Poetry Friday Revisited: Seamus Heaney

May he rest in peace.

Poetry Friday: Richard Wilbur

Stunningly, I haven't posted a Wilbur poem for a year. I used to (without realizing I was doing it) choose "The Writer" every few months.

Now I realize.

I am quite deliberately re-posting the poem because it's that good, so good that it deserves daily posting. But then perhaps its familiarity would breed contempt, and that is something I could not bear.

One new thing -- some links to information about Wilbur's short story writing daughter, Ellen Wilbur:

Filial Fiction
The State of the Short Story

Enough of my words. Move on to Wilbur's:

The Writer 
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

(Read the whole poem here, at Poets.org, or listen to it here, at The Internet Poetry Archive.
The round up today is at A Teaching Life.

What I Really Do

I don't know who first created this version of a "What I Really Do" meme, but I like it! (Thanks, Anne-with-an-e, who pointed it out to me.)

Click to get a better look. 

Poetry Friday: Billy Collins, Because He Understands Why I Overuse the Word Love

I could, perhaps, be accused of overusing and abusing certain words. "Love" may or may not be one of those words. I'll leave that for you to decide. What I do know for certain is that Billy Collins gets it.

And I love him for it.

Aimless Love
by Billy Collins

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,

(Read the rest here, at The Poetry Foundation.)

The round up today is at I Think in Poems.

Bits and Pieces of Our Days: My cooking (sort-of-cooking), Next Food Network Star, and Ramona

First it was Atticus. Now, Anne-with-an-e has started classes, too. The rest of us are sitting back, taunting them cheering them on, and planning for the coming school year.

More to come soon about plans for Betsy's senior year, and Ramona's last year of elementary school.

