![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/naturecenterrhapsody.jpg\")
As you might know, gentle reader, I sometimes take my children to the Nature Center here in Springfield, so I’m familiar with some of the locations mentioned in the book. And, in a Springfieldian turn of events, my beautiful wife nows the author: his wife taught algebra and his child played in the band with her. So I’d better not go too hard on the fellow as it might stifle our social life.<\/p>\n
The book doesn’t have a date on it, but it’s right about in the 1985-1995 era. It uses a monospace font and lots of clip art which puts it in the early days of PC-based desktop publishing (as opposed to X-acto knives and rubber cement desktop publishing, both of which I participated in with my chapbooks).<\/p>\n
At any rate, the first poems in the book made me think I’d picked up another winner. They feature, directly, locations at the Nature Center that I could visualize, probably helping because I’d been there, and the poems throughout the book are shot through with mindfulness\/Buddhist themes of stillness and just being with the universe.<\/p>\n
However, later poems get more to the modern short line stacks that I don’t like at all. It’s hard to evoke with three syllables–even haiku have five (in their first and last lines and seven in the middle line, I know, gentle reader). But the haiku is trying to make but a moment for contemplation and not a longer poem. I might have to work out a mathematical formula for the minimum number of syllables in a line of poetry before I disapprove. It might be seven. Maybe six. Maybe a more complex algorithm where an average line length over the poem matters more. I dunno. At any rate, the later poems led me to re-read the ones at the beginning and kind of discount them as well.<\/p>\n
So it’s okay in spots and thin and tepid in others. Kind of like this blog, come to think of it.<\/p>\n
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As you might know, gentle reader, I sometimes take my children to the Nature Center here in Springfield, so I’m familiar with some of the locations mentioned in the book. And, in a Springfieldian turn of events, my beautiful wife nows the author: his wife taught algebra and his child played in the band with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26871,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26870\/revisions\/26871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}