POETRY LIST

I love seeing/listening to the play lists that inspire authors. Sometimes I end up poaching a song for my own play list; at the very least, I get a trip down memory lane or an education.

And of course, I love making my own play lists. My music tastes run the gamut: rock, r & b, folk, roots rock, classical, jazz, pop. I am just old enough to have loved Bob Dylan before he was a "Golden Oldie"... 

... and just young to know that dancing it out to Pink cures most ills.

But you know what else my muse digs?

Poetry.

I've always loved poetry. Reading/speaking/hearing my favorite poems makes me warm inside, makes me dreamy or fired up or achingly melancholy. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I still thrill to the Eliot lines "Dare I eat a peach? Dare I disturb the universe?"

Or how about Cummings's Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls ... This: "if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy."

I am forever in awe of that line. Forever. It makes me swoon.

And so, for me the act of writing is necessarily accompanied not just by music, but also by poetry. I have created poetry lists for each ms -- poems that inspire the plot, the characters, the dialogue, and most certainly the mood of my writing.

My latest includes these:

1) The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot
2) Melancholia, by Paul Laurence Dunbar
3) When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloomed, by Walt Whitman
4) The Unquiet Grave, Child Ballad 78

And my play list?

1) Awake My Soul, by Mumford and Sons
2) The Unquiet Grave, by Joan Baez
3) The Unquiet Grave, by Ralph Vaughan Williams
4) Where Was Eva Sleeping, Unknown
5) Mr. Rabbit (From Music Together - children's arranged music)
6) Somewhere Down the Lazy River by Robbie Robertson

Does poetry inspire you? Who are your favorites?

Inspiration is Everywhere You Let it Be

Taking your kids to a theme park is part of the parental hazing process -- a necessary rite of passage. Which is why this week, my family drove to Carlsbad, California  to see Legoland.

For kids, this is mecca. That is all.

The kiddoes were over-the-moon happy. They cruised around the park, dipping into the millions of Lego stations to build or play, riding rides, and singing "Everything is Awesome" a lot. A WHOLE lot. And it was fun - in its own special way.  I really truly do love to do things that make my children happy. And spend time together.

The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of theme parks -- they're noisy, smelly, overwhelming. Yuck.

It's the classic irony that as you eddy about from one ride or game to another, carried along by the sea of sweating humanity, much of what you hear and see is crying children. And parents hissing terse admonitions: "We came here to have fun!"

Sigh.
Moment of honesty: I said it once too. *Winces in shame*.

So of course this is the last place I would have expected to wheel right up into a moment of inspiration. Because I had thoroughly forgotten that inspiration is everywhere you let it be.

But behold: Rodin's Thinker - made entirely of Legoes:

Tens of thousands of Legoes superglued (Kra-gl-ed, for anyone who's seen the movie). A work of art lovingly rendered and placed in a central location. Where you couldn't miss it, even if you didn't know what it was.

What's inspiring about a Lego Thinker? The example he sets. You can create beauty out of anything -- even thousands of small pieces of knobby plastic. Which is what my brain feels like most days.

Another moment of revelation -- the beach.

I had forgotten how much I love the ocean. We've been in arid Arizona for 18 months now, and the memory of the breeze, the crash, and the smell have been stunned into submission by the mountains and cacti.

But when we finished with Legoland, we went to the beach ...

Aaahhhhhhh.

While my daughter happily played in the sand and my son and husband romped in the waves. I zoned.

I mean, ZONED. I only got about 5 minutes of that, but it was enough.

Inspiration is everywhere you let it be. The sunshine smell of hot sand, the salt-sweet wind. It doesn't have to come accompanied by a middle-of-the-night dream (although sometimes that's fun) and it often doesn't come on call.

But it can come when you look -- I mean really look, and NOTICE THINGS -- all around you. And when  you don't preordain. As in, "Today I will come up with a brand new, amazing plot idea." (Imagine me saying that in a game-show voice).

More like, "Oh, look. It's Rodin's Thinker. Made out of Legoes." (Imagine me saying that in a Reese Witherspoon You've-got-a-baby-in-a-bar voice).

And then, "Oh, wow. It's the Thinker. Made of Legoes. That's totally cool." That one I said in my own voice.