and there’s still a part of me that wants to be protective of them, that makes me want to guard them from other people. But the idea I’m moving towards is that these poems are not valuable because of their scarcity. De-coupling this notion from my brain is a difficult and frightening thing to do… but it feels like the right thing, the right way to go. Even if it freaks me out a little.
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June 26, 2012
I’ve spent a lot of time with family, these past two weeks. I’ve done a fair amount of driving in that time – Chicago to Sawyer, Michigan and a few days later, Chicago to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I’ve passed a lot of cars, and watched a lot of farms and houses pass by my windows.
A few days ago, the closing couplet from Roger Mitchell’s poem Four Hundredth Mile popped into my head. And as it does, each time I remember those lines… it took my breath away.
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April 4, 2012
On Monday, Liz and I stopped in at New Wave Coffee on our way home from work. We both got coffees, and I ended up dropping off a small stack of stickers for A Poem From Us.
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April 2, 2012
I’m excited, ecstatic and overly happy to announce the launch of A Poem From Us – a site featuring regular folks sharing their favorite poem with one another. It’s an attempt to mix poetry with YouTube and QR codes, creating what I hope will be an ever-growing archive of people, reading their favorite poems.
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March 5, 2012
I honestly can’t remember the last time I opened this book, but it must have been some long while ago. Seeing this small bit of her was like a kick in the chest, and took my breath away.
Is it weird that I took a photo of this to share? Perhaps it is, but I wanted to record this moment – to share how something trivial and small can bring the past right back to you, how a matter of years can come rushing back… suddenly, and unannounced.
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January 28, 2012
In her fortune, there was an odd line break. I’m sure this is due to the space available, and so the sentence naturally wrapped down to two lines. But because I’m a fan of poetry, I pay special attention to line breaks (which usually signal a pause) and enjambment (where a sentence or phrase is broken by a line).
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January 1, 2012
With every new year, I invariably think about this poem by Lucille Clifton. Today, as I went searching for the poem in her book, good woman, I came across her autograph.
I attended a reading she gave back in 2004, and when I stood in line to get her autograph… I asked her to sign this poem in particular.
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November 30, 2011
Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from the Awesome Foundation, letting me know I had won a $1,000 grant for a project proposal I submitted. My head is still reeling, as it’s still registering that I actually won one of the grants… and that I’ll get to apply these funds towards my project.
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