I've got a review of one of my fave poetry books from last year up at Guys Lit Wire today. It's a review of Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali by Charles R. Smith, Jr., illustrated by Bryan Collier, and it includes a wee bit of my SBBT interview of Charles Smith. I hope you'll all check it out, and also check The Guys Lit Wire site in general for books for teen guys.

In my head this morning was a jumble of verses involving kings. See, I'd tried to recall my favorite bit from The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll, only the little man in the back office of my brain came back with "A Bag of Tools" by R.L. Sharpe (which may or may not still be under copyright protection). I only know bits of the Carroll poem, although I believe I'm going to try to learn it by heart. I particularly like "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot,and whether pigs have wings." And the Sharpe poem was one of the things I found among my grandfather's papers many years ago, along with The Lion and Albert and a number of other poems, prayers, etc. So I'll share both with of the kings-related poems with you, as I may.

Looking at them and assessing the metre of both, I think it's not entirely crazy that the little man in the file room mucked up. See, Sharpe's poem begins "Isn't it strange that princes and kings and clowns that caper in sawdust rings . . . " The rest can be read online at a number of places, including a place called Poetry in a Cup.

And here is The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead--
There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

( Read the rest here )

And in this instance, the Walrus was not Paul. Koo-koo-ka-choo.

Today's quote is, of course, from the Edgar Allen Poe poem "The Raven".

On first drafts

Bernard Malamud said that the first draft "is the most uncertain-- where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better."

On revision

Well, in a way. I just finished reading A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett. And somewhere back there in chapter 14, a wise old witch says this: "Change the story, change the world." Ain't that the truth?

On poetry

From Salman Rushdie, a sentence on what it means to be a poet: "A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

On adjectives

Mark Twain gave some excellent writing advice. Here, his thoughts on adjectives: "When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."

On adverbs

Stephen King is opposed to adverbs. Sure, he uses them, and some even say he overuses them, but here's what he had to say in his book, On Writing: "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops." My guess is that his thoughts are pretty darn close to Twain's notions on adjectives.

On rhythm

I've been reading Cindy Lord's blog for years now, and the use of rhythm in writing prose is something she's discussed more than once. Cindy did an interview in 2005 with Robert Redmond for an educators' listserv, in which she discussed her emphasis on rhythm in writing. During that interview, Cindy said

I write "by ear" and read every chapter out loud many, many times, listening for the rhythm of the language, as well as the meaning of the words. My ear can hear little glitches and awkward places my eye won't see, and I keep moving words and sentences until my voice reads them smoothly.

Recently, I've been reading through a backlog of writing magazines (and homemaking ones, too; turns out its not just my to-be-read books pile that's far huger than it ought to be). I found an article in the September 2007 issue of The Writer by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre in which McEntyre wrote about the need for writers to stay "in touch with life's rhythms." Her article opened with this paragraph:

Every sentence has its drumbeat. Rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, unites families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echoes of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchestrates the life of the body.

This makes me wonder what my writing rhythms say about me. And while I'm sure my sentences carry evidence of my influences, I'm not at all convinced they say anything about my ancestry. What about yours?

the gnomes went to Delaware for some R&B. Not rhythm and blues, exactly. More like relaxation and beer.

They enjoyed some time at the condo where we stayed.

              on the back screen porch


on the slide

They checked out the remote at the Bose outlet.


They enjoyed an evening out, too. As it was the 4th of July, they were excited for the fireworks and more than willing to wave the flag.


The rain that caused Rehoboth to send off its fireworks before we could get outside to see them didn't dampen their spirits at all.

(Did someone say spirits?)


For purposes of full disclosure: While at Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats, I ordered one of their homebrewed birch beers. Hubby tried three of their beers, and I drank better than half of his glass of Chicory Stout (brewed with chicory and Mexican coffee). The gnomes, who - as their beards will attest - are over 21 and therefore entitled to drink, checked out the beers belonging to our friends, who were kind enough to loan me some full glasses for gnome poses.

Then, one of them did his best to help me finish my White Chocolate Chicory Stout Bread Pudding made with stout brewed by Dogfish Head and rum distilled by Dogfish Head.


The fumes must've affected the gnomes, because they decided to rock out to the music of The Two-Man Gentleman Band (which inexplicably was composed of three gentlemen).



One of them was even inspired to play the kazoo along with the band.

Oscar Wilde was, as I've noted before, an interesting guy. When he arrived in the United States on a tour, he was asked by US Customs whether he had anything to declare. His response? "I have nothing to declare, except my genius."

