As the Months Go By

On Thursday, at my ninth month checkup the doctor says: You're boring. This, my friends, is wonderful news. Apparently, my amazing bone marrow, countless people's prayers and good wishes, support from a wonderful spouse & family, and a positive outlook with lots of laughter are having the right desired effect. The cea (a cancer marker)-last time within normal ranges- was this time untraceable. My resting heart rate has improved dramatically, and more, and more. (I'll not bore with details) Thank you for your good thoughts.

On the way home,I was doing the snoopy dance in my head, and smiling. In looking briefly for the snoopy dance online I came across this quote:

"He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. "

But more interesting is the Gertrude Stein / Snoopy connection. . .
serendipities abound.

And once upon a time in a life time far away, I too knew Snoopy. In our school's production of "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown," I had the illustrious role of Woodstock. Yellow overalls, beanie hat and all.

Snoopy dances for everyone.

Poetry as Antidote

Sometimes when you ask, the answer is partially comedy,
but wholly what one needs.

We, too, are wondrously made:

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,

Gallway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow

The Universe has a sneaky sense of humor.
Remember to be well, laugh often, bless yourself.

$10 Words?

The news some days is amusing. I've been an avid, voracious reader for a good percentage of my life, so I suppose that I take the words that comprise my vocabulary as standard English. "Thespian" and "flippant," according to the article above, qualify as "Ten Dollar" words. I'll give them credit for "sagacious" though, I haven't slipped that one in a conversation recently. And how do you get a job reading letters from prison?

I'll applaud the prisoner's efforts to give his son a large vocabulary and encourage the child to aim for college. Why should it be a surprise that he wants more for his child? Doesn't every parent? And maybe he just subscribes to The Word of the Day. It's those "big words" that teach root meanings which are so essential to understanding:

. . .an average American undergraduate is estimated to have a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. . . .One half of general words and two thirds of all academic, technical, and low-frequency words are derived from Latin, French (through Latin), or Greek, thus indicating the importance of learning the meanings of roots and affixes.

-- Valcourt and Wells

Language is so permeable and so apt to erosion that each generation really does have a "gap."Try reading books from 1950's and see how much the "normal" vocabulary has changed. Or pick up a copy of Shakespeare and see what a couple of hundred years will do. So, I'll applaud anyone who is working to keep "big words" in circulation. Don't the French have a whole administrative wing for that?

And if you learn more words, you'll experience a physical change in your brain:

For monolingual English speakers, increased vocabulary knowledge correlates with increased grey matter density in a region of the parietal cortex that is well-located to mediate an association between meaning and sound.

--Green, Crinion, Price

I like that "mediate an association between meaning and sound" line. It's an article on brain function, but there for a moment, I'm hearing a line from a conversation on poetry.

Did you see this?

Congratulations to Seth who is continuing to making his mark on the poetry world. Now that's something!

Poetry's Featured Poet: Seth Abramson

Laugh or Cry?

I'll admit that the whole site was quite funny in a strange way. But somehow knowing that these manipulated images (esp. of women) bombard us constantly makes me want to cry.

Isn't she beautiful enough before? I guess someone thought not.

Stop it.


but this one is just hilarious.

What He/She Said

In a mailing from Poetry today, a card with a quote and a Triolet. It's a little late for the pocket poem, so I'll post it on the refrigerator. However, paper tends to get dusty and worn and splashed with tomato sauce, so here' the quote that I'm saying Amen to today:

Let us remember. . .that in the end we go to poetry
for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit
our lives and the world in which we live them, and
that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might
be less apt to destroy both.

-Christian Wiman

In this week's library catch: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

-Jane Hirshfield

And that's the opening sentence for the preface. Thus far, I've really enjoyed the essays I've sampled. In the library's deep chair under a corner window, I found myself nodding emphatically. I am reminded of this Louise May Alcott quote as well:

She is too fond of books and it has addled her brain.

And if you have a moment to giggle, you can check out an ornament decorated with this quote and the "related items" at Signals.

A Cloud for Spring

It's been a long while since I've posted a word cloud. There is a cloud generator here if you'd like to try it for yourself: TagCrowd.
You can enter your webpage, or a piece of writing and even exclude words (like blog).
Since the webpage, I entered was this one, I'm sure that these are my common words for the last month or so. Can you tell I've been in the garden?

amy birds branches date draft dream evening fine flint frost garden green happy heart hills insistent labels leaves lemon life links literature love marigolds morning peppers photos plant pleasures poems poet poetry primitive promise quebec rain reading remember roots selects store sun things thoughts tomatoes unsworth visit willa year zucchini

created at TagCrowd.com