Last week my parents' house went up in flames the day before my sister's sixteenth birthday. Although the structure of the house stood strong, the inside was mutilated. Light switch plates melted down walls, the frame on my bridal portrait had melted onto the photo while the photo itself bubbled from the intensity of the heat, and my mom's kitchen was obliterated beyond recognition. My family's furniture was either scorched or reeked of the foul smoke, the baby hats my mom had knit were ruined by grimy soot, and my sister's jewelry was wrecked. My parents and sister were left with nothing but the items in their cars and the clothes on their backs.
Hello my name is Daryle Dickens and I’ll be your blog writer today. I feel honored to be a part of Ruminate’s blog writing team. So much so that I have a bit of writer’s blog with this first post I am attempting to write. This is why I thought I would start with a simple introduction and some background.
My high school English teacher was ferociously unforgiving when it came to the rules of grammar and punctuation. One mistake resulted in an F, one rebellious comma, complete anguish. So, needless to say, I became quite familiar with the rules. I conformed my thoughts to “two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction must have a comma.” I molded my emotions around “use a semicolon between two independent clauses joined by a conjunctive adverb.” I became quite obsessed with these little rules: quoting them, obeying them, and even passing them on to new generations of English students. Lately, however, I’ve experienced a new freedom, a freedom I so wished had been discovered before turning in so many flat and lifeless papers.
Each spring I experience familiar rumblings of renewal.I note with gratitude longer hours of daylight, leisurely walks under Colorado sunny sky that help to shrug off the remnant of winter, copious amounts of energy for new projects, and a deep sense that all shall be well in the world with the advent of warmer temperatures.
For the past three months, as part of my New Year’s goals, I have been reading self-help books on raising boys and on sibling rivalry, hoping to gain something helpful to improve how I’m raising my four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter and to decrease the amount of screaming-hitting-fighting-squabbling-yelling for mom. The books have been interesting and helpful (my kids are definitely more peaceful, and I understand my son’s impressive energy much better), but as I closed the third book in a self selected series last night, I had a wonderful and huge craving for delicious writing, for the kind of prose that satisfies a deep craving for beauty and for inspiration. It was not unlike the craving I get for a well-crafted meal with close friends.
I
look forward to the second Tuesday of each month, as it brings the
meetings of the Poetry Bookclub I run at the Boulder Book Store.We've
chosen to read living poets only, as there is a great wealth of them
and they tend to be excluded in bookclubs and classes (which generally
focus on the classic poets).We read a wide range of authors with a variety of styles, and have had excellent conversations about them.As a poetry reader for Ruminate,
I find these meetings endlessly helpful in learning what to look for in
a poem (pacing, imagery, tone), and how to articulate it in the phone
meetings we have with the other poetry readers.
