poetry friday: anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t and danced his did
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they [...]

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the exercise, the experiment, the extreme makeover

This middle grade novel is turning out to be quite the exercise in patience.  I guess it’s to be expected that when you live with an idea for years without really thinking it through before writing.
Last semester I took this thing on because it was the most pressing, the most insistent of my unborn children [...]

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poetry friday: nosferatu blues

From the collection Blues Poems selected and edited by Kevin Young
Nosferatu Blues
To be honest, I love your awkwardness most.
Not the naughty plumage of your lips
Or the splayed wildcat of your accent
Or the unexploded heartbeat of your paintings,
But your uneasiness in crowds–
How you skirted the edges
And wandered companionless,
Fidgeted and tried to mingle.
What should I tell the [...]

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strokes

Feverishly working over the new workshop piece, worrying every line.  Not because I want it to be perfect, but because it has to work.  Like setting up a line of dominoes that won’t correctly splay into their patterns if they aren’t placed just so.
I’m orchestrating five main characters – or rather, two main characters and [...]

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the disenyland theory, part two: deja vu

A while back I was talking about my affinity for The Magic Kingdom when I outlined that I had three distinct theories about what it is that draws me in to this hyper-real park. I had it brought to my attention recently that I am two parts behind on my discourse, thus we have part [...]

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revision is like…

building Hoover Dam singlehandedly.
shifting beach sand five feet to the side, one grain at a time.
watching paint dry in humid weather.
using a fork with broth.
herding clouds with a paper fan.
(feel free to contribute)

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the diet that ate my camera

Okay, so my camera wasn’t really eaten.  But I am blaming the diet for making me muddle-headed and causing me to accidentally delete al the pictures on my camera’s flash memory card.  So no pictures of my daughter the hobo on Halloween, no pictures from my walk around the block that I hadn’t uploaded to [...]

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to vote

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
~ Tom Stoppard
I was eighteen when I was able to vote in my first national election. It was 1980 and my brain was swimming with a first semester in college and my first time living away from my family. Selective Service had been reinstated and [...]

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