Say what you will about Mr. Wilde and some of his proclivities, yet I shall not allow you to insult his writing skills, which were superb. For this 4th of July Poetry Friday, I'm sharing a poem by a notorious Irishman.

Sonnet to Liberty
by Oscar Wilde

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea,—
And give my rage a brother——! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout* or treacherous cannonades*
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.

*knout: a heavy braided whip with multiple heads (think cat of nine tails, but with some wire bits added as well in the forms of rings and hooks)
*cannonade: heavy artillery fire

Those of you keen to spot sonnet forms will note that it follows one of the Petrarchan or Italianate forms: ABBA'A'CCADEFFED. Also, Wilde fudges a wee bit with his rhymes for "A", since "eyes" and "cries" doesn't actually rhyme with "Democracies" and "Anarchies". Still, one has to admire his juxtaposition of polysyllabic political jargon. This poem is from about 1880, and is one of several forays Wilde made into political poetry, having come from school at Oxford into the real world of his day and social class. Most of Wilde's political poetry of the time shows a softcore socialist bent, and this one is no exception.

Of course, for me, mention of the barricades immediately conjures the barricade scene from the musical Les Miserables, when the barricade spins and one sees the guy dead, hanging from his shoes (in the traditional position of the Hanged Man, a symbol of sacrifice). But it could just be me.

Enjoy your 4th of July. I hope it's filled with happier things like ice cream and fireworks. But don't forget how others earned our day of celebration.

I am sitting in an olive green wicker rocker on the screened-porch balcony of a condo located in a gated community called The Peninsula somewhere in Delaware. The view from the balcony is of a slim stand of trees, through which one can sort of make out the green for the first hole of the community's golf course. Or at least, one could when we arrived, and the sun was still a foot or so above the horizon. It set in a splendid, orange-pink haze after landing in the top branches of a tall tree about half a mile from here.

Now, it's quite dark here. The breeze is rustling through the trees, the sprinklers are sending water onto the golf course as if they were the side-rinse sprays at a car wash, and all over, near and far, small frogs in trees are playing tiny didgeridoos and tapping tiny vibraslaps (the instrument my marching band director used to refer to as a wanglebanger). One of them somewhere off to my left is even playing a small train whistle, undeterred by how different its high, clear call is from the more raucous calls of its confederates.

It is my idea of a slice of heaven, really.

See those gnomes in the sunset? Their happy little faces and that end-of-day glow are perfect for today's news: I've reached the end of the manuscript for Garden Gnomes Gone Wild.

I can't call it a first draft, really, since although the last several pages are all new, the first few pages have had a bazillion goings-over. And it's by no means a completed manuscript, because it needs time to rest while I do other things, and then come back to it to read and revise it. And stuff.

But the manuscript, she is finished. And that is a satisfying feeling.

Tomorrow, the travelling gnomes and I will be leaving for a short vacation. Very short. As in, we'll be back on Saturday. Still, I'm happy at the idea of getting a wee bit of a getaway in. But not until after my morning writing time. And I will, of course, post something on Friday. But I will do it from Delaware, First State and home of tax-free shopping.

Missed the boat on the hometown photo signup, but I'm enjoying seeing everyone else's posts. I wrote a Jane poem last Thursday, but as of right now, the gnomes are in a, shall we say, "precarious" place. I won't talk about it more right now since I hear them calling me back to work. More later this week.

In other news, I went to see WALL-E this weekend, along with the rest of America. Let me just say this about that: I left the movie feeling unsettled and depressed. Hubby and kinder thought it was great. Wasn't WALL-E cute? Who's cuter, WALL-E or Wally (the not-a-puppy-anymore)? Etc.

I just walked around in a funk for about 24 hours. Staggering garbage and pollution. Staggering consumerism and laziness. People too lazy to walk or do anything for themselves. People more concerned about their virtual lives than reality. It's a completely dystopic film, and all that 3/4 of my family got out of it was "wasn't that robot cute?"

