Thanks Miss Ruth!

Think mystery and magic not mastery & duty... I woke in the middle of a way cool dream around 3:30 am and suddenly a poem came through. It's cool how they come a little bit then a bit more then soon there's too much to easily remember and I have to get up and grab paper and pen. The one from this morning is called Wild Thing and you'll find it on the P P & P page in a bit. Any which way... it made me think of a story I heard of a poet who described the poems as coming across the fields... thanks to the internet and Wikipedia (Seriously, THANK YOU... I contribute to Wiki)... I found what I was thinking of... Ruth Stone is the poet I was trying to recall.  

"Writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells a story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which she had shared with Gilbert:
As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, "run like hell" to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet".

And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first."

For me poems are like water and light or sound. The water is always flowing all around, dripping, gurgling, babbling, rippling, rushing, crashing, roaring, bubbling, burbling, blustering, thundering (I feel another poem coming...=) and then the light hits it in my view in my mind and I notice the words flowing, like water... out of the corner of my eye I see a sparkle and turn to look or I hear something... which also causes me to turn and look at the flowing words in my mind... and it feels like I do "capture" them as they go by. That's why I love Ruth Stone's description... she says collect it... or grab it... that works too. There is definitely that sense that if I don't get up and write them down they will just move on. Thanks Ruth! 

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