19 Comments

"Because the result

is sure to keep someone warm"

This had alot of great analogies. It takes a bit to reravel(?!) lines, but maybe can be like knitting! (keeping someone warm!) Enjoying your post!

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Thanks so much, jm. I love the idea of a poem helping to keep someone warm!

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I’m not surprised you love to knit!

Every knitter I know has a resolve to create something beautiful no matter how long it takes. Just like your wonderful poems--sometimes years.

Knitting requires a love for the process that non-knitters don’t always understand. I was once “frogging” a piece (rip it! rip it! rip it!) to the horror of my husband. “What are you DOING??” he wailed, as I wound the yarn back into a ball again. “All that work!!!”

I assured him that it was fine, and that now I had the pleasure of knitting it again. Correctly. He just looked at me like I was insane.

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THAT's why people call it frogging! Oh, that delights me. As do your words about loving process; it's a capacity that stands knitters, poets, and pilgrims through the microseasons in good stead.

Love to you and yours, Ann. Thank you for coming by to read and comment.

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I enjoy your commentaries as much as your poems, I think because they help me catch what I have missed. They also make so clear your deep humility and wonderful humor! It seems your two creative passions reinforce each other because of their differences. Mine, I am afraid, are too similar: stained glass and mortared rock work. In both cases I try to find something beautiful, subtly shape it to add beauty, and then try to herd a bunch of them together in a pleasing way. I guess I will rationalize it as synergy! Love, Cousin Dave

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I'm so taken with the materials that your creativity draws you to, Dave -- stone and glass, the unyielding and the fragile! Such different techniques to shape and group your materials in each medium ... and I love your insight into what's similar about the creative processes. Synergy indeed!

So glad to have you for a reader and a relative, Cousin. Love to the family.

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Thanks for sharing about the connection between scrambled eggs, knitting and writing poems! Well said! I guess picking up needlepoint after a 20 year break has actually helped my writing in that it gives me time to think. Plotting story, figuring out why a character does something, always takes time in solitude but I have a hard time just sitting and doing nothing (even when practicing at Tassajara!). Needlepoint is the perfect way for me to meditate on things, though I wish I could knit and make something more useful than I do.

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Hand-crafts are such a blessing -- and needlepoint is exquisite, which makes it useful in wonderful ways. Thanks as ever for reading, Rose!

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These are both great. The first one certainly feels like some days of writing!

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Doesn't it?? Thank you, Brian -- so glad you enjoyed them.

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Now I want a plate of scrambled eggs. You've knitted several things for me - vests, scarf. and I love them all. But my favorite is the scarf, one of your first tries and I was blessed to receive it.

Barbara

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Breakfast soon, Barb, cooked by our friends you-know-where!

I love seeing you wear that beautiful droopy scarf.🧶

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I don’t eat scrambled eggs or knit and am grateful for these poems….

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Grateful to you for reading them, Shari!

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" instead of tense lines

rubbed thin, frayed to tangles.." ------------Thanks for this, what a pleasure and a laugh.

"you have a tug with ----------------- I altered your original line a tad here, hope that's okay.

a lapful of soft resilience"

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Not sure what the extra "with" is doing there, Weston, but I'm glad you enjoyed some of the lines.

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whoops, that was my mistake.

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No knitting for me, but I happen to love both cooking and poetry (actually wrote a book combining the two) and I LOVE YOUR SCRAMBLED EGGS POEM!

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I'm so glad you do, Sulima! And I'm glad you love to cook!

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