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Art & Fear

October 15, 2010

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"The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over..." -David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear

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Franz Wright, "Night Walk"

My friend Carolynne sent me this poem. It made her remember how important friendship is, and I can feel that, too, but where it really sent me was to my days as a waitress, before I found love, before I married and had children. Funny how a poem can feel like a transport to another place and time I have almost forgotten -- waiting on a family dashing in for hamburgers between games in their son's Little League playoffs on a Saturday afternoon -- driving home one evening through a quiet neighborhood and seeing the lights in other people's kitchens and dining rooms. Night Walk The all-night convenience store's empty and no one is behind the counter. You open and shut the glass door a few times causing a bell to go off, but no one appears. You only came to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe a copy of yesterday's newspaper -- finally you take one and leave thirty-five cents in its place. It is freezing, but it is a good thing to step outside again: you can

John Haines, 1924-2011

"Good benches and chairs, as well as poems, come from roots. A man who has mistaken his life and who does not believe in what he is doing, who wishes he were somewhere else, doing another thing, is not likely to build good chairs nor to grow good turnips." http://www.adn.com/2011/03/03/1734017/alaska-poet-john-haines-dead-at.html

His Book of Bread

I promised myself that if this poem “came back” after this flurry of submissions, I would share it here. So, even though I had two of my older poems picked up recently, this one is now yours. It was written probably in 2005, toward the beginning of my One Bad Poem years. His Book of Bread “Those who cannot love themselves...eat a terrible bread.” —W. S. Merwin On the first page, his mother hands him a thick slice of bread warm from the oven, her fresh- churned butter melting into it. The book remembers bread but also all he’d like to forget, bedwetting, crooked teeth. Bread holds together whatever plot there is. Married, he becomes a man with grip-lock lids on the garbage cans. He cuts the crusts from his daughter’s toast. He grows older. The daughter grows up. His wife never shares his essential hunger. He moves from whole grains to whatever’s marked down. In the later chapters, he suspects that more chaos would have made a better story, like a living yeast that makes the br

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