the emails that still sit in your bin

I look at Beth Kephart's blog because every entry includes a photograph that is placid or tentatively terrestrial or fragmented yet spiritually whole or purely tonal (and often moody) or mildly ominous or lonely yet sanguine about it or artifactual (is that a word?) or having a quality of being a piece of this world or natural yet slightly obscure or still-lifeish - and sometimes indeed all of the above. Beth's sentences (in her books and on her blog) cast a dream over the page. Typical (of the blog): "I have been thinking about how long people live, even after they're gone. In the songs that bring them back. In the gifts they'd given, long ago. In the emails that still sit in your bin, all full of nobody but them." Notice how the word "nobody" feels empty and negative and yet in the meaning of the line becomes the sign of somebody, of presence.

Anyway, it's such a darned I-centered world: on the day I'm plugging Beth's blog, she's already plugged me. Her entry today is about me and PoemTalk. I cherish especially this outrageous compliment: "[H]e's so ridiculously inventive and innovative that it is frankly difficult to keep up with all that he gives straight back to the world."