My thoughts? "Wasn't that movie didactic? When did 'message films' become such huge box office? Maybe I should spend less time online. Maybe I should cut down my purchases and disposals. Maybe I should look for more things packaged in glass, since it's definitely recyclable, whereas plastic? Not so much. Here they only collect plastics marked with a 1 or 2. That means that the stuff marked '5' goes to the landfill. And I'm still not convinced that the 1s and 2s don't end up there as well. I need to exercise more. And maybe plant a vegetable garden. Is it too late to plant a vegetable garden? Wait - we have a lot of trees. Is there even enough sun in my yard for vegetables? Vegetables and gardens remind me of my gnome project. And hey - the gnomes, they are a-calling . . . "

Today's selection is a lovely poem by John Donne, who was born in 1572 and died in 1631. He led a rather varied and interesting life. Born Catholic, some of his family was persecuted for remaining openly Catholic after England became Protestant. Donne set out on a fine life in the law, but lost his first choice of career when his secret marriage to his boss's niece, Anne, became known. Donne eventually became an Anglican clergyman, known for giving dramatic sermons. In private, he wrote and circulated copies of poems, some of which were fairly erotic and of a libertine nature. Some were even of a rather insulting nature as far as their treatment of women. Most of the bawdy poems are commonly believed to have been written when Donne was a law student, sowing his wild oats.

Today's poem is related to sexual intimacy, but is not one of the poems Donne wrote in praise of the notion of bedding lots of different women. For that reason, many readers assume, correctly or not, that it was written for Anne.

Donne was fond of using something known as a "conceit" in his writing. Usually, these are drawn-out comparisons, often between rather odd partners. In the case of today's poem, the conceit is that Donne personifies the Sun, talking to the sun as if it were a human being who interrupted Donne and his lover.

The Sun Rising
by John Donne

      Busy old fool, unruly sun,
      Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
      Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
      Late school boys and sour prentices*,
    Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

      Thy beams, so reverend and strong
      Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
      If her eyes have not blinded thine,
      Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
    Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

      She's all states, and all princes, I,
      Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
      Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
      In that the world's contracted thus.
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

*prentices: apprentices

The use of conceits fell out of favor in the early 1600s. In later times, Donne was classified (and thereby dismissed) by Dr. Samuel Johnson as a "metaphysical poet" because of his comparisons/conceits. In the early 20th century, however, folks like T.S. Eliot dug Donne's poetry back up and rehabilitated him, defending his metaphysical notions as they went.

Moving from the first through the third stanza, you can see the development of the conceit more fully, and why Johnson referred to it as metaphysical: At first the sun is merely an intruder, the way a person would be. But by the third stanza, the world and, in fact, the universe, has been reduced to the man and the woman and the sun.


The form on this one is interesting to me. Each stanza follows the pattern ABBACDCDEE, making it kinda sorta a ten-line sonnet (leaving out a quatrain somewhere along the line). Only without the iambic pentameter that one might expect - his metre shifts as he moves around in the poem. At least, that's what I'm going with unless I manage to more clearly I.D. the form in a bit, after the driving of the children has concluded its morning session.

Edited to add: The poem is an aubade, as noted in the comments by wordsrmylife. An aubade is defined as a poem that deals with lovers separating at dawn. (The scene in which Romeo and Juliet separate at dawn is an earlier example.) However, the aubade has no particular formulaic requirements as far as line lengths, etc.

M recently finished reading Girl Overboard by Justina Chen Headley. She snapped it up at the store months ago, then didn't quite get around to reading it right away. But once she opened it, she pretty much refused to put it down. Without further ado, M's review:

Girl Overboard is by far one of the best books I have read! Justina Chen Headley's character, Syrah Cheng, is so relatable, I saw a tad of myself in her. This amazing book starts right on track and just picks up pace as it goes. We follow Syrah after some extensive ACL surgery as she struggles to balance her billionaire family and her passion . . . snowboarding. Her friend won't talk to her because his girlfriend won't let him, so Syrah makes a new friend. We find out that her new friend's little sister has cancer and needs a bone-marrow transplant. So what does Syrah do? Well, I can't spoil it for you, but this book is riveting! I got a lot of lectures about staying up too late to read this book, but boy was it worth it! I definitely give this one 5-1/2 out of 5 stars.

You read that last part right. In fact, if this were a scale from one to ten, then M's review would go to eleven. She puts this book way up there among her set of superstars, which include Carrie Jones's books, JK Rowling's books, RULES by Cindy Lord, and Sense and Sensibility. Yes, those are her top tier books, to which she has just added Girl Overboard.

I love positive feedback, as I'm sure do you all. Today, some kindness has come my way from an unexpected source. See, after I post book reviews, I usually try to let authors and illustrators know they're up. And it's been my experience that I often get a nice email back from someone. And that illustrators are extremely quick at getting back to you.

