geo wrote:This is a great inspirational poem by Kay Ryan.

I'll be thinking about this one all day! Thanks, geo.

Here is what I read in my Sunday paper this morning --

From: Walter Scott's Personality Parade (insert from Washington Post)


Q Why are my tax dollars going to pay a poet laureate when nobody reads poetry? -- Jeff Kawabata, Omaha, Neb.

A "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there," wrote the great American poet William Carlos Williams. (We hope you'll look him up!) While it's true that not many people read poetry, they'd probably get a lot out of it if they gave it a try. the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Californian Kay Ryan, earns all of $35,000. But fret not: Her stipend is funded from a private endowment, not tax revenues.

Good for Walter Scott!! What an embarassment that even one American would make such a complaint. Thanks, Saffron, for answering my question a while back about the laureate's wages.

geo wrote: you know it is the Person from Porlock
who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.

Anyone have a gloss on "person from Porlock"?

DWill wrote:

geo wrote: you know it is the Person from Porlock
who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.

Anyone have a gloss on "person from Porlock"?

I will not take any credit for know anything about the person from Porlock. what I can do is look it up -- my specialty.

This is copied from the SpakNotes website:

The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridge’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and “Kubla Khan,” strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius.

Wikipedia:

The Person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge who called by during his composition of the oriental poem Kubla Khan. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock (a town in the South West of England, near Exmoor) while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "Person from Porlock", "Man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders.