I opened a book today that my husband gave me for Christmas years ago – Bill Moyers’ The Language of Life, a Festival of Poets. I hadn’t really read it much at the time, but now it is intensely relevant and important to me. Though I took many things from my day’s reading, the one I will share today is the information that a poet named William Stafford had a practice of writing a poem a day (as I do!). And when asked what he did when he was having a bad day, he said he simply lowered his standards.
This gives me permission, and I think I need to let myself write poems that don’t aspire to goodness, to keep them and me from getting pompous. So today I will share a “poem” about my blog stats.
My sad confession is that I often haunt my blog looking for signs of having made a connection. There is a stats page associated with the blog, which tracks page views – how many there are, where they come from, which pages were viewed, etc. So I was surprised today when there was a sudden spike of activity from Russia. And last week a similar but smaller one from China. My poem is about those spikes:
Did nineteen people read my poems in Russia?
One spike at three o’clock this afternoon?
Was it a class, something they were doing –
Could they even read it, was there a discussion?
Or does my stats page give a wrong impression –
Perhaps it was some automated creeper
that opened up my blog but with no reader
just marched on through in mindless blind procession
I’d like to think that in some far off land
an energy connection had been made
an arc of our humanity find ground
across a gap of culture, time and space
and though I doubt this count is realistic
I must confess I’m glad for the statistic.
April 14, 2011
