Getting out of my own way is a constant challenge. When I succeed, the world is larger, more exciting and more rewarding. Last week I wrote about my plan for devoting more time to my first love, poetry and rejoin the community of like minds. That intention, though, won’t matter unless I connect with the world beyond my desk. I am not happy as artist in a cold, lonely garret. Better to put on my walking shoes, or the art that is in me collapses like a spent balloon, no shape, no lift.
So I announced my plea for connection with other poets and the world heard me. No, I did not stand on the front porch and shout it to the geese on the wing or the pizza delivery driver speeding past. Yet, it’s happening. Coincidence, chance, or synchronicity: “the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (such as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung” Miriam Webster Dictionary.
Yesterday email brought news of a poetry festival in February in Crestone, CO. That’s not the moon or Mars. I will go. It’s rude to refuse an invitation from the muses. Also yesterday, I went to Lighthouse Writers Workshop Friday 500 event. This time we visited the Denver Public Library and Dan Manzanares introduced us to the poetry of Belle Turnbull (1875-1950). Welcome Belle to my word hoard. Also, yes! Jackie St Joan, News Poetry Editor for Colorado Independent notified me that my latest submission has been accepted.
For whatever reason or no reason at all, I’m receiving what I asked for, as if my mind is a radio tuned to the right station, my pen an app that delivers, not pizza, but poems. “Only connect! … Live in fragments no longer.”–E. M. Forster
Karen Douglass, Author 