Still, I am blown away by the feedback I got today based on yesterday's review of Coraline: The Graphic Novel. The wizard behind P.Craig Russell's website has posted a bit of my review and a link back here. And it includes a panel from the graphic novel, if you're interested in seeing more of the art. And seriously, why wouldn't you want to see more of the art?

Some of you may remember that I raved about Neil Gaiman's book Coraline as part of a multi-blog event last year. I really, really liked the book. (And yes, I know I only recently raved about his picture book, The Dangerous Alphabet, illustrated by Gris Grimly. But I'm a huge Gaiman fan, so you shall have to suck it up. Or skip this post, but you'll be missing out if you do it.) Regular readers may reacall that in my post for Bradbury Season, I noted that a graphic novel version was forthcoming, illustrated by P. Craig Russell. And then I squeed about scoring a copy of the ARC for the graphic novel version at ALA.

You can bet, I read it pretty much immediately. Only I didn't talk about it until now on account of its official release date is sometime in July. Only last week, I spied it with my little eye in the children's section at Borders. Isn't it cool-looking?

Mind you, the Coraline in this version looks nothing like the Coraline on the cover of the original novel* (as drawn by David McKean), nor does she look anything like the Coraline who will be in the forthcoming 3D movie version of the book.* BUT in some ways, I like her all the more for it, because she looks like a real girl, and not like a cartoon(ish) character. Russell even makes Coraline seem to stand a bit taller as the book moves along, and the images of the Other Mother (who likes to sew buttons for eyes, brrrrr**) are decidedly frightening, as they should be. The souls of the three children in the closet in the Other House are rendered well (and clearly demonstrate the time periods/species to which the children belong). The balance between dialogue and imagery is just exactly right (unlike, say, the version of The Hobbit at the local library, which is so darned text-heavy in dialogue bubbles as to render the entire thing unreadable, in my opinion).

This graphic novel finds the right balance between image and text, between action and speech. Both the images and the text merge to tell the story in an extremely terrific way. In fact, reading the graphic novel was very much like watching Coraline as a movie, only where the dialogue is in subtitles and not spoken aloud. Although if I'm being truthful, when reading it, it played precisely like a movie in my head, complete with close-ups, wide-shots, dialogue and even background music. (Those of you familiar with the existence of my brainradio will not be surprised.) The illustrations depict Coraline's development as a character in a way that made it seem clearer than in the book that she was a different person by the end than she had been in the beginning. I believe she walks taller, and her braveness is nearly palpable. But it could just be me. Although SLJ seems to agree it plays well as a graphic novel.


*Here's the movie poster for the Coraline movie, in which the role of Coraline is being voiced by Dakota Fanning, Terri Hatcher voices both mothers, and John Hodgman voices both fathers, along with the cover of the original book as well.





**Check out the "Unshelved" comic strip dated August, 2005 for a bit of a plot summary and a nice demo of why the buttons-for-eyes bit is so creepy. If you need convincing, of course.

So, does this post look better than usual? It sure does to me, since I'm typing it on my shiny (okay, matte-finish) new Dell laptop. (Note to any Dell people - any free swag you want to send me on account of me saying nice things about your computer is fine with me. Hey, it works for Stephen Colbert, so why not me? Oh. Right. He's got a lot more readers and viewers than I. *sigh*)

I was going to say that if today was any indication of the what my summer's going to be like, I won't get much writing done. Only then I remembered that I wrote a draft of a new Jane poem this morning whilst on a writing date with my friend and sometime bedmate, Angela, so maybe it bodes well after all. Only it seemed to involve an inordinate amount of driving, even with another mother taking S to camp and someone else bringing M home from the movies. And when gas is nearly $4 per gallon (yeah, it's lower here in Jersey, even though they pump it for you), that is not only time- but also money-consuming. Proving once again, I suppose, that time is money. Ah well, nobody's going anywhere tomorrow afternoon, at least for a wee bit: the water company person is coming to replace the water metre. I know! The excitement is more than I can bear, too!

Did you know that the word "sonnet" is directly related to the musical term "sonata"? Well, 'tis true. Turns out I play sonatas on the piano and read and write sonnets as well.

Today, I'm sharing a sonnet called "The Sonnet", by John Addington Symonds. I found the third "verse" of it in a new book I've been reading called The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton anthology, edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. The work is a series of three sonnets about the sonnet. I really loved the third verse when I read it in the book I'm reading, but when I found the whole thing online, I found it impossible to pick just one - each is a jewel. How can you not love "a gem which, hardening in the mystical/mine of man's heart, to quenchless flame hath leapt"? Or the references in the second sonnet to carving facets in a diamond and to Prospero?

