Things Worth Paying Attention To

We’re getting a puppy!

Guess which one is ours? Answer below.

“Poetry is the history of emotions.” Someone, not me, said that. A poet writing 30 Poems in November named Julie Cavacco just sent me that quotation, and it raised the lid on the Pandora’s box of what is poetry, a question I don’t engage with unless someone pins me to the wall and asks me point blank. OR I’m pinned against the wall with a bad draft of a poem I’m in the middle of but can’t see a graceful way out of and wish that I’d started somewhere else.

I say, “This isn’t even a poem! This stinks! It’s just a bunch of lines randomly broken into other lines.”

Fortunately, this month is all about practicing writing some bad poems so that I can make time and space and the habit to write some good songs. (And I have in the past even written some good poems, it’s true.) I’ve sent my novel on vacation while I’m focused on this fundraiser and my own new work. It feels delicious and precious to have the hour or so a day I’m allotting myself to get these thirty poems drafted. 

Time and space, as I have mentioned before, is what I would pay for in gold. Necessary for the health of this kid and for any chance of her being useful to anyone else, close to her or far away.

Which is why, in the brilliant thinking that characterizes the couple facing an empty nest in fewer than nine months, chaos beckons in the form of an eight-week-old puppy who will be arriving at our house all the way from Texas right smack in the middle of my Kali Retreat this coming weekend. 

Cleo (full name is Professor Cleopatra Plum) is a rescue Aussie mix who was found with her sister (Peach) in a laundry room after her mother, who had just given birth to the pups, was taken away to be spade. Yes, you read right. The owners somehow missed the facts that their dog was pregnant and then that their dog was giving birth. In fact, they claimed they didn’t find the pups until after they returned home from dropping their dog off for her operation. 

As they say in France, ca c’est méchant. (I actually don’t know if they say that in France, but I say it. In French.)

Read more on my Substack here.