SPACE TRAVEL

[jim turner]

Journeys to stars make adventurous reading
and television networks profitable.
Lockheed and Boeing would roll in dough;
NASA would have a raison d’etre blast.

Such voyages? Party time! In foolproof ships
with room for beer, bourbon, girls,
and other essentials, like t-bones, zinfandel,
and sourdough toast with garlic butter.

But the sun is a star, and when August
roasts me a hundred and ten in the shade,
I’m as close to stars as I care to get.

Jim ( from Pre-History–meaning I don’t know when I wrote it or where it came from.
Possibly beamed down from Betelgeuse one night when I was staring at Orion)

[RonPrice]

I am 67, Jim, and as I read this piere I thought to myself: "this chap must be one of the much younger set." Inspired and moved by a different range of experience than I have had--the baby boomer that I am. Things become words and words things when one writes poetry I find. May you live to see some "party time" in "space travel." Take care.-Ron

[jim turner]

Thank you. Won't go into to detail beyond that I was born Aug. 1, 1925 and was married in 1954. Don't know what's waiting "out there," but I doubt it's a party. Jim

[RonPrice]

It just goes to show you, eh Jim, that you can't tell alot abbout the poet from the poem? As Rabindranath Tagore once put it: "the poem not the poet." No parties waiting for me, either on this earth or 'out there.' Greetings, Jim, from Australia.-Ron

[Steve Plonk]

Kind folks and gentle people, there is plenty going on in outer space,
if one takes the time to look. I've been an amateur astronomer for years...
Also, inner space is quite interesting, if one knows where to look.
The Almighty resides in both and is still right there at your elbow.
I party hearty every time I see Jupiter... I say howdy with prayer...Always merry and bright...

[RonPrice]

Thanks for your comment, Steve. Plonk is quite a name to live with. Your post has prompted the following response from here in Australia on the first day of summer.-Ron
---------------------
TEACHING AND WRITING

I only skirted the edges of the institutionalization of poetry, the formal instruction in the study and writing of poetry in educational institutions, as a teacher of literature and creative writing among other subjects---earning my living along the way in the last decades of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century. I helped in the education of students, in their acquisition of a common and essential base for their advancement in the system of learning, helped them to write English, to write essays on many subjects so that they could pass exams at least to some extent and as best I could engender through my several teaching skills. I did this in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools, colleges and universities.

Perhaps some of those students I taught over those decades would find their creativity, their genius, and their home in the world of writing but most, I’m sure, would only be helped “to put bread on the table,” as they say. Few would be those who in time would come to immerse themselves in creative literary expression and, of those few, only a small handful---if any at all---would come to exemplify Ezra Pound’s imperative to be original, to be uninfluenced and to “make their work new.”(1) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Ruediger Heinze’s review of Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, W. W. Norton & Company, NY, 1994---‘The Dream of the Unified Field’: Originality, Influence, The Idea of a National Literature and Contemporary American Poetry,’ in the European Journal of American Studies, Volume 2, 2008.

Current poetry, and certainly mine, is based on the rhythms
of speech, on a reinforced oral tradition….This can be seen
in open-mic readings frequently held in public venues which
I used to take on years ago. Now my writing is private….it is
the least public of traditional literary genres, but it gets read by
many thousands in cyberspace. Whitman’s invitation of poetry
is still true for me-----“Stranger, if in passing you meet me----
and desire to speak, why should you not speak to me?/
And why should I not speak to you?”(1)

(1) Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, eds., W. W. Norton & Company, NY, 1965, p.14. These simple lines from this famous American poet define or express the base, the basis, of much of the conversation I have had in life and some of the very raison d’etre of the poetry I have initiated and which others have read.

29 August 2010
Updated for: Poets and Artists Community:
Studio Eight on: 1/12/'10

[diesel dyke]

I enjoyed your poem very much jim turner
August in Texas is closer than I want to get

>
Who knows maybe there is a party going on out there.
Could be a party going on out there. And I would like to be in that number, but I won't need a space ship to make the scene. Somebody call me a taxi.