The Sonnet
by John Addington Symonds

I
The Sonnet is a fruit which long hath slept
And ripen’d on life’s sun-warm’d orchard-wall;
A gem which, hardening in the mystical
Mine of man’s heart, to quenchless flame hath leapt;
A medal of pure gold art’s nympholept
Stamps with love’s lips and brows imperial;
A branch from memory’s briar, whereon the fall
Of thought-eternalizing tears hath wept:
A star that shoots athwart star-steadfast heaven;
A fluttering aigrette of toss’d passion’s brine;
A leaf from youth’s immortal missal torn;
A bark across dark seas of anguish driven;
A feather dropp’d from breast-wings aquiline;
A silvery dream shunning red lips of morn.

II
There is no mood, no heart-throb fugitive,
No spark from man’s imperishable mind,
No moment of man’s will, that may not find
Form in the Sonnet; and thenceforward live
A potent elf, by art’s imperative
Magic to crystal spheres of song confin’d:
As in the moonstone’s orb pent spirits wind
’Mid dungeon depths day-beams they take and give.
Spare thou no pains; carve thought’s pure diamond
With fourteen facets, scattering fire and light:—
Uncut, what jewel burns but darkly bright?
And Prospero vainly waves his runic wand,
If spurning art’s inexorable law
In Ariel’s prison-sphere he leave one flaw.

III
The Sonnet is a world, where feelings caught
In webs of phantasy, combine and fuse
Their kindred elements ’neath mystic dews
Shed from the ether round man’s dwelling wrought;
Distilling heart’s content, star-fragrance fraught
With influences from the breathing fires
Of heaven in everlasting endless gyres
Enfolding and encircling orbs of thought.
Our Sonnet’s world hath two fix’d hemispheres:
This, where the sun with fierce strength masculine
Pours his keen rays and bids the noonday shine;
That, where the moon and the stars, concordant powers,
Shed milder rays, and daylight disappears
In low melodious music of still hours.

Oh, the happy sighing beauty of it all.

The quote in today's icon is from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler. It appears more than once in the 13-volume set. On my little inspiration board to my left (which needs some rearranging, methinks), I have a tear-out postcard from a movie-related thingummy (I think it was, in fact, a book of tear-out postcards?) showing Klaus Baudelaire peering up over a ginormous book. The caption reads "Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another." I tried to locate the image online (briefly), but to no avail. But I did find an image that resulted in a head-slap moment. All I could think was "so that's who he reminded me of".


Photo from www.fraterslibertas.com. And now I wonder if Chertoff has a tattoo of an eye on his ankle. But I digress.


On writing a new project

"You know it's a good idea if a good character quickly follows. And you know you have the right character when other characters start collecting around her. It's magnetic attraction of the imagination." ~Laurell K. Hamilton, in a Writer's Digest interview with Maria Schneider, April 2008 edition.


On the nature of fiction

"As the world becomes a smaller place, people want to better understand. People gravitate toward fiction to better understand the facts." ~David Baldacci, quoted in an article on writing Thriller/Suspense novels, Writer's Digest, April 2008 edition.


On what sparks a writer's interest

My lovely friend, Cindy Lord, put up an interesting post earlier this week about what really gets her going as a writer. For her, it's not plot or character.

"I was thinking this morning about what motivates us to tell the stories we do. Sometimes it surprises my critique partners and my editor that I am willing (and quick) to change whole characters and plot elements readily. But those things are not what matter most to me.

It is always the ethical questions and themes that lie under the story that I am most invested in. The setting often comes next in importance, and only after those things come character and plot. I would change a main character much more easily than I would give up either my setting or the story's ethical dilemmas. In fact, if I had to give up the latter issue, I would stop writing the book. I wouldn't care anymore."~Cynthia Lord

The subject line of today's post is a short synopsis of my day yesterday.

A Green Dragon

Those of you fortunate enough to live in or near Lancaster County, Pennsylvania may already be familiar with the Green Dragon. It's a farmer's market and auction located in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, and it's open every Friday. I only wish it were closer to my home, and not more than an hour away.

