Drew Myron's Blog, page 37

You still here, too?

John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

Remember when "blogging" was a ridiculous made-up word? And sharing your personal thoughts on the internet was just weird and self-involved? 

It's all still true, but I've been blogging for 8 years so I guess I've acquiesced. Drewmyron.com, established 2008. Happy Birthday to me!

Eight real-life years is equal to 20 internet years. So, yes, I've made the leap from flipphone to smartphone, from cotton to cashmere, from Friends to Veep. Time flies when you're writing to yourself (and hoping a few peer over your shoulder and give an occasional nod). 

Blogs are dead! You've heard this, too? Most of my blogger friends have left the party. But I'm still here, the clumsy guest who just won't leave, even as the hostess nudges me with, Can I get your coat? Your keys? A life?

But, wait, you're still here too. Hello, so nice to see you. I like your dress, and your shoes. So tell me, are you a writer? what's your favorite book? do you want to be blog friends? 

Let's keep this party going.*

 

*with a nod to Pink and the prehistoric Myspace era. 

 

Using the fuel that fires you up

Education turned to outrage, turned to literary activism for Roberta (Bobbie) Ulrich. 

Now in her 80s, she's worked 50 years as a groundbreaking journalist.

Learn more about Ulrich at 3 Good Books. 

 

How to love the living

What I Learned From My Mother
 

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

 

— Julia Kasdorf

Try This: Dear You

Oh, Emily, we feel your pain.

I've got letters in my hand and letters in my head. Let's write! 

Some of my most satisfying writing is rooted in letters. In these of-the-moment conversations, nothing is planned, prepared, or overthought (though, admittedly, sometimes overwrought). 

Try This: It's Mother's Day season. Write a letter to your mother, or the person you wish were your mother, or a letter to yourself about your mother, OR, if you are a mother, write a letter to your child, or the person you wish were your child . . .

You don't have to send the letter. Just be willing and real. Keep the mind open and the pen moving.

If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it. Or burn it. 

Get Inspired: How much do I love letters? I'm now reading books of letters: 

Dear Mr You
by Mary-Louise Parker

Yes, the author is an actress (loved her in West Wing) but she's not one of those annoying has-beens who dabble in books, y'know like launching a perfume or recording an auto-tuned song. Parker is a writer's writer: sharp, tender, perceptive, and this is a collection of letters written to men, real and imagined, who have shaped and informed her life. 

Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room
by Kelli Russell Agodon

This book of contemporary poems is dedicated to "those who write letters to the world" and includes letter-poems both funny and profound, such as Letter to An Absentee Landlord, and Letter to My Sister, Who is Still Drowning.  

 

[image error]The Beauty of the Husband
by Anne Carson

In what she calls "a fictional essay in 29 tangos," Anne Carson writes to and about a husband as their marriage falls apart. Inventive and bold, Carson defies definition — is this poetry? prose? shadow and tricks? — and that's what makes her work so viable, so strong. 

His letters, we agree, were highly poetic. They fell into my life
like pollen and stained it. I hid them from my mother
yet she always knew.

  . . .  How do people 
get power over one another? is an algebraic question

you used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.”
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce 
a golden rule.

Start now: Write a letter. If you'd like, share your letter in the comments section. Or tuck it in your journal. Or frame it, burn it, or just let it go. 

 

Thankful Thursday: Bits, Lists, You

1.
The best thing I’ve heard this week: I enjoy you.  

And this: Thank you for talking to me.

2.
People shouldn’t feel so grateful to be heard, to be seen, but there’s so much loneliness it permeates the pores.

I'm trying to say it takes so little to be kind. And if my occasional glimmer can brighten a moment, that strikes me as both hopeful and sad. 

3.
Last night in a dream, my tooth was rotten. I could touch the soft bone of decay. And the dream asks the dreamer: In your life, what must go?

