bug city: make a bug: July 4th Eden Prairie Hometown Celebration: Volunteer and or Donate at Writers Rising Up @razoo @GiveMN. Come on over and meet the neighbors: seed carrying ants and nocturnal beetles with luminescent tummies…write and submit a buggy poem to the bug city: make a bug, a collection. Write a poem for each bug..best poems will be featured in a buggy online book at @ISSUU Follow guidelines at https://wrup.submittable.com/submit/42055
Paul Gruchow Essay Contest 2015- Submission deadline April 18, 2015. Guidelines at the Events/Contests link. Submit at the Submittable link.
In his book “Grass Roots: The Necessity of Home,” the acknowledgements are a tribute to Bill Holm, Emilie Buchwald, Carol Bly, the Land Institute and the Land Stewardship Association and others for their help and support. The first chapter, called “Home is a Place in Time,” gives “shape and substance” to the abstract: what is time? Paul writes, “Nostalgia is the clinical term for homesickness, for the desire to be rooted in a place –to know clearly, that is, what time is. This desire need not imply the impulse to turn back the clock, which of course we cannot do. It recognizes, rather, the truth–if home is a place in time–that we cannot know where we are now unless we can remember where we have come from.”
With every seasonal change we can’t help notice how the light is altered by earthly effects, one reflecting the other. While summer reflects the most light, in winter it reflects the least. Atmospheric phenomena like Halos and Sundogs usually occur in the winter when light is refracted off ice crystals close to the earth’s surface; it’s called diamond dust. Snow shadows and ghostly curvatures often conjure unimaginable creatures, and memories that can emerge in the lines of a poem. Emerson’s poem “The Snow Storm” exemplifies the shadowy appearances snow creates…
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
Chemical of the month? Cholorphyl, you say.
Actually, no, because cholorphyl depends on sunlight and warmer temperatures. What happens in the fall is colder temperatures destroy Cholorphyl and other chemicals step in like Carotene and Anthocyanins, the former produces yellows, the latter blues and blue green. A reaction of Anthocyanins and sugars, depending on the light, produces red leaves.
If there exists a system of color in poetry, like in nature, it has been described as a “moving army of metphors” that can be detached from reality. While Thoreau regarded autumn as a season of unparalleled vibrancy, Dickinson used fall as a backdrop for longing and waiting in a season devoid of color.
Thoreau wrote in “Autumn” Sept 25, 1854, “I suspect that I know what the brillancy of the autumnal tints will depend. On the greater or less drought of the summer. If the drought had been uncommingly severe, as this year, I should think it would so far destroy the vitality of the leaf that it would attain only to a dull, dead color in autumn; that to become brilliant in autumn, the plant should be full of sap and vigor to the last.”
Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, a five-year project that builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze Rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. She paddles along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, giving poetry and art workshops along the river communities, making thousands of flags as gifts and peace ambassadors between the Mississippi and the Yangtze Rivers.
Her publications include Ten Thousand Waves, poetry book from Wings Press, 2014, American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, 1999 from Hanging Loose Press, Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr Press. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press, 2002 paperback by Random House) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. The Last Communist Virgin won 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award.
Wang Ping is a Chinese-American author and academic. Her writings center around the past and present of China, and the experiences of Chinese immigrants who live in America. She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Macalester, and teaches courses in creative writing and poetry. Wang has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts for poetry, the Minnesota State Arts Board for fiction, Bush Foundation for the Arts (poetry), McKnight Fellowship for creative non-fiction, Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Vermont Studio Center residency. Wang Ping's "The River in Our Blood: A Sonnet Crown," will be presented in installments over the winter.