Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
Musings on poetry and such
Ken and I just spent the weekend at Beavers Bend State Park, and we stayed in cabin 4. The cabin was small and cozy with a fireplace and good heat. It was a bit chilly, though just fine for hiking weather. We went on some trails, searched for a few geocaches, and enjoyed the park’s natural beauty and silence. Continue reading “Poetic Vandalism”
One of my favorite memories from childhood was when our Mom made a treasure hunt for our birthday party (my sister Kelly and I share the same birthday—born same day a year apart). I remember particularly getting to the end of it and finding one of those wild-haired troll dolls in the wellhouse. Continue reading “Poem Caching”
Art is inspiring, like any creative outlet, and I have an extremely wide view of what creative outlets are: the main thing is that they need to make you feel like Emily Dickinson described when reading poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Continue reading “Art Crawl: Take Your Head Off”
I first encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay in an old high school literature textbook. Parked like a shiny convertible amongst the hearses of early twentieth century American literature, she called to me. Now granted “Renascence” wasn’t a horn-honking kind of poem, and it was certainly death-haunted, but it was written by a woman, one of only twenty at that, and it sang of possibilities.
High school textbooks, of course, would not publish some of Millay’s best works that came later, poems about sexuality, love, and longing, that were certainly ground-breaking topics for a female writer in the early twentieth century. She lived life on her own terms, had many affairs, was openly bi-sexual, went to jail for supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, and traveled extensively.
Today, February 22, in 1892, Millay was born. Her friends called her “Vincent.” Continue reading “Today, Remember Edna”
Two friends of the museum, Johnny White and Brittanie Schneider (both excellent poets and artists–and I’m not biased, just because they are former students from my lost teaching years) made the latest poet chair for the museum. I love it, and I think you will, too.
We tried to capture the ordinary madness that Bukowski wrote of: the pounding of keys against the page until the ink is gone and it is nothing but a glorified hole puncher, the violence and drunk insanity, and aspirations of greatness cuckolded by reality.–Johnny White
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 