Guy Conner's Blog, page 9

Dream Poem 1 – The Word

I’ve talked on this blog about autobiographical poems, ones that attempt to express the truth about my life; and I’ve talked about Story poems, ones that seem to be autobiographical, but really aren’t. There is also another category – the dream poem, a poem that came to me, essentially fully written, when I woke up in the morning. This poem is a slightly revised version of a dream poem from the late sixties.

THE WORD

All my life, I’ve been looking for a word,
I mean, the word,
Even when I was...

Story Poem 1

Sometime back, I announced that I was going to post autobiographical poems on this site from time to time. You can expect more of them in the near future.

This post is the first of a series of poems that I call story poems. The difference is this: an autobiographical poem tells a story about me that is true; a story poem tells a story about me that appears to be true, but isn’t.

Afterglow
They say the spirit lingers after death,
Or so I hope – there’s so much more to say.
They say that with y...

Two Polls are Better Than One

As I said in my first post on this subject, there are times when an underfunded local campaign is better off doing two or more simple polls rather than one large, more complicated and more expensive poll. Sometimes, this is because knowing how a particular message is doing with the electorate over time is extremely important; sometimes it’s just that polls can be used as fundraising tools.

In 2006, I ran a campaign for Supervisor in northern Sonoma County. The campaign had three major problem...

Parody

A parody is an imitation of a serious work of art for comic effect. In general, I avoid true parodies; when I imitate a poet as, for example, here, I usually have some other purpose than simply making fun. In 1967, however, I did write a parody of Edward Fitzgerald‘s most famous quatrain from his translation of Omar Khayyam, the one that goes:

A Book of Verses underneath the bow,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou,
Beside me in the Wilderness.
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

My vers...

Redistricting the U. S. Senate

I read an interesting article in the 3/16/15 issue of the New Yorker today. It said that of the eight democratic governments around the world that have both an upper and a lower legislative body, the United States has the most malapportioned and least representative upper house.

The U. S. Senate is a historical anachronism. No sensible person, who was sitting down to devise a governmental structure in the modern world, would create one in which the population represented by each member varie...

Playing with Meter 1: The Anapest

In my first book for children, “A is for Arnyx: An Alphabet in Verse,”I set out to write a book of children’s poetry, that would not only be fun to read aloud, but which would allow me to experiment with meter and verse forms, a long-time interest if mine.

From time to time on this blog, I will post verse that continue that tradition. This is the first of a series:

Meter is the basic rhythmic structure of aa line of verse. In English, it is usually described in terms of stressed and unstress...

I Had a Thought

Today is Light Verse Thursday, and I’m giving myself permission to post an exceptionally silly verse:

I Had a Thought
(1967)

I had a thought the other day,
While falling down the stair.
“I’ll shortly land, quite hard I fear,
I guess I’d best prepare.”
And then I thought:”Suppose I say
I quite refuse to fall.”
Quite brave of me, with land so near,
To thus attempt to stall.”
And then I saw, to my dismay,
My final landing spot.
“I can’t go up; I’m on my way.”
And then I thought: “Why not?”

The p...

A Poll is a Snapshot of the Electorate

In an earlier post, I talked about how I got into polling for local elections, and gave a ;ist of key points about polls that local candidates should know. This is the first of several posts in which I will elaborate on that list. (Note: In all my posts on polling, I assume that the voters polled are random se;ections from the target universe.)

A poll is a snapshot of the electorate at a given point in time; it is not, by itself, a way to predict the outcome of an election. An experie3nced pol...

The Farmlands Group

When Pat and I first came to Sonoma County in 1984, she was already a committed activist, and I guess I was as well. We were certainly looking for ways to get involved in our new community.

One of the first issues we tackled was farmlands preservation. In the 70’s, two Sonoma County Supervisors, Chuck Hinkle and Bill Kortum had been recalled because of their opposition to residential development of rural areas. Concern about the effects of sprawl were very real.

Our new friend, Marty Roberts, r...

The Agnostic’s Prayer – 1965

I am the product of a mixed marriage – my father was a committed Agnostic, and my mother was a Social Christian; that is to say, she believed you should go to church because you were expected to go to church.

My maternal grandmother, a Christian Scientist, gave me my own copy of the King James version of the Christian Bible for my seventh birthday. It was a small, thick blue book with my name embossed in gold on the cover. By the age of nine, I had read through the more interesting Old Testa...