The inspiration for "open chakras"

In the picture you see Eero with his mother and maternal great-grandmother, attending the Robbie Burns Night in Picton, Prince Edward County, Ontario. The event is run at the Picton Legion by the Picton Legion Pipe band, of which my son Peter, Eero's father, is Pipe Major (leader of the band, for those who don't know what a Pipe major is.)

The morning after, in the Picton Harbour Restaurant, where we all met for breakfast, Eero, who is two, noticed the ceiling fan running above us, its light globe jiggling slightly, and said "flying light". I was so struck by the imagination there, and this fresh way of observing something we all take for granted that I wrote "open chakras", as today's poem.

Ellen Degeneres

[image copied from Wikipedia]

This article is a companion piece to the poem "MC", which I posted yesterday, in wordcurrents.

Ellen Degeneres' type of humour really appeals to me. While it is self-deprecating and seemingly self-conscious and even seemingly naive, it appears to come from a genuine joy. We all need that joy in our lives. While there is occasionally a bit of an edge to it, Degeneres offers the edge as a kind of devil-girl dare, like sticking out your tongue — for a moment, she shows her inner brat, and we like that. (Like her Oscar show cracks about the absent Dame Judi Dench's surgery.)
I used to like the "Ellen" show, and was sad to see how the industry dropped Ellen and her show so quickly when she perhaps naively declared her personal sexual preference, and it was not acceptable to the silly "moral majority"; it was as if she had been caught in a giant very public act of bigotry. Brava, Ellen, for overcoming such massive institutional cowardice and prejudice so completely and so bravely.
I genuinely liked Degeneres' hosting of the 79th Oscars, which I viewed with the sound off, for the most part, except when Degeneres and a few others were on camera. The erst of the time, I was writing, casting occasional glances at the TV.
I was pleased to see Ryan Gosling's sister, Mandi, on his arm at the awards. Mandi was a very talented student in the Program for the Arts Drama course I ran at CCVS in the last years of the teaching career. Ryan would have been in the program, but he became a member of the revived Mouseketeers before that could happen.

[Ryan and Mandi Gosling]

So, the Oscar held two pleasures for me: enjoying Ellen Degeneres and spotting Mandi on the red carpet. Cheers, Mandi!

400 poems

It is hard to believe I have posted 400 of my own new poems in just 375 days. I am printing them each day, and have filled one binder and started a new one January 1. (see photo below)

The new result has been that even if I sit down to write with no idea what is going to come out, I can usually start and finish a fairly serviceable poem in a few minutes. Today's poem, "I started to write a Saturday poem", was one of those: I typed what I thought was the first line, then looked up at the screen, and realized I had typed it in the subject slot. I left it as the title, and continued, realizing it was giving me the poem's theme, and the changes would provide the poem's arc.

When it comes right down to it, I often find the process of discovering the poem as rich as I hope is the reader's experience reading it.

daily route

"daily route" comes out of my experience delivering mail in the Christmas break from university, in 1957 (I think, although it might have been 1956). This was in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, my home town, in a very cold corner of Nothern Ontario. The temperature in the week or so that I did the job never rose above -34F, and the wind on that exposed side of town was pretty high most of the time; I suppose the windchill was often -60F. Don't worry; I was dressed for it. I was assigned the "Federal" walk, a friendly but thinly travelled region, where I seldom saw anyone outdoors. I walked down many paths and shortcuts upon which I my boots imprinted their distinctive treadmarks, which were almost never trod over by anyone else. I began to see that I was retracing my own footprints every day, and soon saw it as a metaphor for a life that has no possibilities but repetition. Over the years since then, I have thought of that experience often, until it has become one of my life stories. It's not that I hated or depaired of the job: I only did it for about ten days; but there were moments when I saw the possibilities, and they have grown into understanding.

I chose the sonnet form for several reasons: first, I thought that the theme required a disciplined predictable form to reflect the subject matter; second, I write iambic pentameter rather easily; third, the sonnet fell into a Shakespearian pattern because it is not a poem about metamorphosis, as an octave and sestet pretty well requires, but rather a poem about a situation that obtains, with a conclusion that I made hopeful in the couplet, rather than keeping the atmosphere as a total downer.