(I was in a mild state of shock, however, when I realized that after this year, Ramona would qualify for various church/community activities that cover "junior high/high school, grades 7-12." Ummm? Eeeekk?!)

~~~~~~~~~~

With Atticus back to work, I've reclaimed my kitchen. In the first few days all I could handle was Little Caesar's, then tuna salad, and then I progressed to egg salad. (The egg salad totally counted as cooking because I had to boil the eggs. Heat and/or a dirtied pan = cooking.) 

This week I've managed to pull together teriyaki chicken with rice, and a Nikki Dinki-style taco salad (i.e., mostly veggies and beans, with a wee bit of meat) that got rave reviews from my former cook. Today I'll be making homemade pizza dough and freezing batches of it.

I'm adjusting, people, slowly adjusting. And on the up side, Atticus still likes to cook on the weekends. (I know. I have nothing to complain about.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of Nikki Dinki and Next Food Network Star, I forgot to blog about it this year. We were stunned by the final three. Sputtering, really. We thought it would be/should be Stacy, Nikki, and Damaris. I'm sure Rodney's a great guy but his charisma must be one of those magical, in-person things. I just wasn't affected by it through the screen, and did not feel Giada's crushiness (i.e., I would not "follow him anywhere.") And Russell -- also a great guy, but I'm trying to eat healthier, buddy! Your culinary sins will not assist me in advancing to the next round! 

The girls and I were out of town, at my sister's house, when the final episode aired. Kathy is a NFNS fan, too, and this was the first time we'd ever been together to watch an episode. But Ramona could not bear the thought (too sweet!) of watching the finale without her daddy. So we did the next best thing -- we watched as he watched, and we did play-by-plays over the phone, right down to the finger-crossing before they pronounced Damaris the winner. We were happy, y'all.

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We like to eat cupcakes celebrate baptismal birthdays.

We recently celebrated Ramona's. So hard to believe that eleven years ago, she looked like this:

Scan of an eleven year old photo ... sorry. 

I love baptisms, love to cry at baptisms, love to remember my own baptism, and I really love chocolate cupcakes. (So much for healthier eating. Ummm, Russell?)

Thanks to Anne-with-an-e, who got it from Buzzfeed:

17 Problems Only Book Lovers Will Understand

If you’re a self-proclaimed bookworm (or a bibliophile in denial), you can probably relate to these 17 problems.

I think my favorite is #16: "When no one gets your obscure literary reference."

Poetry Friday: Atticus, Grading Essays, and George Bilgere

School has started.

I've lost not only an excellent cook, but a beloved evening companion.

When one is married to an English teacher, one measures out one's life not in coffee spoons but in the number of hours one will actually get to spend with one's husband once school and essay-grading have begun.

Is there a Mrs. Bilgere? Does she feel as I do about those stacks of essays? Is she, too, guilty of being the voice of temptation, the one who whispers lies about how those wretched stacks can wait?

Robert Frost 
by George Bilgere

Over there on the dining room table
are just twenty-five of the thousands of essays
on the poetry of Robert Frost
produced this week alone in the USA,
the world leader in essays on Robert Frost.

The essays are about ambiguity...

...And yet two days have passed, an entire weekend,
and it's Sunday evening and I am having a glass of wine
and the essays on ambiguity in the poetry of Robert Frost
remain unassessed by me, and this is getting very serious.

(Read the whole poem here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

The Poetry Friday round up is at Steps and Staircases today.

Home!

A telegram from me: 

We've been visiting family in Hot Springs, Arkansas. 

 -(STOP)-

Here's the view from the Hot Springs Mountain Tower. 

-(STOP)-

Why didn't they tell us before we drove up the mountain that the restrooms were closed due to a   plumbing problem? 

-(STOP)-

Atticus didn't get to join us (school has started for him.) 

-(STOP)-

Hey, local school districts? Why do you have to keep starting before Labor Day? 

-(STOP!)-

We got home last night -- day's drive fueled by coffee and carbs, baby. 

-(STOP)-

Laundry and recovery first; blogging coming soon. 

-(STOP)-

KAREN EDMISTEN

Latest Ramona Tweet

Karen Edmisten ‏@Karen_Ed23h

How my 11 yr. old breaks news: "We cleaned it up -- let me just preface this with that."

Details 

My New Book, Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line, Is Available For Pre-order

Last summer (eek, was it really last summer?!) I mentioned I was writing another book. Then, in November, I bemoaned mentioned working on revisions. And now I'm delighted to let you know that Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line is available for pre-order on Amazon. Huzzah!

I love what Our Sunday Visitor did with the cover. You're looking at (clockwise from top left) Patricia Neal, John Wayne, Oscar Wilde, and Gary Cooper. There are nine other stories in the book as well, among them poet Wallace Stevens, art historian Kenneth Clark (of Civilisation fame), and infamous gangster, Dutch Schultz. (This was a fascinating book to research and write.)

Deathbed Conversions will be published by OSV on September 25.

In Which We Discuss LibraryThing and Praise Dylan Thomas For His Empathy With Our Plight

I've had a LibraryThing account for, oh, two years.

I've thought about cataloging all our books. I had sincere intentions, initially. But every time I looked around the living room (and the dining room, and the girls' rooms, and the family room...) instead of getting to work on some data entry, I just quickly diverted my attention elsewhere.

"Oh, sure," I'd tell myself, "it would be a nice little luxury to have all this stuff cataloged, but I'll never get around to it. And what would I do with that information anyway, other than tell myself that I really should haul more of these books to Goodwill?"

Then I'd go make a pot of coffee.

Enter my friend, Magical Mrs. M., who told me about how she uses LibraryThing for record keeping at the end of the school year. Everything her 10-year-old read last year? Tagged. Everything related to biology? Tagged. My ears perked up. Tags. I love tags. I could use tags.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I put Anne-with-an-e to work for me. (I was right -- I'll never get around to it.) So far, she has entered the books on only three of the shelves in our living room, and we're up to a count of 500. I'm a little afraid of the final number, and of how long this project will take, but what can I say? We love books. We love words. We love what happens when pen meets paper.

So did Dylan Thomas:

From the preface ("Notes on the Art of Poetry") to The Poems of Dylan Thomas:

My first, and greatest, liberty was that of being able to read everything and anything I cared to. I read indiscriminately, and with my eyes hanging out. I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books, such sandstorms and ice blasts of words, such slashing of humbug, and humbug, too, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just-awaking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

"Delight and glory and oddity and light" -- it's a plight I'll endure.