Hubby and I have different expectations of the Dragon. Hubby goes at it as if it were a carnival. He's all about the caramel corn, whoopie pies, wasabi peas, bulk-sale candy and . . . well, you get the picture. I go for deals on produce, spices and (if I've remembered a cooler) on cheese and meats as well. Yesterday's haul included an 8-oz. container of Herbes de Provence for $5. (Compare to the 0.62 oz. jar at the supermarket for over $7 to calculate the savings. Not to mention that not all herbes de provence at the store contain lavender, which is one of the essential components of the mix.) Also? Two quarts of fresh peas for $5. Two heaping quarts of freshly picked strawberries for $4. A large bunch of rhubarb for $2 (it's $3.49/pound at the store, and this bunch is just over 1-1/2 pounds).

After shelling the peas last night (it took over an hour!), I not only had a large serving of hot buttered peas with my dinner, but ideas for a poem cycle about shelling peas.

Beer

Hubby has been hankering to visit Stoudt's Blank Angus Pub in Adamstown, PA (about 5 miles from the Green Dragon). So yesterday, we went. We shared the "Sausage Platter for Two", which included servings of home-made kielbasa, andouille sausage and beer-and-apple sausage, served atop beds of sauerkraut and red cabbage, and with individual sides of mustard and German potato salad.

Hubby first tried the Fat Dog Stout, which was made of excellence. I don't usually love stouts, but I confess to having consumed at least 1/4 of the glass, in between sips of my root beer. (Yeah - root beer. Because I don't really love beer, and besides, somebody's gotta drive.) We also ordered a beer sampler (4 5-oz. glasses, each of which probably had 6 oz. in them, for $6 - a bargain!) and I tasted each of the four we selected (the Scarlet Lady Ale was my favorite of the four), leaving hubby to finish them off.

Also on the menu: artisanal multi-grain bread so good, I'm already Jonesing for more. Odds are not good I will find its equal anywhere near me, and the sales office had already sold out, so I shall have to live with my disappointment.

Intercourse

Intercourse is, as you know, a village in Lancaster County. My favorite part of Intercourse is The Old Country Store, one of the best quilting shops in the country. I love their extensive selection of fabrics and books, and their prices are reasonable (as these things go, anyhow). Also, the Quilt Museum upstairs (which I didn't go see yesterday). The store also has a wonderful assortment of Amish and Mennonite crafts (and quilts) for sale. I left with a few yards of fabric for a future project and a small quilt-square-based pincushion made to look like a bird. (I intend to replicate it, you see, so I'm using it as a model.)

I was perfectly happy to browse the quilt and pottery stores. Hubby doesn't mind going there because there's an ice cream stand (continuing with his carnival appreciation) and a foodgoods store with plenty of free samples. We didn't have time to stop in Bird-in-Hand as well, but I like browsing there also. For those of you unfamiliar, other communities in the area have equally colorful names. I remember hearing from the time I was young that you have to go through Blue Ball and then Intercourse to reach Paradise. Thing is, I'm not certain there's a road that allows you to accomplish that in a simple manner. Isn't that always the way?

John Mutford created a poetry quiz to see how well one knows one's poetic forms. I confess to having been nervous when taking it, but the results were all good:

Today, a reprise of one of my favorite poems. Lots of folks love this one for the final two lines. I love it for the first four. Yesterday morning, whilst I was talking to my brother on the phone, I asked him how late it stayed light in Idaho, where he's been "visiting" on official Air Force business. He mentioned it being dusky at 10, with the remnants of twilight still visible at 10:30. And I started quoting this poem to him, because of "night and light and the half-light".

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This is composed of two quatrains, mashed together to form one stanza. It rhymes ABABCDCD. And it does so by reusing the same word twice: cloths, light, feet and dreams. It doesn't use a standardized metre, exactly (like iambic pentameter or dactyls). Rather, it uses the same number of accented beats: 4 in the first three lines, three in the fourth, 4 in lines 5-7 and 3 in line 8. Those of you so inclined can test it out by printing the poem and marking the stressed syllables. Go on. I'll wait.

I love the language of this poem, and the notion that the heavens are composed of embroidered cloths capable of being pulled down and spread at the feet of a loved one. I hope you enjoy it as well.

For those of you wondering, "Aedh" is a fictional character, a lovelorn guy held in thrall by La belle dame sans merci. The poem is sometimes retitled as "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven." It was recited in a movie called 84 Charing Cross Road as well as the movie Equilibrium.

