We've reached it, almost: that time of year so precisely and richly
described by Natalie Babbitt that it changed me as a reader and a writer.
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
-- Prologue from Tuck Everlasting, 1975
This beginning to a book caught me like hands holding my 10-year-old head on both sides, looking me urgently in the eyes and saying, "Of words we can make art, art as true as a photograph layered with brushes of color, with sound and rhythm of blues symphony, full of the woven textures of weariness, curiousness, motion and suspense. Writing can do it all."
What about you, poetry friends? What piece of literature brought you to see writing as art, made you want to live in and even make this kind of art?
Keri has the round-up today at Keri Recommends. Happy Almost August.
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wherever you are is somewhere sour or sweet/ a lemon heaven full of juice to squeeze reflections on writing and reading poetry in and out of the classroom
By: Heidi Mordhorst,
on 7/31/2015
Blog: my juicy little universe (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: fiction, Poetry Friday, art, prose poetry, Add a tag
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wherever you are is somewhere sour or sweet/ a lemon heaven full of juice to squeeze reflections on writing and reading poetry in and out of the classroom
By: Heidi Mordhorst,
on 7/31/2015
Blog: my juicy little universe (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: fiction, Poetry Friday, art, prose poetry, Add a tag
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