Night of a Thousand Blossoms

I didn’t make any real progress on a new poem that I’ve been working on. I have four stanzas written and believe I need two more. I struggled and struggled this morning to find the words for starting the fifth stanza, but the words wouldn’t come. Hence, I switched over to revising an older poem and did some fairly major revisions to it to the poem’s benefit.

I received a rejection on Friday from The Spoon River Poetry Review. I still plan to mail out some poems tomorrow.

My poetry coach recommended that I read Frank X. Gaspar’s Night of a Thousand Blossoms. I like his poems. There’s a lot of spirituality and wisdom to them. I’ll need to re-read the book after I’ve finished it, but so far it seems like in sections one and two of the book he keeps writing the same kind of poem over and over. They strike me as meditations on the tangles and elusiveness of truth and spiritual matters. Each of the poems in sections one and two seem to assert/explore and then cancel themselves out by the conclusion of each poem, like a snake eating its tale, back to a neutral place where things started and none the wiser except perhaps for the journey. I’m half way through section three of the book right now, and these poems seem different than sections one and two.

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Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! … To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

--Herman Melville