Peace (in connections),
Kevin
CLMOOC Silent Sunday
Morning Poem: Sun Kisses Shadow
Book Review: Six Walks (In The Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau)
Ben Shattuck’s wonderful new book — Six Walks (In The Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau) — is built on a quest, of sorts. Shattuck wants to wander, and he uses six different adventures that Thoreau wrote about in various books and journals as a guide to leave home and explore. Where Thoreau goes, so goes Shattuck.
The result becomes more of an internal journey, as Shattuck uses the explorations (Cape Cod, New Hampshire, Maine, etc.) as a way to think about his own world, in the quiet of contemplation from being alone (mostly). Throughout the book, Shattuck weaves in the voice of Thoreau, in his many complications as a person and writer and thinker, while making his own observations of nature and the world.
Quite a bit of time passes between the first three walks and the last three, and Shattuck’s own life has changed, as he is engaged and has a child on the way, and the gap between that earlier, uncertain life and the one where he finds love as a force of stability gives the writing balance and ballast.
I enjoyed his observations of the forests and sea coasts and lakes, and the ability Shattuck has for weaving narrative from those observational strands, never flinching from difficult stories nor worrying about celebratory ones. And Thoreau hovers like a ghost in the book, his words and own travels guiding Shattuck forward into the wilderness of discovery.
I could see this book, and the model of the hikes inspired by another writer, as a possible text for folks who participate in the yearly Write Out adventures.
Peace (in the farther woods),
Kevin
Slice of Life: Quiet At The Quabbin
I had to use a Personal Day, or lose it, so yesterday, I took a day off from school, and found some solitude and quiet at the Quabbin Reservoir, a state-protected space with a controversial history (Boston needed water, so it decided to flood a handful of Western Massachusetts towns that had no say in the matter and build the reservoir.)
There were only a few people around as I rode my bike over the large dam and up the roadway to the scenic overlooks of a beautiful space. The day was perfectly clear — low 70s, no humidity, and blue skies. I was happy in the quiet.
The day allowed me to catch my breath as we hit the final two weeks of a most difficult school year, one in which the end can’t come quickly enough for all of us.
Peace (outside),
Kevin
Three Words; Three Poems
These three poems began as text, from a daily one-word prompt over at Mastodon, and then became something slightly different as media when I moved the poems over to different platforms (Pablo, Canva, Lumen5) to make something more visual as a means to add texture and layer to the small poems.
The poem above was inspired by the word “thunder” and the ones below by “wish” and then by “seize.” If you are on Mastodon, you can follow the daily word, and assorted poems, and be inspired to write or create, too.
Peace (along the edges),
Kevin
CLMOOC Silent Sunday
Book Review: Real Life Rock
Greil Marcus is a legend in rock music criticism, a longtime voice on the scene that often cuts through the surface of music to go deeper by observing the cultural moments and the lens of musical history. He can be witty, supportive and insightful, and he can just as quickly be harsh, snarky and critical. Whether you agree with him or not, he’s clear on what he thinks about a particular artist, song or cultural moment.
In his book Real Life Rock, Marcus gathered together decades of columns in various publications (starting with The Village Voice and ending in The Believer) of a column by the same name of the book, where Marcus uses the Top Ten list concept by examining music, culture, art, books, television, politics and whatever else caught his attention at the moment. (Note: he also has a new book out, with more recent columns)
For each of the ten topics in any given column, he mostly opines in only a few sentences, although there are other times when he takes liberty with the space offered, writing a short editorial beneath any given topic. You can tell he has found something passionate, and has sunk his hooks into an issue. His breadth of knowledge is pretty impressive.
Common artists emerge across time for his opinion (often skeptical but sometimes celebratory): Bob Dylan, cover albums, the Mekons, Lucinda Williams, Bonny Prince Billy, Sleater-Kinney, Allison Krause, and more.
I flipped to a page in the book, and here are the topics at a glance, which give a sense of the wide scope of Marcus interests:
- Dido’s Thank You song (and what Eminem did with it)
- Live concert of Rock Your Baby (Portland) by Dick Slessig Combo
- Billy Bragg and Wilco (Woody Guthrie covers in Mermaid Avenue Vol.2)
- Shalini (singer from North Carolina)
- Thread Waxing Space (art display in NYC) – life casts of musicians
Reading his pieces across time (1986 through 2014) is pretty fascinating, and even if I skipped through many of his pieces as I sort of did a power reading tour of musical criticism, Marcus’ voice is always loud and clear, confident and critical. I didn’t always agree with him but I always kept on reading him. The rewards in terms of tiny nuggets of insights were always worth the time.
Peace (in books about music),
Kevin
What If I’m Not Writing
Working By Emergency Light flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
For quite a long time — many years, in fact — I wrote on this blog every single day – rain or shine. For some of those years, I was even known to post twice a day. I know. I know. What was I thinking? I was thinking that writing here would oil the gears of my imagination, and open up other writing ideas.
It did.
This blog (which is also my own personal digital archive of ideas and thinking) became a place to plant and nurture seeds, to try out new ideas, to think through whatever it was I doing. Comics. Poems. Songs. Stories. Essays. Whether the audience was myself or others who were stopping by or reading it on RSS, my blog has long acted an extension of my writing identity, a place to land each morning, getting centered and situated, before the rest of the day began.
But the past few months have altered my relationship with my writing here. I’m trying to sort out why.
Maybe it was just that I have been worn out by teaching this year, as so many colleagues have expressed as well. I surely am exhausted and frustrated, and summer break can’t come fast enough (a little more than two weeks). Most days at school have become long, difficult days with a growing range of student behavior and mental health issues taking up so much of my time and energy, trends that no doubt can be traced to the Pandemic and the disruptive years behind us all. Knowing that reality and the source of it all doesn’t make any day ahead any easier to navigate. Sleep is also an issue, as in not getting nearly enough.
At some point — and I think it was in March and April, when I was joining some activities around poetry and also finishing up the daily Slice of Life challenge — I just took a break from the blog’s daily writing one day, and that break kept on going and going and going.
Now it feels a bit as if the break has broken my blogging.
I have still been writing small form poetry every morning, and I’ve been posting the odd book review (mostly written earlier, and then pulled from my draft bin) and sharing silent photos for Sundays here and other odds and ends, but I have not been doing deep dive writing about the topics that I have long centered this blog around — teaching, writing, music, art, collaborations, etc.
Strangely enough — and somewhat alarming to me, the writer — I hadn’t even noticed the absence of my reflective writing voice, that voice I’ve developed here at my blog over years, until … well … I did. I suddenly noticed what was not there anymore. I’d look at this space and it felt like some distant echo of the writer I was before, but I couldn’t quite hear it anymore. When I am not writing regularly, I find myself on a day-to-day survival mode, as opposed to being able to step back and see the larger landscape.
I’m now attuned to the absence of that voice and I miss that part of me.
So, now what? I am not ready to be writing here every day, all over again, and maybe that era of me as a daily blogger is long past. I’m actually OK with that, if I can still find a strategy for nurturing my writing self. I need to find a connection back, to spark the creative spirit that nurtures me as a teacher and a writer and a creative person. I know I have teaching colleagues and I have writing friends, and others in my collaborative circles, that I can connect with, and get support from. Perhaps summer break will be what I need.
I’m mulling on where to go from here, and how to find myself back to the writer I want to be.
Peace (and self-care),
Kevin
