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So many books, so little interest
My poetry shelves are out of control. Recently I pulled out a few volumes and donated them. And I considered avoiding any of the four libraries available to me. Why, I ask you, do I borrow books when I already have too many within my reach? Yeah, yeah, I’ve read them all, but if I’m…
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In Praise of Index Cards
By now you know that I read a lot. But you probably don’t know how I struggle to retain some sense of what I’ve read. Sometimes I comment in my daily journal, sometimes add pages to a notebook dedicated to writing advice, sometimes I make a quasi library card and add it to my index…
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All About Poets #5
Typically, my poet focus here is on poets I have known, face to face. Well, what was it Emerson said about consistency? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds …” Who wants that? Not me. But today I’m thinking about W. S. Merwin. I’ve leaned on and learned from him the only way…
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Gluttony
How little resistance I have for books. I walked into the library, slid two novels by Donna Leon into the return slot, a machine that reads the barcodes into another machine that tells the library that I’ve returned these two Guido Brunetti mysteries. What the digital system cannot do is record that I actually read…
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Writing by Recipe?
Writing workshops are useful. I like being in a room full of scribblers, hearing about the variety of projects underway, discussing questions that come up and inform us all how we might structure a piece of writing. But…the approach to writing is, at times, like a cookbook: add more detail to spice it up, tenderize…
Karen Douglass, Author 