Monday Musings

Transit of Venus

The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb
because other words do not sound like conversation.
In the kitchen, always, one who’s just discovered
beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.
He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;
in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb
in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
*Courtesy of the Academy of American Poetry for National Poetry Month
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I’m in the process of putting an book order in on Amazon. I know. I don’t need anymore books, but I’ve almost made my way through the “shelf” that was gathering dust, so I feel it is time to replenish. I just added The Writer’s Notebook put out by Tin House that is featured in this article in the NY Times:

One of the biggest growth areas in higher education these days is creative writing. In 1975, there were 52 degree-granting writing programs in American colleges and universities, and in 2004 there were more than 300. In his new book, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that for this to happen in an era when American education has generally become more practical and vocational is not quite as odd as it seems.

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