balanced on the edge

Now  that we’re on spring break, ten beautiful days, I have some spare time to update this blog. Don’t imagine me living it up in Cancún, however. I’ll be at home, catching up on laundry and writing a paper. I never was one of those Daytona Beach types, anyway. When I was studying Spanish in [...]

My dreams have been highly charged with symbolic images lately, more than likely due to my reading of Man and His Symbols, by Jung et al. I’ve scribbled a few haphazard images down in my journal, but there’s been little free time to think about what the dreams might mean. Instead, I’ve been reading poetry, [...]

The professor of my contemporary poetry course has given us each a chance to present a book published within the last ten years. My presentation was over Slamming Open the Door, (Alice James Books, 2009) by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno. We discussed the book mostly in terms of its overall effect as a project. The topic is [...]

We’re just finishing Pathways to Bliss in my poetry course, and then we’re going to read the first two essays from Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays edited by Carl Jung for the everyday person. I’m ready to take on Jung after Campbell’s excellent recap  of modern psychology in Pathways to Bliss, from [...]

This past fall I took a graduate course covering Robert Frost, the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur, all American poets esteemed for their attention to poetic form. The professor gave us his in-depth analysis of the lives, the times, and the poems of these poets. Although my appreciation for [...]

Saturday evening New South, the GSU literary journal, hosted a reading at the Highland Inn Ballroom in Atlanta. James May, editor-in-chief of New South, invited me to read, along with fiction writer Jody Brooks and poet Jessica Hand. Jessica is completing her MFA at Georgia State, and Jody is a lecturer at GSU in the [...]

Evening classes at GSU were canceled today, due to all the rain we’ve had in metro Atlanta. On my way home I drove through inches of rain pooling on the surface of the highway. The cars in front of me sent fountains of water out from under their tires, and some drivers had their hazard [...]

There’s a fine line between excitement and anxiety – adrenalin can either make us soar, or gnaw at our innards. Now that I have week one under my belt, I’m feeling more like embracing the challenges rather than wanting to take a road trip and never come back. Thanks to all of you who’ve encouraged [...]

Today I read poems by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, brother of Ann and Mary Boleyn, and member of the court of Henry VIII. He fathered a son at the age of nineteen, but the poor guy was executed at the age of thirty for treason, though it seems he was innocent of wrongdoing. Those [...]

I’m still chipping away at my reading list for the MFA. Today I read poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, born in 1503 and member of King Henry VIII’s court. It’s thought that Wyatt was the lover of Ann Boleyn. I remember him as a minor character in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, [...]