In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I was thinking of Ireland this morning. The country has a wonderful blog called Poetry Ireland that celebrates and promotes poetry across the country. Currently, on the main page a literary festival held in Dublin Castle is being advertised. Oh wouldn’t I love to go to that? With my name, I could fit right in. Continue reading “Dance With Me in Ireland”
Category: Musings
Musings on poetry and such
Frost’s Forest in Your Head
On this day, March 7, in 1923, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published by the New Republic. This poem is one of the first that I set to memory. I carry it with me everywhere I go.
I carry its emptiness through my busy, busy days. The little horse shaking its harness bells is such a quiet sound in the midst of the teenage voices and car engines and noise of TV and computer that fill my days.
The “easy wind and downy flake” are suspended in my bones while I try to shut the car door against the southern Oklahoma wind and grab for my sunglasses in the stark light of the day.
I pass a slew of abandoned farmhouses on my way to work each morning but none seem as quiet, as lyrical, as lonely as the one that is not even near on that “darkest evening of the year.”
The death wish that some people say Frost’s poetry contains is always present with life. In the midst of life, we are . . . and so it goes (as Vonnegut would say). This poem about wanting to sleep in the dark and deep woods is the network of veins under our skin.
The blood is our desire to go another mile, just one more mile, before we sleep. Thank you, Robert Frost, for the gift of your forest that fills my life.
–Shaun Perkins
Poetry in Your Hair: Here There Everywhere
Yesterday, I heard two NPR reviews and read a Tulsa World review of The Lorax. It’s not looking good. From what I gather from all three reviews, the filmmaker over-complicated the story and gave it an overall depressing and downright grouchy atmosphere. Ah,Hollywood. It can’t ever get Dr. Seuss right. Continue reading “Poetry in Your Hair: Here There Everywhere”
Beginning with Death
I wrote an earlier musing on poems ending with the word “life,” so I thought I would also consider poems beginning with the word “death.” The most famous of these is probably John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” which John Gunther took for the title of the biography of his son’s illness and death—a book from my childhood that I remember quite clearly (along with Robby Benson, my teenage crush, in the TV movie role). Continue reading “Beginning with Death”
Poetry Where We Are
When I see blank signs along the roadway, I usually think of a poem that would fit on them. That one would be just perfect for a Yeats’ line or that one could fit an entire Dickinson. I like signs that were once something and the writing has all faded out so that they are signs about nothing now. Continue reading “Poetry Where We Are”
Poem in a Minute
One of my occasional gigs is taking my Montgomery Ward typewriter to a festival or conference and setting up to write poems in a minute. You give me three words, and I will make a poem for you with them in it. Today, I am snowed in and could use some practice. If you put your name (or a fake name) in the comments box along with three words, I will write you a custom poem and post it on this page. You can see samples of the poems I’ve written in the past. It’s what I do. Continue reading “Poem in a Minute”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 