Category Archives: Uncategorized

Need a Creativity Boost? Play Tourist … Travel Tips for Your Everyday Life

The following is an excerpt from my latest Linkedin post. Enjoy~ 

You don’t have to wait to travel somewhere exotic in order to reap the benefits. You simply can change your perspective to boost creativity and effectiveness.

The trick: adopt a vacation mentality in everyday life. Play tourist in your own backyard.

Traveler Tip 1: Revel in the Details

Traveler Tip 2: Bask in the Excitement of the “New”

Traveler Tip 3: Be Unafraid to Look Silly

Traveler Tip 4: Take Risks and Say Yes

Traveler Tip 5: Slow Down and Enjoy

Read the full article now!

Looking for the Smoke

in the dark spaces
i went looking for the smoke.
Thought i glimpsed it
around the dust gathering on the third stair,
followed it past open windows,
chased it through the kitchen, a hallway
filled with secret light,
i went searching high,
low, i found nothing.

Felt my way in the early dark to the deck to see a
skyline city far away, no avail. Went looking to the east
and there! I saw a ghost of myself
jumping free into dense air,
she seemed convinced of one thing.

Moving

Boxes, open at the top, spring up like a new development
of cookie cutter homes waiting to be bought.
You discover pieces of Ikea chairs never assembled
languishing in a closet you opened twice in four years
and M&M earrings (a gift?) never removed from their backing.

There is dust, and dirt, ticket stubs and cat toys shoved far
beneath the couch. You find yourself sitting on the hard floor for hours
listening to music and thumbing through photo albums. Your face was fuller then.

Beneath you the people at the bar pound their fists as the Orioles
hit a run. Across the street, cars wait for steamed crabs at Chris’ Seafood.

Heat rises. Night falls. Tomorrow, this is nothing but a dream.

First Morel by Amy Fleury #AmericanLifeinPoetry

I love the immediacy of this poem. The raw feel of it~ Enjoy!

American Life in Poetry: Column 474
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Let’s celebrate the first warm days of spring with a poem for mushroom hunters, this one by Amy Fleury, who lives in Louisiana.

First Morel
Up from wood rot,
wrinkling up from duff
and homely damps,
spore-born and cauled
like a meager seer,
it pushes aside earth
to make a small place
from decay. Bashful,
it brings honeycombed
news from below
of the coming plenty
and everything rising.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Copyright © 2013 by Amy Fleury from her most recent book of poems, Sympathetic Magic, Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Amy Fleury and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

This Morning I Could Do A Thousand Things by Robert Hedin

Loved this poem today – and was compelled to share. See Ted Kooser’s comments below as an intro into Hedin’s piece. Enjoy!

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American Life in Poetry: Column 473
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
 
I was born in April and have never agreed with T.S. Eliot that it is “the cruellest month.” Why would I want to have been born from that? Here’s Robert Hedin, who lives in Minnesota, showing us what April can be like once Eliot is swept aside.

This Morning I Could Do A Thousand Things

I could fix the leaky pipe
Under the sink, or wander over
And bother Jerry who’s lost
In the bog of his crankcase.
I could drive the half-mile down
To the local mall and browse
Through the bright stables
Of mowers, or maybe catch
The power-walkers puffing away
On their last laps. I could clean
The garage, weed the garden,
Or get out the shears and
Prune the rose bushes back.
Yes, a thousand things
This beautiful April morning.
But I’ve decided to just lie
Here in this old hammock,
Rocking like a lazy metronome,
And wait for the day lilies
To open. The sun is barely
Over the trees, and already
The sprinklers are out,
Raining their immaculate
Bands of light over the lawns.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2013 by Robert Hedin from his most recent book of poems, Poems Prose Poems, Red Dragonfly Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Robert Hedin and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Everything ends.

Everything ends.
You will end. As will I.
This winter, these frozen cobwebs of memory like so many
rivulets of ice will
melt into spring lakes
My smooth hands will gnarl like roots of old trees,
and you won’t recognize them anymore.

One day, seeing a stranger,
you’ll run from me when i ask you to dance,
and your frantic footbeats will fade away,
leaving an empathetic silence.