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Today’s poem comes from Ted Kooser’s enjoyable little volume, Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison. The idea behind Winter Morning Walk is a simple one: a poetic journal of Kooser’s morning walks with his dog around his Nebraska home. The poems and the book are dedicated to poet/writer Jim Harrison. Each poem in the volume… Read more
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As any reader knows, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book the first or second time you pick it up. Yet if you pick that same book up at a later date and start reading you may actually fall in love with it. I have noticed that music works the same way for me… Read more
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Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I… Read more
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H. Rider Haggard wrote in the late 1800s. He is credited with inventing the lost civilization adventure. His most famous of books are: When I began my list of classic Adventure stories I had not read in their original, I included all four on my list. I could have started with any of them but… Read more
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In the mornings, I often go walking before heading to work. This time of year at 6:15am, it is still quite dark and the sky, when it is not overcast, is bright with stars. Here is a small poem about stars… and much more. Enjoy! STARS, SONGS, AND FACES by Carl Sandburg Gather the stars… Read more
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A few years ago I picked up a copy of Personae by Ezra Pound at ABE books. When I opened it up to start reading, I came across this note in pink on the inside cover. September 15, 1969 Jay, Happy Birthday Enjoy! Love, Sara Books are living things, with histories, lives of their own… Read more
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“I have a love affair with coffee.” – Unknown I am lucky enough to live almost across the street from one of the best coffee shops in the Twin Cities, Smith Coffee & Cafe. It is located in an historic old railroad hotel and house in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. If you are ever in the… Read more
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Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Penguin Classics) (p. viii). Penguin Publishing… Read more
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Osip Mandelstam is an artistic martyr, a saint of the imagination. No poet sacrificed as much for his art. No poet paid more dearly for believing in the power of language and beauty and the freedom of imagination. Exiled and incarcerated often in Soviet Russia for what he wrote, Mandelstam reminds us that words do matter. That one of… Read more
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If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. ~… Read more
ClimbingSky 