Hello, friends!
I hope each of you signs up for this wonderful annual fundraiser 30 Poems in November for Northampton’s Center for New Americans. In this ever-busier season of elections, stumping, going door-to-door and then let’s not forget about Thanksgiving and holiday shopping, it’s so good for the heart and soul and mind to explore poetry. Every year I say, “I don’t have time.” And then I do it anyway, because there’s nothing like that feeling of quiet concentration that arrives when we focus on that one idea, that one right word or syllable or comma.
To be a poet you can sign up here, or if you want to support another poet, say…I don’t know… me, you can do so here. As usual, I plan on writing a combo of poems, song fragments, prose poems and, I hope, at least one complete song by the month's end. Either way, I'll be writing in the poetry genre every day of November, and I'll also be exploring the differences between poems and song lyrics.
I’ll be hosting a 30 Poems workshop at Little Blue on Sunday November 20. Stay tuned for updates! And if you need a daily accountability group…
Join Morning Seeding & Tending!
For a ridiculously low price, do something nice for yourself! Get an accountability group, a warm morning beverage and get those 30 poems or 1667 words written!
My new Morning Seeding & Tending group has been going strong now for two weeks. Every weekday morning, I open the Zoom Room at 10am ET sharp. I read a prompt, share it on the screen for the next five minutes, and all present yawn their hellos, with cameras on or off. We all type our intentions into the chat, and then we write for an hour.
What do we write? Whatever we want! Some of us are working on ongoing projects—novels, memoir, a collection of poems. Some post updates to their social media to build that all-important “platform.” Some do longhand journaling, others work on their query letters. It’s our time to devote ourselves to the writing parts of our lives.
Being present every day for a good hour of writing, I get a lot more done, I see how much clearer my new draft is, and how beautifully this accountability group sets me up for the day’s work. Plus, we’re a really nice group.
At 11am, I turn on my camera and so do others, we say a quick farewell. The beauty of this group’s low fee ($25 per month) is that if people miss a few days a week, they’re still getting a good investment on their dollar-to-word count ratio.
Morning Seeding & Tending: open writing time with no strings attached! All for the price of a weekly latte. Zoom only. Weekly, Monday-Friday 10-11:05am ET.
What I’m Ingesting
Literature and History I know I’ve endorsed this before, but now I’m halfway through the (as of today) 97 podcast episodes, which only means I’m at Cicero and the crumbling of the Roman Republic. As I’ve said, this guy Doug Meltzer is a secular saint. He cannot possibly be making enough money for the amount of research and time he’s put into this treasure trove of history and literature. And finally, after decades of saying I should really know something about history pre-70 CE (let’s be honest, my knowledge of anything pre-1066 is scant), I can finally proudly say that I know…something. As in some things. Plus he writes songs at the end that are sometimes so funny that I crack up at the Y when I’m supposed to be seriously lifting weights, and then everyone in there stares at me.
History of the English Language Because of Lit and History, I got this amazing book published in 1964 called The Mother Tongue, which I love so much that I read it before bed and kiss it goodnight. (Tom is jealous). This led me to Kevin Stroud’s incredibly informative podcast about how language evolved from the Proto-Indo-Europeans to today’s speakers. Right now, I’m learning all about the alphabet. Fun factoid: The Indo-Europeans seem to have originated in the Steppes––grasslands, think Kansas or the Dakotas––above the Caucasus Mountains between the Caspian sea and the Black Sea. They were animal herders, and because they adapted their bodies to consume lactose, they were able to travel long distances with their food source (cattle, sheep, goats) without having to kill it for meat. This is why the Indo-European languages could be found as far East as China and India, as far north as Iceland and as far west as …Iceland, but also Portugal, and as far south as Greece and Anatolia (modern day Turkey).