I’ve been meaning to say how much I enjoyed being a judge at the poetry slam sponsored by Spectrum at Clarkson with MC Rives. The quality of the poems varied considerably, but the quality of the spirit held up very well. At least until the end when some of the poets who had been eliminated chose to leave before the winners performed. Not a lot of class in that move, kids. What I noticed, also, was an almost universal tendency to go on too long. Several of the poets / performers presented pieces that made their point effectively in, say 90 seconds, but then felt compelled to go on for another minute with what almost always amounted to explanation, commentary, or mere repetition. Still, an enjoyable evening that we need to repeat.
Habit
Aside
Funny, once you break the habit of blogging it’s hard to pick it up again. I have been tweeting more, though. Follow me at @profduemer.
That Flag Really Gets to Me
Aside
We live in a country where some people cannot afford to heat their houses in the winter and where others make 20 million a year and say in public that they are not concerned about the poor.
Rosanne Cash, Bodhisattva
Master Dogen Zenji writes, in the Genjokoan, that many fully actualized Buddhas have no idea that they are Buddhas:
When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.
Rosanne Cash says she is not a Buddhist because she “kills ants and eats meat,” but what does she know? (Some of the most rigorous Buddhists I know eat meat from time to time.)
A Little Poem
February
In the burnished light of winter
the different greens reveal themselves –
pulse of spruce, metallic sheen of pine
& the glow of the cedar’s golden green:
Bright neon of moss where the wind
has kicked the snow away.
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Hmm . . . looking at this now, I don’t like it as much as I did at first. Not crazy about those three uses of of in the middle part. And clearly, the poem is really just an excuse for the verb kicked, weakened, I see now, by has. (I had a hard time deciding between kicked & scuffed.) The problem is that the language doesn’t successfully embody the perception, which is that there are subtle differences between the kinds of green one sees in a winter landscape.