Towards a different aesthetic?

Do men and women have different poetic aesthetics? Or is this an individual taste issue?

just curious.

Autumn Skies

This evening we sat on the porch and watched the sky move. This is the only place I've lived where at sunset the sun drops below the clouds and the day is brilliant for one last hour. The clouds were round, spilled marshmallows on a blue cloth.

There are orange mums and violas in the pots along with the last of my herbs. The ginger mint too is brilliant against the brown glaze of the pot and the matte surface of the soil. The rue sprouts new leaves.

I admire what persists.

I need a challenge.

Does anyone have a good prompt or challenge? I've been grading papers and feel less than inspired to write poetry.

I feel rusty; I need a little nudge.

CALL for PROSE

Since I'd failed to mention this earlier, I thought it best to mention it now.
I've picked up some extra duties at "Three Candles Journal" where I am now
also in charge of reading prose submissions. So, send me

Stories! Plays! Flash! Essays! Memoir! Creative Non-Fiction!

or whatever else on your desktop that you'd file under prose!

tick tock,
Time's A Wasting. . .

and while I'm at it.

I'll be reading on Irish Poet John Montague at the ACIS conference coming up next month at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb. If anyone is around thereabouts and would like to join me for a cup of coffee, send me an email!

____________

The Official Blurb:

The 30th Annual Meeting of the Midwest American Conference for Irish Studies
Northern Illinois University,
DeKalb, IL
12-14 October 2006

-Saturday: Session 6: 2:15-3:30 -
6B: The Poetry of John Montague, Illinois Room
Amy Unsworth (Kansas State University), “Oil for a Rusted Hinge: Poetry as Place of Deconstruction in John Montague's Poetry.”

_______________________

a mind of winter

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- from Harmonium , 1923


I find it amazing that poems that I've read time and again can suddenly begin to speak to me. As if they have been speaking a language I had yet to acquire, and all at once I begin to understand more fully, beyond the dribs and drabs of images into the language of the soul.

Hyperbole? Perhaps.

What happens in Middle School?

What happens in Middle School that kids stop being readers? What happens in High School that makes them want to turn their backs on poetry forever? I am trying to win readers back. They are silent in class, but when I read what they write they do know what they refuse to say in front of their peers. Every once in awhile, I see a twinkle in an eye, and know that at least someone has felt a poem speaking.

Make much of time.

Amy