4 comments


  • Tom Adkins

    Dylan did a song 55 years ago about this kind of change… So did Sam Cooke. When will it happen and take hold?? Still waiting I guess.

    June 16, 2020
  • Mike Stinson

    “Poetry is free speech. It is ever on the side of the irrepressible spirit and in opposition to the censor, to Management, to the protocols of the company psychologist, to the roomful of men in blue suits who casually cheat schoolchildren. It is on the side of exhilaration and the stupendous vision, the sight of the stars through the barred window, the perfection of small birds, the democracy of their chittering language and of our own yakfest and hullabaloo. Poetry is made of the grandeur that is available to a man with no fortune but with somewhere to walk to and ears to hear and a mind to transport him. He may be defeated in love and finance and yet the night belongs to him, he feels entrusted with the stunning sky, the guardian of the houses on the street and all the people in them. So are poets, the angels and shepherds of the sleeping world.” –Garrison Keillor, Intro to “Good Poems”

    June 17, 2020
  • Write in Community

    Mike, this quote by Garrison Keillor is just perfect. Thanks so much for sharing it I especially like “poetry is made of the grandeur that is available to a man with no fortune but with somewhere to walk to and ears to hear and a mind to transport him.”
    Fabulous.. .

    June 18, 2020
  • Judy

    Yes~ poetry at its best “crystallizes” the experience and is the result of careful attention distilled through our emotional response. As Mary Oliver said, “Attention is merely reporting if it is without emotion”. Whether captured in poetry, music, visual arts, dance etc., it is the carefully chosen, the discrete expression of word, color, feeling, note, rhythm, movement, strength and weakness, that champions clarity, precision and illuminates for others as well as for ourselves.
    The pandemic can be reframed as providing us the gift of ‘the pause’, the space, the temporal room to listen, notice, to attend, to explore what is happening within and around us and give it substance that can be shared.

    July 22, 2020

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