Computer Interface

As I have already posted in wordcurrents, I am attempting to dictate my posts instead of type them. While dictation has the advantage of allowing me to rest my poor aching hands, it has the disadvantage of creating barrier to my imagination. I have noted in the past that my handwritten work is different from my typed work. Learning to dictate without this barrier is a little bit like learning how to drive on the opposite side of the road in a foreign country, or learning how to draw with your foot controlling the pen instead of your hand.

I believe that dictation will take over as an interface for computers particularly when the computer is a handheld phone. It just makes sense. The fact that we still type most of our entries into computers makes clear in the fact that we really are in the Model T age of computers.

In another about-face, I have decided that I will no longer attempt to post every single day, as this is getting in the way of a novel I am working on; however, I will still post fairly often, perhaps more often in prose. Perhaps this will improve the level at which I am writing poetry in my blog.

One interesting thing that has occurred during my hiatus over the summer while I was not posting at all, is that I note I have had pretty well the same number of visits to the website as I had when I was posting on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, most of those visits were to my theatre reviews. Of course, people search for what they already know: they don't know that my poems are here (at least, they certainly are not pre-aware of the titles of my poems to search for them, unless I start using titles that are already in the public awareness).

"fluid"

This is the first time I have used the "pre" HTML code to post a poem with indentations. This procedure lets me compose the poem in WordPerfect, then copy and paste it into the "pre" code, and it more or less keeps its formatting.

It has always frustrated me that HTML and php sites do not easily allow poems to be formatted that way, as it really limits free verse form. I have considered rewriting the css files of my WordPress-based blog to allow for indentation, but that is a tricky procedure at best. Finally, I have tried the "pre" code, of which I was aware, and it sort of works, although for some reason, the format does not allow the font to stay a normal size,; so it is either too small or too large.

Previously, my recourse was to post the indented lines using letters the same colour as the background to serve as placeholder; unfortunately, these characters print as black on a laser printer.

At least now the poem prints more or less correctly.

Michael Healey, playwright

I admired Healey's Plan B, which I reviewed in wordcurrents after seeing it at GCTC on Thursday June 5, 2008.

Plan B is a remarkably funny satire of Canadian politics. Better than that, it has three acts, and with two intermissions, runs over three hours. Healey is a Canadian playwright to watch.

Here are some links to give you some background about Michael:

Playwrights Canada

Suite 101

Doollee

Northern Stars

June 1, 2008: the count is now 800 daily poems in wordcurrents

This milestone has come with no particular fanfare. It is more a tribute to the power of habit than to any other particular talent; I have written and posted a at least one new poem every day (with the exception of July and August last year) since mid-February 2006.

I know that many of them are pretty feeble; in fact, since most of them are first drafts, and I have chosen to revise only perhaps one in ten, you could say they are more flotsam and jetsam than art. But there is a kernel of strength that arises from wordcurrents: I am doing it; I have done it; I have learned from it.

I have learned that I can write. I have polished my writing synapses so that the process is pretty well automatic. Just as a musician is made by practice, so a poet must practise so that the act is made fluid and the talent can emerge.

When he turned ninety, someone asked the late cello maestro Pablo Casals if he still practised. He said he played several hours every day, as he still had so much to learn. I still have almost a couple of decades to go before I am ninety; I imagine I will still feel that way then, too. I have so much to learn.

One of the areas I would like to explore is eroticism; however, I am more than a little reticent to do so, as my extended family would be grossed out, I am sure. Just as we all know our mothers were virgins, we also know that elderly men so not think about nor remember anything about sex, so I am obviously becoming increasingly less qualified to profess to know anything about it.

My summer break is coming up. I shall take July and August off again this year.

"the rest"

One of my FaceBook friends has a birthday today. As I was writing a note on her "Wall", which originally read something like "Today is the first day of the rest . . . ", it struck me that there was a poem in there. Then I thought of the anecdote that appears at the top of the piece, and after about a half-hour of fiddling, today's poem, of four-lines, was born. I tried a few stabs at lengthening it, but it seems that after the first four lines, it is complete.

It features tight internal rhyme and some dense word-play. I particularly like the play on "quarrel", which I suppose may be obscure, although a look past the obvious in at any dictionary will open it up.

the rest

"fiery braille"

The title of this poem ("fiery braille") derives from Tom's lines in the opening of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie":

“. . . the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”

WIlliams' dynamic image seems more relevant now than it did in the forties, or during its referent, the Great Depression. In the thirties, unfettered greed was the engine; today, the driving force is still greed lubricated by oil. My poem focuses on a single flower, but the drama no longer simmering in the background is obvious.

thoughts below ground, the series

This series of poems is based on the fact that my office is in the basement, it is spring, and I have been noticing worm castings all over the lawn.

Worms remind me of the Hamlet's line in Hamlet, in which having killed Polonius, he tells the king to look for the old schemer "not where he eats but where he is eaten. . . certain politic worms are e'en at him."

The setting, then, is under ground, from the narrator worm's point of view.

The snake references came about as a result of a breakfast nook conversation with son Pete. We were discussing out-of-character actions that people take; he told me about the belief of

Kundalini yoga, in which there is said to be a fire-snake, coiled in three and a half coils in the base chakra (one of seven power-zones along the human spine). It is coiled around the Shiva lingham ­ the male line of force that comes down from the sky. Kundalini is an Earth force that comes up from the Earth. Kundalini yoga is the practise of awakening the snake and allowing it to rise up the spine until it reaches the highest chakra, the Crown chakra, where the meeting of Shiva and Shakti lead to enlightenment and the trance of Samadhi ­ ecstasy ­ the annihilation of the ego and the end of duality.

[I refer for my source here to a Google search using the terms snake+"human spine"+mythology and I excerpted this passage from an article in http://www.2012theodyssey.com/articles-beyond.html to which I do not particularly subscribe; however, I find the speculation interesting.]