Lucille Clifton

I totally suck as a person with both an English BA and an MFA!  How could I possibly miss the death of Lucille Clifton??  She died last Saturday (February 13th, 2010).

The poetry of Lucille Clifton is not overwhelming; it does not beat the reader down.  There is a quiet power and deep love in her work.  It is a weird analogy but her patterns always remind me of water ripples--the reverberations feeding out from the central point until they touch the edges of our outer self.  It brings comfort and transformation.

Links 

Sorrows.
Won't You Celebrate With Me. [video]
Remembering Lucille Clifton.  [Poetry Off the Shelf]
Far Memory.

The creeps...

Sometimes I like things that creep me out. But only when I am totally sure I may change the channel or close the book and sleep with my light on do I allow myself access to the things that go bump in the night.

I am a chicken [yes, I freely admit it.] I slept with all the lights on in my apartment for a week after I saw The Blair Witch Project. I haven't walked over a storm drain since I was 14--courtesy of the Stephen King novel It. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4 Episode 10 "Hush" freaked me out a bit more than I would have liked--the Gentlemen...creepy!

And, now on Neil Gaiman's site I find a trailer for Coraline. Some of the trailers are cute and some are a bit eerie, but the trailer he is in begins the chilly thrills....

I'll admit I'm a Gaiman junkie...I adore his work. He makes me think in directions I would never have before considered. That impresses me.

Late last year I listened to his book tour for The Graveyard Book in which he read a different chapter at each stop. I opened a tab and let it play while futzing around on the Internet. Each chapter is a separate section (roughly 40-50 mins) so listening to a daily chapter is easy. Oh, and it just won the Newberry Medal!

The romance and practicality of winter

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long ago.

--Christina Rossetti

Sometimes I forget how much I adore Christina Rossetti poems. Originally I stumbled across her in a Lit Survey book--one of the works was a poem entitled Goblin Market. Not long after that I found a Dover Thrift Edition ($1.00) of an unabridged version of Goblin Market and Other Poems on a clearance table at the local bookstore.

Her work always makes me feel as if I should be curled in some hidden nook watching the world from behind leaded glass and reading. Although I have no leaded glass windows, I do have a very snowy winter Saturday before me. Knitting and listening to an audio book sounds like a great way to spend the day.

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Well, at 8 am, light has finally come across to illuminate the overcast and very snowy morning. I shoveled the driveway around 7 am for the second time in 12 hours. Luckily it wasn't soooo bad this morning (meaning I had about three inches instead of six). However, since the snow continues I think it won't be another twelve hours before I must again shovel. The best news: it is a light dry snow and very easily removed.

Moon Report: 99% of full. full moon.

today

MOON REPORT: full moon. 100% full.

my moon news: When I first saw the moon yesterday evening it had lifted itself beyond the horizon and held a pale gold glow. It really looked more like a harvest moon--I imagine blood red as it rose. I like moons that rise with enormity and look about to swallow the world. But the eclipse happened on a moon that was so high it looked like a dime. The shadow passed leaving the moon a greyed burnt orange as it went.

Eclipses, whether you attach meaning to them or not, are amazing. They remind us that we are a part of a much larger living system which we should not take for granted. As Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us, the universe is trying to kill us. Best to pay attention.

See the entire interview by Mark Molaro.

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Well, the moon has been used for centuries by creative minds and idiots alike to express all sorts of notions. And the Writer's Almanac lists four writers born today: poet W. H. Auden, novelist David Foster Wallace, diarist Anais Nin, and the poet Ha Jin.