Me and Mr. Jones

Billy Paul, take note.

- "Me and Mr. Jones" by Amy Winehouse, from Back to Black (2006)

Volver (The Snow Man)

It's been a little while. Whoops.

I feel a strange and slight twinge of maternal guilt for neglecting this blog, but mostly I feel excitement. For the past month or so, my focus has landed hard on poetry. In the last week, I was very lucky to do a featured reading and a symposium presentation. I also just got a piece accepted for publication by Kansas City Voices. Obviously, I'm incredibly grateful and surprised by all this, but other arenas of my life have diminished for it. In addition to the spareness of this blog, I managed to somehow kill my hydroponic dill plant, which is fed and watered by an automated machine. (I deserve a special award for that one.)

That's all my long-winded way of saying that it's impossible to find time and energy to do even half the things I want. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm only reading the books that truly hook me (I strongly recommend Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing). I'm accidentally spending more time away from the Internet. I'm starting a new job tomorrow. I'm exploring Kansas City, and pulling my head out of its own self-involved thoughts every now and then to honestly look at the current moment. It's much easier said than done, but there is no discovery like seeing a familiar place as if for the first time again.

This post seems to be building to a point, but it's not there. So, because it is Sunday morning and the laundry basket is calling my name, I'll end this scrambled, rambling post with a poem I love.

As always, thank you for reading this far.

"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.

- by Wallace Stevens, from the collection Harmonium (1923)