Gene Myers – poet & journalist. His column is The Joy of Life. Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Coleman Barks, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, Pete Seeger, Wynton Marsalis, Gregg Allman, Brandi Carlile, Aimee Mann… Interviews that go deeper.
‘Fantastic! Please don't let it get around that you write a damn good mom column or I'll be out of a job!’ Columnist, Tracy Beckerman, Lost in Suburbia.
‘Gene Myers' column "Have An Idea?" in the Cliffside Park Citizen was excellent.
"No sentence uttered ever matches the spark of its epiphany."
You'd have to go back to the work of E.B. White (of The New Yorker) to match the creativity Myers displayed, in his persuasive admonition to readers that to remain inspired, you have to remain silent.
‘I look forward to reading your articles on a regular basis especially as they pertain to the joys of life and your son Owen. You see, my son is almost one year old. It seems that everything you write abœout touches me personally. Topics I can relate to... I look forward to more of your articles as well as the antics of Owen…’
Hi, Gene, I just submitted several three word haiku…and when I first discovered it I was delighted. Each word makes you pause till you enter that word…and each progressive word creates the change. But I soon found that some of mine could not convey what I had seen so I went back to my old way of doing it…actually…I am an organic haikuist…. I write how it comes.
Some of my three worders were:
winter
fox
fire
wasp
silk
cocoon
rain
drumming
song
fallen
tree
light
Each of these were experiences I witnessed… but I found out the hard way that the word “fox” for instance carries extremely bad connotations…and mixed with the word “fire” really sounded like something evil indeed…when I was trying to write about the desire for life I saw in the eyes of those wild foxes in winter. So I had to rewrite the haiku to say what I was trying to say….
So glad to see someone else has discovered the fun of this though.
Merrill