Barbara J. Hamby

sign-up for our email list

Flourishing Plants and Diminishing Poems

The weather was almost perfect today. We hacked away at the jungle of rose bushes, shrubs and dead flower heads. It is amazing how many types and sizes of plant life can be crammed into a tiny yard. I’m grooming a shrub to get tall enough to hide the neighbor’s ugly satellite dish that’s visible out my office window when the leaves are off the trees.

My webmaster and I are working on the supposedly automatic updating system for the Writing Contests page of my website. I hope to have the glitches worked out soon.

The poetry muse who stayed by my side so faithfully for many years, has been playing hide and seek. Somehow I have to lure her back. I want to write more poems as breaks in the memoir writing. Lately I’ve produced fewer than one a month, as opposed to the late William Stafford’s one a day. I’ve not heard whether his son Kim is that productive.

Last night on C-Span Book TV, I heard Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson read. I tuned in late, but was impressed with both her writing and delivery. She is a charming black woman who writes with honesty and feeling. She also decries the modern trends in poetry that make it so inaccessible and imponderable to the average reader. You can read a few of her poems at this website.

http://www.poemhunter.com/marilyn-nelson/poet-13678/

As those annoying restaurant “servers” say, “Enjoy!”