Lately, I've been wishing that I received more letters. REAL letters, that is, not offers for credit cards and car sales and whatnot. All this internet communication and text messaging stuff and inexpensive telephone calling is fine, but I remember quite fondly carrying on college correspondences with my grandmothers and one of my cousins and my college boyfriend. (Hi Bill!) And these days, I'm seriously wishing I'd kept all those letters I received, the way that Cassandra Austen kept all the ones she got from Jane. In part, I've been wishing I had a penpal like back in the day (my day, not Jane's), because there is something wonderful about getting a chatty letter from someone who knows you so very well. And in part, I've been thinking how nice it was to have something tangible in hand on a regular basis, and how real mail is almost like a little gift.

Then it hit me. Part of my wishing for a penpal is directly related to some of my favorite books and movies:

Possession, by A.S. Byatt, featuring two pairs of lovers, one in the Victorian era and one in contemporary times. The plot features luminous letters between the Victorian characters, Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Ash (played in the movie by Jennifer Ehle and Jeremy Northam, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart playing the modern day pair, and a nice supporting role by Tom Hollander - 4/5 of them were also in Jane Austen adaptations, although not all of them together). From one of Ashe's letters: "I know you live very quietly, but I could be very quiet - I only want to discuss Dante and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe, not forgetting of course, Christabel LaMotte, and the ambitious Fairy Project." From one of LaMotte's: "Oh Sir - things flicker and shift, all spangle and sparkle and flashes. I have sat all this long evening by my fireside - turning towards a caving-in, the crumbling of the consumed coals - to where I am leading myself - to lifeless dust." *sigh*

You've Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Sure, they're communicating through email, but oh, the loveliness of those emails. "Bouquets of sharpened pencils". "I came home tonight and got into the elevator to go to my apartment. An hour later, I got out of the elevator and Brinkley and I moved out. Suddenly everything had become clear. It's a long story. Full of the personal details we avoid so carefully... Let me just say, there was a man sitting in the elevator with me who knew exactly what he wanted and I found myself wishing I were as lucky as he." *sigh* (And that sigh is doubly deep based on my appreciation for the flawless grammar of that last sentence. Because I am truly that geeky.) (You can read the emails online, if you're so inclined.)

Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen all have letters in them. Not necessarily heart-breakingly gorgeous ones, but they're there. And they are gorgeous, if not in the same way as those in Possession. (There are some letters in her other novels as well, but not nearly as many.)

Oh. And then there's the letters of Jane Austen, the known survivors of which have been gathered into book form. They are delightful to read, and would be wonderful even if she'd never written a single novel.

So perhaps if I had a real penpal, it would never live up to the fictionalized ones I so enjoy reading and/or watching. For instance, I probably couldn't guarantee writing charming letters at all times, or writing with the depth and intimacy of some of those fictional characters, but I nevertheless fantasize about having that wonderful sort of on-page relationship with another person (again). Still, there would be something pretty great about looking forward to real mail.

Most days, I'm in a good mood. At least for much of the day. I'm not one to wallow or moan overly much. As a rule, I like my glass half full, not half empty. If I get peeved about something or upset, I usually manage to bounce back. In a world of ups and downs, I try to stay on the "up" side.

Most writing days, I manage to make actual writing progress. Or at least to acknowledge the making of progress. For instance on Saturday, I spent two hours at the library, during which time I wrote out a list of writing goals for the remainder of the month of June, and then revised 15 of my Jane poems. (Note: This was not heavy-lifting sort of revision. This was going through poems that I've worked and re-worked and thought might be done, specifically looking for bullshit words that are the type that simply gots to go. Two of the poems scored marginal notes that read: "Needs revision" I didn't have the time or energy to deal with them on Saturday, so I moved on.) Did I write anything new? Nope. But it all counts as writing progress to me because I've got plans. And revisions are part of the work of writing. Not the sexy part, but a necessary part nonetheless.

Today was one of those days which proves an exception to the rule. Not to the writing progress rule, although it was the sort of miniscule progress that is terribly hard to see. I spent half an hour sorting out a single-syllable replacement for the word "keen" in one of the Jane poems I'd revised on Saturday. In taking out a "the", I'd moved some stuff around and added a "keen." The trouble is, I'd already used it elsewhere in the poem. To be specific, I'd managed to use "keen" twice within the span of two lines, with a different shade of meaning even. And yes, I realize that most folks don't use it twice in the space of, say, their lifetime. But there it was, and it was one of those things that simply gots to go. Is spending half an hour on such a thing progress? Yes, indeed it is. But it doesn't really feel like progress. It feels like dithering. Or dallying. Or mucking about. Anyhoo, I felt rather as Oscar Wilde may have done when he wrote "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again."

