Bicycling to poetry

It would be hard to call the following a poem: I tell my students that a poem should stimulate the imagination not the intellect. Can reformatting it make it a poem? I tell my students A poem should stimulate         the imagination not          the intellect Or is a generous application of metaphors required? (with thanks to Billy Collins) I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

As I walked into Everybody's Whole Foods, my local grocery, I was passed by an employee carrying a customer's groceries out to the parking lot. A lot of visual information flowed into my brain but what dominated was that his watch was analog with a yellow background. Was it the yellow background or the analog watch on a person in their twenties that attracted me? When he returned from the parking lot, I asked him about his watch. He said he bought it from Etsy and that it was based on a Russian model. He told me that he prefers analog watches to digital ones. This surprised me given that he is in his twenties. The watch made me want to learn more about him so I will continue the conversation next time I see him in the store. I think it will lead somewhere interesting. I will tell him about the analog stopwatch that I have had since 1963. It is probably my oldest possession. I bought it when I was training for cross country and track in high school. It still works an...

When I moved to Fairfield Iowa, a town of 10,000 people, I knew very few people there. I would go on walks or bike rides past houses and hope that after a while I would be invited into some of them. This did happen. Today on my bike ride, as an exercise for writing this post, I remembered the some of the people who invited me into their houses as I passed their houses. Joyce invited me to her 90th birthday party. Up to that point my interactions with her were limited to waving and saying hello as I walked by her house. She is a very young 90. I often see her mowing her lawn on her tractor. It was nice to meet her extended family all of whom carry her influence with them. Like me, Chett did not grow up here. He bought a farmhouse near Joyce and lived there for a couple of years. He is a retired English professor and a skilled carpenter. He has invited me to help him on some carpentry projects where I mainly try not to injure myself or anybody else. He has land outside of town and on...

Vague words like smidgen, pinch and dash often show up in recipes and give the cook an opportunity to complete the recipe with their own interpretations of these terms. In computer science, beginners are often told that algorithms are like recipes but no algorithm will ever use these words without precisely defining them, e.g. a dash is 1/460 of a cup. Once a friend, who has a Ph.D. in computer science, sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that attempted to be algorithmic in its precision. For example, the dough for each cookie was the size of a golf ball. To achieve this it would be necessary to see how much water a golf ball displaced when immersed in water and then assure that each dough ball displaced the same amount of water. But his recipe got sloppy near the end. It instructed me to place the dough balls on a cookie tin and cook them for a certain amount of time at a given temperature. Unfortunately it did not tell me how far apart to sp...

It happened again. Going North on my bicycle I passed two pedestrians going South and overhead one say "On the other hand it makes me not want to say anything." What silenced her? Was it a sharp rebuke, a comment received on social media, stage fright? From my perspective it could be a continuation of the snippet I wrote about yesterday, I understand. On the other hand ... Is this how poems come to people? Probably not but I will have my ears open tomorrow for the next line. These days, I don't think that people say "On the other hand" enough. It implies a willingness to look at things from another's perspective, something which isn't practiced enough in our politically divided country. I find it hard to believe that Trump has ever uttered those words. He probably considers them to be a sign of weakness.

The conceptual artist, Sol Lewitt, said "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." A recent back injury ruled out shoveling snow for a while. It would be nice if I could use conceptual art to make snow shoveling a perfunctory affair The Chinese terracotta army gave me the idea that I could replace the snow shovel with various sized ice cream scoops and create an array of tiny snowmen on my porch. I would need three scoops, a large one for the base, a medium sized one for the torso and a small one for the head. I would also need wet snow which unfortunately is not the default in Iowa but Google assures me that it is possible to convert powdery snow into wet snow by adding water. It is necessary to decide how many snowmen to make because that will determine how much snow I need to clear from the porch. I will clear the area by creating snowball...

Riding my bicycle this morning I passed a pedestrian walking in the opposite direction. She was talking on her phone and I heard her say "I understand" and then we were out of earshot with one another. Why do people say that? I think that it sometimes is not a happy admission. Some reasons that come to mind are Impatience at being interrupted Annoyance at being condescended to A reaction to an apology To gain time to let you process bad news An neutral acknowledgement that you followed what is being said I will never know which of these apply to the conversation snippet that I overheard but there was something about her tone and facial expression that suggested bad news. Had I stopped and watch her recede into the distance perhaps her hand gestures would have hinted at which of these applied. But I didn't because I didn't have the curiousity that has been generated by writing this post. I'll be ready next time someone says that

I was 14 when I learned how to ride a bicycle. That was a bit old but I have been an avid bicyclist ever since. Now at 75, I think it is time that I learned how to express myself comfortably in writing. Toward that end I have started an online workshop with https://mainstreetwriters.com I plan to use this blog to develop my writing muscles.