Poet Tree (the fruit, called a poem is possible to eat.)

At the end of davening this morning the Dvar Torah of the day was pros and cons of early and late Shabbos Shacharis. The speaker felt that a major motivation for such minyanim is to miss the rabbi's speech. I think rabbis are on to that and now often appear to speak at each minyan.

As I type this , the song Happy Together is playing. It's a great tune and yet - I wonder if there's ever been a worse rhyme written than, "So happy together, so how is the weather?" The next song up is Peace Train, to me a wow.

After minyan I went to Grandma's and bought a whole wheat bagel with egg whites. I returned home to read from my new anthology of poet laureates. I'm pleased with that investment. At the same time I bought that (at Westsider Books, between 80-81, on Broadway) I purchased two other books. Nothing To Be Frightened Of, is "a memoir on mortality" - if you trust an inside flap. I seem to remember this getting strong reviews. And I definitely remember really liking a story he had in The New Yorker. It was called The Limner and was published two years ago, almost to the day.

I always say that my favorite short story is (Wait for it - first I'll tell you some close seconds: The Bear Went Over The Mountain by Alice Munro, and A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor. I don't think either of them ever wrote a story that didn't work for me.) In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, by Delmore Schwartz. I used to own it, and now I own it again. It's one of the first stories in a collection of film related writings, called Roger Ebert's Book of Film. It clearly resonates for Ebert, as it did for the Partisan Review, which published it in its first issue (even though it doesn't seem to resonate for most people I share it with - sigh).

The new New Yorker just arrived, and Alice Munro has a story in it! My problem with the New Yorker is that there's too much in each issue that I want to read. On the bus back from Quebec City, one eleventh grade boy was reading the New Yorker. (I mean, just one that I noticed. It was probably a lot more.)

I wrote this today:

Gorgeous yet common

Poems are windblown weeds

Like dandelions

Poets do not grow on trees

Whatever would we call them?