Journal
Here are the daily questions, thoughts, provocations that get batted around in Lezlie-land: sometimes wacky, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes shamefully self-indulgent. Hey! It’s a journal!Thursday, 26 November 2009 18:22
Poet Chase Twitchell’s rules for writing and living are:
Tell the Truth.
No decorations.
Remember death.
Her poems are getting skinnier and skinnier.
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Ray Bennett, M.D. has written a book called The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide for Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great.
I bought a copy.
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Every time Karen and Arthur Blumenthal go on a trip, they pause before they leave and ask one another this: “What is our mission?” They answer: “To fall more deeply in love.”
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Mick Quinn says that enlightenment is “your relationship with the experience you are already having.”
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The bodhisattva’s prayer >>
May I be a protection to those without protection,
A guide for those who journey,
And a boat, a bridge, a passage
For those desiring the further shore. -- Shantideva
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In a recent interview, writer Mary Karr talks about her experience teaching poetry to women at a group home in Minneapolis. She says of her students, “In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.” She had grave doubts about their ability to respond to poetry, but she plunged in and read them a poem by Pablo Neruda. At the end of her reading, she says, “a big silence held us. Then applause broke out. Feet were stomped. A few ladies got up to hug each other again. If there’d been pillows, they’d have all started whacking each other.”
A pillow fight: the perfect response to a poem.