Wednesday, May 27, 2009

A Side Trip

Well with the delight of a new grandson and all that entails I haven't been able to muster the concerted effort I need to put up a full play - even work on the first 11 pages. I figure I'll get back to it in a month or two. In the meantime I've been writing a series of poems for a poetry book called EVERYDAY MERMAID POEMS. In the planning is a collaboration with Deidre Scherer to illustrate them.(you should look at her website by googling for it). And now the tie in to the play. In writing the poems I've realized how much I've learned about poetry by immersing myself in Emily Dickinson's work. She's such a nimble wordsmith and wrote on so many different levels. I've learned about cadences, line breaks, punctuation, simplicity, playfulness, slant rhymes, ordinary rhymes, patterns of lines. Of course I'd known a lot of this before, but Emily Dickinson writes with such precision and clarity of thought (even when she's deliberately obscuring). I love thinking I'm learning and or doing something for one reason and all of these side benefits crop in. Also I've learned a lot from haiku and had fun reading one review of haiku that said if you like haiku you'll love Emily Dickinson. And an aside note: I love how TWITTER is like composing haiku.

2 comments:

andrea said...

Ah, your Twitter posts are a delight! Do you follow other poets as well? Poetry magazine has an interesting feed. http://twitter.com/poetrymagazine

light touch said...

thanks andrea. will look into it.