Macro

In contrast to the patchwork, it's a grey day here in Vermont, but yesterday was beautiful. I walked up the hill in the afternoon, under a clear blue sky. The valley fell away beneath me - thick stands of dark green pines interspersed by white snow-covered fields and lawn, the houses always less conspicuous in the graphic winter landscape. The temperature had risen to above freezing, and the snow-blanket was melting and running down the side of the mountain: a trickling stream audible under the snow, and drips pinging in the culvert. Even the birds were singing new songs.

A week into it, I'm enjoying my experiments with Twitter and Identi.ca. The smaller and warmer feeling of Identi.ca appeals to me more, and I'm using that as my "home" where the posts first appear, but many more people seem to use Twitter. Like some of the other micro-blog poets (some old friends, some totally new to me) I'm using the medium as a daily seeing-thinking-and-writing discipline. It's good for me, and like most immersions in art forms, it changes my head. I find myself observing myself and the world around me with an eye to distillation, and then sifting through the impressions of the day to find the one that lends itself best to an image and condensed expression. Strung together in the offline log file I'm keeping, they already begin to form a record of these days that quite different from either a blog or a private journal.

Many of us who live in the north have been writing about this time of thaw and opening. I'm enjoying reading other people's attempts to take something so familiar and periodic and make something totally new and surprising from it - not so easy! The other poets I've met have been very warm and generous, which has been an unexpected reward.

I also didn't know about Open Micro, a site where the members post the best micro-poems they find on the net. My qarrtsiluni co-editor Dave is active there, as is Peter of slow reads. I feel like I've dropped into a whole new macro world through a micro opening!

Comments

[Marja-Leena]

It is wonderful for you to have found other creative places for your writing, Beth! And thank you for showing us the full quilt, it is beautiful.

[Lorianne]

I'm also (newly) experimenting with Twitter (I haven't yet checked out Identi.ca). I resisted the whole Twitter thing for a long time, but like many things I resist, I'm finding it's as interesting as you make it. For me, it's an interesting exercise to say something SHORT to sum up my current condition, the morning's walk, or how my day went. It feels like exercising a different "muscle" than what my blogging normally uses: a different way of encapsulating & sharing experience.

[beth]

Thanks, Marja-Leena. Isn't it interesting how abstract and modern the quilt ends up looking, and yet the blocks are more than a century old. I always see something different in it. But it certainly wouldn't hold up on a bed for more than a day, and is pretty rough when you see it up close.

Hi Lorianne - yes, I've been keeping up with (and enjoying) your experiments too. That's exactly how it feels to me, and I rather like the enforced brevity!

[Rachel Barenblat]

It's been delightful being on twitter with you.

[Bluegrasspoet]

Thoughtful post, thoughtful comments. Beth, I am delighted to have met you through Identi.ca and look forward to exploring your work. I have learned about craft from my micro-blogging and met some delightful folk. Not much downside that I can see.

Beautiful crazy quilts. One ambition of my youth that I never did fulfill, quilting. Now I'm not sure my back and eyes would take it.

[beth]

Thanks a lot, Bluegrasspoet! I'm glad to have met you too. It seems like you are friends with my qarrtsiluni co-editor and old online friend Dave (Morning Porch), so that's another connection.

Yes, making stuff has always been a big part of my life. I used to sew a lot and spent many years painting pretty seriously; now I'm more likely to be knitting, but it's all good so far as I'm concerned!

[Natalie]

The quilt is fantastic,Beth. Looks quite like a Picasso of the cubist period. but in better colours!