I have many favorite poems. They follow me wherever I go, weaving their meanings through doorways in my life and murmuring their quiet approbation to my partial vocation as a poet. The playing with words appeals to me, as I often find myself deep within a layered slangy conversation, nuance built like battlements.
The (new…oops) title of this blog comes partially from the first poem that caused me to feel a chill in my bones from the sheer genius of its woven words, The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.
“In a minute, there is time…for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
Always surging forward. Always circling back. The way I do in conversations, remembering suddenly something I forgot to mention earlier. Hopefully life takes a similar familiar pattern
I also love Frank O’Hara’s stark and moody word play. A special friend once compared me to his Jane Awake, after watching me sleep once or twice. It stuck. And made my knees weak.
My students in Chile got a lesson improvised around the infamous Road Not Taken in the attempt to get them to think about both hiking in the beautiful region they live in and the possibility that our choices have an immediate and irreversible effect.
And it wanders into and out of the realm of the noticed. Sometimes in summer it seems that the whole world is awake and trembling with poetry waiting for a conduit.
I volunteer!
Reverse Retrograde 