I don’t have my mind very sensical yet — still trying to figure out all the widgets and gadgets and gore — but here’s something to chew on from Billy Collins, and a bit from my own journal afterward.

“As I’m writing, I’m always reader conscious… I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong… I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere. The ur-poem for this is Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ There’s no reason to stop there; the horse knows that. But the human is willing to stop for some reason that is beyond the comprehension of the horse. And it’s that willingness to slow down and examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives that is the poet’s interest.”

~ Billy Collins
{ http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/121999collins-publish-war.html }

---

Excerpt from my journal, thinking about this:

‘There’s a glory in everything around us, if we’d just let the Light leak out through pupils colored by irises formed by lives uniquely visioned… Being good caretakers — of anything or anyone, earth or animal, leaf or human — means putting something there that wasn’t before.

Any good gardener notes his or her surroundings, the climate, the soil type, and natural tendencies of their very particular place — so many feet or meters square… but then will apply vision, ingenuity, and experience such that color and texture and light are arranged just slightly -so- — appealingly like home for a heart.

Rose-colored glasses are not necessary in life. Glory truly appears when we take our place. When we learn to love our place.’

~ Kate Gough
11/1/06 8.51pm
santa cruz mtns