4.
A string of passings this month. It’s time, but I’m always surprised. One day we’re chatting, the next day dead. I hope I never get used to it.

5.
As National Poetry Month comes to a close, let me share one last thing: this poster. Designed by Debbie Millman, this great blend of graphic and literary art features lines from over a dozen classic and contemporary poems. Read the poems here. 

6.

Before she died, we ate rainbow sherbet. It tasted so good. I think of that now, how that’s the best way to live, savoring the sweet right to the last.

 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, poems, and more. What are you thankful for today? 

 

Thankful Thursday: Poem in Your Pocket

[image error]

Oh, what joy! It's Thankful Thursday and Poem in Your Pocket Day.

As part of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day encourages you to carry a poem and share it with others.

You don't have to ask me twice; I revel in an opportunity to share poetry. On this Thankful Thursday, I sing the praises of poems carried, clutched, and shared.

What's in your pocket?

Survival serves us

Feeling overwhelmed, uncertain

and full of wonder is not a feeling I’ve

yet escaped and don’t hope to escape.

— Peter Rock

[image error]Peter Rock is the author of seven novels and a short story collection. 

His best-known book, My Abandonment, [one of my favorite novels] is based on the true story of a father and his 13-year-old daughter who lived in an urban forest in Portland, Oregon. His most recent novel, Klickitat, is a young adult novel centered on two sisters and wilderness survival.

Peter Rock is now featured on 3 Good Books, a blog series I host in which I ask writers to share their favorite books on a given them. 

 

 

Love that line!

Some of the saddest words in the English language are ordinary, generic and Relaxed-Fit-Khakis. 

 
— Dale Harabi
Not Your Average Jean Jacket, The Wall Street Journal 

 

More great lines: 

Praise songs were sung . . .

Now ninety . . . 

Selfishness and greediness . . .

Fresh writing shines across forms. Not just your standard novels and poems, but in billboards (The Joy Team), water bottles (Vitamin Water), coffee lids (Dutch Bros), horoscopes (Holiday Mathis) and more. I could go on (and have) but it's your turn now. Read a great line lately? Please share! 

You can be a winner (yes, you!)

Ahhh, April. Flowers bloom, birds sing, and poets shine under the new spring sun.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month — the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets marking the event in myriad ways — I’m taking part in the Big Poetry Giveaway.

How It Works:

1. Start here. 
I’m giving away three poetry books. No pressure. No obligation. No cost to you. 

2. Enter the drawing. 
Type your name and email address in the comments section of this blog by end-of-day on April 30, 2016. I'll draw three names and mail the books to the winners. That's it. Easy, huh? 

3. Win even more. 
Visit Allyson Whipple, master hostess of the 7th Annual Big Poetry Giveaway. On her blog you’ll find a list of participating bloggers. Visit her blog to increase your chances of winning books (and meeting fun, nice writers and readers).

4. Have fun. 
Open your mind. Insert poems. Live more deeply, madly, moonly.*  

Enter my drawing to win these great books:

The Less I Hold
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 

Selected Poems
by Barbara Crooker

 

Thin Skin
by Drew Myron (that’s me!) 

 

* with a nod to e.e. cummings

 

Thankful Thursday: Sweet Spontaneous

Spring, like poetry, makes us humble, writes Annie Finch. 

And giddy. I'm drunk on blue sky and sunshine. In this string of clear days, I revel in the loopy leaps of e.e. cummings. I'm at one with bees buzzing the blossoms, and the squirrels fatly lapping the trees. Spring unspools, turns me astonished and grateful. 

We made it? Yes, we made it through winter's gloom! 

Is it any wonder National Poetry Month is in April, smack-dab in the flush of spring and all its poetic possibilities?  

O Sweet Spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and

poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

         beauty                  how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
         (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

              thou answerest

them only with

                                spring)

 — e.e. cummings

 

Read: Spring Ahead, an essay by Annie Finch, at the Poetry Foundation. 

 

It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?