Pictures and Words

Poetry, short stories, and works in progress... isn't every product of writing a work in progress? Are poems ever finished? Paul Valery says poems are never finished, only abandoned. So in this place I will leave my abandoned poems, stories, and other ideas which I have tended to over the years but can no longer mother them. They've grown up and left my desk, dashed off to digital lands of the internet. This will be their homebase, so when they come home, be sure to find those grown-up poems and stories here in the coming months.

Poetry

Lexington Cemetery Right now none of my poems have come home to their homebase on the internet. Every day, or nearly so, for the month of November 2006 I updated a poetry blog with a new poem. I tried this concept in November 2005, but only made 17 poems from the endeavor. Last year, I designed the project a little differently. Each poem followed a theme, telling the story of a fictional person who lived in Lexington, Kentucky, during the 1800s and 1900s. Poems were written in a variety of perspectives, so that each story was unique and different, but also challenged me to work a little harder at the writing. Also accompanying each poem is a photo I took in the Lexington Cemetery of statues and headstones. I managed to write 15 poems in November 2006, then I continued working and editing more poems in June and July 2007. In intend to finish writing the last 5 poems in November 2007 and complete the editing process. I do want to have a total of 30 poems for this book. I have about 4 people willing to be critical readers of the collection and provide me feedback before I make final editing changes and then submit it for publication consideration. I'll return with more updates on this project as time permits.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~ Anais Nin

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~ Charles Peguy

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~ Vita Sackville-West

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. ~ Virginia Woolf

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'Connor