My this-November’s spoken for but next year perhaps, the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, 2 days and 2 half days of haiku events near Seattle. It’d be for the knowledge and social. Sounds like a dauntingly cold place for that time of year even if things are indoors. It’d be grand to go one year.
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At The Globe and Mail’s In Other Words column, George Bowering gives his take on, What makes a poet a poet?
1. Insatiable curiosity about the facts.
2. An ear that likes what words do other than designate.
3. A desire to continue the work.
4. A lot of skepticism.
5. A love for oneself as a stranger to oneself.
6. A highly competitive ego-loss.
7. Compassion on the part of one of the nine muses.
That’s as good of list as I’ve ever seen.
Too much of are you a poet focuses on — this might sound strange, but — putting words to page. Mental stance to life is more important. Explorers who question the world and themselves and have a distance between themselves and their identity are better hallmarks than people who put out unexamined words as expressions of emotionally emphatic lives.
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yes. perfect. I would only add space within oneself as well as distance – perhaps same thing, but it spoke somewhere in me. Space to watch whatever arises without needing to react.
yes, good addition.