Recently my mother passed away. Her decline came rather swiftly as a result of a brain tumor and likely a series of small strokes as well. She passed away in the afternoon and in the evening when  arrived home I was greeted by my wife who said to me, your a orphan now. I chuckled at the comet. Still, the words kept coming back to me the next day.

My father passed away in 2005. Both paternal and maternal grandparents on both sides of my family are deceased. Cathy's  biological parents are deceased as well as her grand parents. She has a step mother that is surviving but as fare as actual birth parents, she too has been an orphan for a while now. It is a peculiar thing to reflect upon that sort of aloneness  that you suddenly find yourself in. 

Today in the mail I received Laura Kasischke's Where Now - New and Selected poems.  This is a beautiful hard bound book of like 360+ pages. The publisher is Copper Canyon Press and everything with their imprint is always crazy nice. 

I met Laura in Kansas City at a reading  numerous years ago and bought a copy of her poetry book Gardening in the Dark. I enjoyed it so much that  it catapulted Kasischke pretty high on my  list of remarkable poets. 

Frequently I have gone back to Gardening in the Dark when I have been looking for inspiration to get me through a writing funk. It will be joyous to take another journey through her work reading material I've not seen before.  

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My night stand becomes a catch all for things that I go to from time to time to read from, in addition to new titles that I am reading for the first time.
 
So what’s on my nightstand right now? 

• The Art of Recklessness -  Dean Young
• The Lost Neruda Poems
• Thrust - Heather Derr-Smith
• Good Bones - Maggie Smith
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath
• Calling A Wolf A Wolf - Kaveh Akbar
• Faithful and Virtuous Night - Louise Gluck

​Oh, and a copy of Poet's and Writers Magazine.

It’s really October. It’s so hard to believe that we are starting the last quarter of the year 2017. How did this happen? I know we are there because besides the calendar the baseball season is moving into fall ball and then after the World Series, the baseball blues will be in full swing. Already I feel them tugging like a tide going back to sea, pulling a blanket back off the shoreline, exposing the beach.

This week I will be fortunate enough to begin a mentoring period with a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of 4 books.  The objective is fearless and impactful poetry on my part. It sounds lofty I know, but I believe the right help is on the way.

These times are quite raw. The devastation of hurricanes, people’s lives upended and cast in uncertainty.  Last night, a mass shooting in Vegas with at least 58 dead and those injured numbering 515 persons, the largest mass shooting of modern times in our country.  The question is sometime asked, “Who needs poetry?”  At times like these the answer is a simple, “We do!”

When we don’t have answers to life challenges, both good and bad, sometimes we just need to ask the right questions. Poetry can help us process these things. It may not solve them, but helps us find perspective.