I then spent over an hour and a half working diligently on a new Jane poem. Progress made: two lines, totalling 20 syllables. Bonus points to those of you who rapidly worked out that I'm working in iambic pentameter based on the line and syllable counts. Is that progress? Well, yes. Or rather, maybe. Because while it doubled the number of lines in the poem, it remains entirely unclear whether ANY of the four lines can remain until I sort out the rest of the stanza.

And my achievement of two lines really bummed me out. Even though two lines in 1-1/2 hours is much rapider than the prior two lines, which were the result of, um, more than four days' worth of work. Which brings me to the crux of this process sort of post, if indeed it has one. So today, I feel very much like Sisyphus (a point to which I shall return in just a moment, after a bit of process porn).

( Process porn for them that like it ) However, I know that unlike Sisyphus, if I keep pushing my pen across the page, I will eventually make enough progress to move from the hill that is the first stanza to the hill that will be the second stanza (and so forth, and so on), until I reach the end of this particular poem and have to shoulder a different boulder for a different poem. But today, my glass is half empty, and I keep having to watch that boulder roll right back down the hill. Alas and woe is me.

I shall cling to the wisdom of the words Mr. Slinger said in Lily's Purple Plastic Purse (by Kevin Henkes): "Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better."

S is in the midst of finals now, finishing her freshman year in high school. But not that long ago, she was turning in a plethora of final projects, particularly for her two honors classes. One of her honors classes is English, for which they read quite a number of books this year, including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pearl, The Odyssey, Great Expectations, Anthem, Jane Eyre, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, A Raisin in the Sun, A Separate Peace and, oh yeah - Romeo and Juliet.

S balked at reading it at first, but she really enjoyed it once she got started. She enjoyed the exchange at the beginning between two guards, which she made her sister perform aloud with her when my folks visited, accompanied by lots of crotch-grabbing and gyrations. Turns out she reads it as having a sexual double meaning - likely, too, when one thinks about the particular author of the play.

Although she complained about her teacher's overly dramatic readings of the text in class, I could tell they got her attention. And after they'd first read the play, the teacher showed some scenes from two movie versions: the Leonardo/Claire Romeo+Juliet and the one I remember seeing at the drive-in when I was young, Franco Zefferelli's version. She preferred the Zefferelli, surprisingly enough.

One of S's final assignments was to create a diary for her assigned character, Romeo. One entry per scene in which the character appears. Here's one of her entries, reprinted with her permission. She's particular proud of her "sword" metaphor, since she felt it captured the Shakespearian punny double-entendre notion that got her giggling so much.

Dear Diary,

Lonely Mantua. Were there one hundred souls here with me, I would still feel alone because I am without my Juliet. Her face dances across my mind as the poor substitute for her presence to my face. Never have I been this low. I am missing my heart, for my Juliet has it with her in fair Verona. Oh woe is I! The days neither start nor end, for I see no sun, for Juliet is my sun. I see no moon, for the moon pales in comparison to my Juliet! I smell no flowers because all I smell is Juliet’s scent. Oh my mind is full with Juliet. Mantua may not be far from Verona, but any distance from my love is as good as a world away. How I love her. She is the sunshine of my life, my sweet dewdrop on a flower’s petal, and my stars in the night. When I look to the sky and see my future, I see Juliet’s silhouette in the sky, the bright stars that are her eyes are far brighter than those in the sky. Why did I have to let my temper get the best of me that day with Tybalt? Had I only taken Mercutio away, he would be living and jesting whilst Tybalt would still live, out to harm me. I would be with my love, my Juliet. Yet, the harsh reality of my banishment sinks in. Wishing is for fools. Or is it foolish to not wish? I am sure all my questions would be answered were I with Juliet, our love able to overcome any obstacle. My room compares not with that I had in Verona. The walls are bare, the bed cold. I eat measly breakfasts and dinners at a freshly cut table. My thoughts are all that occupy me these long days. My sword has not been drawn, but it is my sword that got me into trouble. My sword deserves a beating for the pain it has inflicted on myself and my beloved Juliet. I miss her so! I miss Benvolio as well and I wonder what his actions are. His friend is gone to the Heavens and I as good as dead here, useless to him now in his time of mourning. It is he to whom I credit the match between me and Juliet, for when I was in need of advice he was there for me. To bed now. This night is everlasting.

Romeo