Early Spring in PEI
It’s spring folks. My front garden is up about an inch above last fall’s debris. The lilies like to get an early start, and the bed is on the warmer side of the house. We get sun all morning and…
Haying
It is summer. The sun burns down from a clear, blue sky. Locusts whine in the spruce trees by the barn. I try to run barefoot across the hayfield but the stubble is sharp on my city feet. I slow…
Highland Storm
Highland Storm! It’s a wonderful show put on by the College of Piping in Summerside every summer. This was our third visit. There is always an underlying theme to the program. This year they depicted the arrival of the Scottish…
Island Living
I live on Prince Edward Island, that little bow tie on the east coast of Canada. It would take a long day’s drive to get from North Cape to East Point with much-varied landscape in between. It is very fertile…
Fiberglas Horses
I like to look at horses. I don’t ride and have no desire to, I just like to look. There was a beautiful honey-coloured horse with a creamy mane and tail who used to live in the field behind our…
The Germ Theory
When I was taking the Masters’ Degree in English at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, I was taught the germ theory of writing. You hear a story or read an article in a magazine and take a word…
Poetry Carcasses
I was grumbling to John this morning about how every topic I think of to write a poem about seems to have been done to death by greater and lesser poets than I. He told me about the view of…
Just Imagine!
Imagination is as much a thief of time as procrastination. The difference is that imagination gives you something wonderful to show for the time it steals, while the time stolen by procrastination is merely wasted and gone forever. I discovered…
Writing Poetic Forms
I wrote my first Haiku the other day. Twenty-five years ago when I first heard about them I thought: “Oh, what a cute little poem.” Try as I might back then, I just couldn’t make one. I finally conceded defeat.…
Purposeful Poetry
I’ve been reading and writing and thinking about poetry a lot lately. I’ll soon have enough for another book. What I’ve been thinking about has been its construction. In many ways it’s a lot like writing an essay. It has…