Windchimes

Birthdays and Strict Meter Assignments

My oldest son is 24 today. Don't know if he plans to come over, but we'll bake a cake and have a present around for whenever he does.

I've been reading, little bits at a time, by and about Elizabeth Bishop. Today, I read an interview given during the time she taught her first university poetry class. Among other things (of course) she talks about how so many students write just anything and call it free verse. She said you can scan good free verse, you'd never mistake it for prose, and uses Eliot, E.E. Cummings and the rain poems of Apollinaire as examples. Going to have to find those rain poems, I've read very little Apollinaire. "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" (love that one!) and a few calligrammes (sp?).

It's been forever since I gave myself strict meter assignments, and I need to learn what "scan-able" really is. I won't post my strict meter tries in my port, though. I recently posted some other practice tries at a different poetry assignment once given by a professor. They've been looked at, and maybe even read, a few times, but no one's commented on them. Looking at them after the benefit of some weeks have passed, I can understand why. People who've looked at those things must think I've gone off my rocker. I'm going to delete them as soon as I click "save new entry."

So I'll practice in my pen and ink journal, or on my account notepad.


Different subject: My husband, Cliff, and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary this month, on the 19th. He's taking me off to a beach in North Carolina for a week (17th-23rd). I don't think I'll spend much time on-line during that week. Hope to do some reading and writing, but the old-fashioned way. Hope to do plenty of some other things as well...

J.H. Larrew
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