HeyJudeNotJudy (Jude Hopkins)

The Little Match Toad?

"How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical...always another chance."

"Deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite for renunciation—was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come"—Henry James, "The Portrait of a Lady" Born on this date in 1843.

In addition to the poem's evocation of nature's indifference to the often inscrutable goings-on of humans, I love the synesthesia in the phrase "shimmering sound" to describe the circling sparrows. Reminds me, message wise, of the Stephan Crane poem "A Man Said to the Universe."

Exquisite. Included in a new anthology that features a selection of nearly 100 small press poems and prose works from the past 25 years of The Pushcart Prize (selected from 1,500). Congratulations to @sophieklahr

"Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky" — William Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury" #SundaySentence

Welsh poet/playwright Gillian Clarke to remind us why we need poetry: "a trug of thundercloud" (describing blue hydrangeas) "a load of night-inks shaken from their hair" "their indigoes / tide-marked and freckled with the rose/ of death, beautiful in decline."

Comes out in June. Certain summer reading.

Not often we see the use of "quail" as an intransitive verb, meaning to falter or cower. And the image of "stems struggling to put down feet." There's effort in transformation.

"The road to excellence is paved with mediocrity" — Theodore Dalrymple, "The Strut and Trade of Charms" #SundaySentence

Today is the birthday of Finnish poet Edith Sodergran who captured fragmentation and dissonance in this short, image-soaked modernist work.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Spring." "I know what I know."

Some April Fool's nonsense from Ogden Nash titled "The Wrongs of Spring; or, No All Fools' Day Like an Old Fools' Day"

Was despair ever so beautifully rendered?

@RickBarry44 Nice!

Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fiction possibility. JULIAN BARNES, Departure(s) #SundaySentence

"Language is the soul's ozone layer, and we thin it at our peril" — Sven Birkerts, "The Gutenberg Elegies" #SundaySentence

Having a Jesuit-taught rhetoric professor in college has left me forever looking for rhetorical figures in writing style (and finding them scarce). This, an example of polyptoton, the repetition of a word in a different form but from the same root.

Bashō on tending one's garden:

@ThomasCosentin6 I'll be buying it and reading it.

@HeyJudeNotJudy Thanks, hope you get a chance to read this one

Here's the cover and title of my new novel. I got suggestions for the title but my editor made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I love this story, it's about friendship, community and belief in something greater than yourself. I hope readers enjoy taking a trip back to Liberty Hill