The Merry Merry Month O’ May in Saragun Springs

May in the Springs is inspired by Tom Sawyer getting kids to white “warsh” the fence for him. Thus, being incredibly lazy, I have opened a new feature in the Springs. Every fourth week of the month is open for guest posters who wish to be exposed to at least forty subscribers (we are among the meek who will inherit the Earth, Wind and Net someday).

Friend Dale Williams Barrigar will be appearing on the week of the 26th-30th. For others who wish to fill a week with poetry or various odds and ends, I say go ahead and send those to saragunsprings@gmail.com Now I am not publishing a journal or anything of the such, I am fully occupied by Literally Stories UK. But as stated, I am pretty lazy, and I appear to be attracted to stuff that has the potential for shame,  despair, and disaster.

Still, I feel awkward telling obviously intelligent people the following: I will not post hateful, pornographic, libel suit beckoning, plagiarized stuff; nor touts, ads, or anything straying far past three-thousand words. Brevity is the soul here, and poetry the favored soul.

May is spoken for–but June is free.

Leila

9 thoughts on “The Merry Merry Month O’ May in Saragun Springs”

  1. Leila and Readers

    Happy May! Tom Sawyer was of course brilliant in his laziness, and so are you.

    I can say that I believe 40 (or thereabouts) is a “perfect” poetry number for many reasons.

    Too many attracts readers who aren’t artistically genuine, who have an agenda instead; and too few can drain poetry of its intended energy. But none other than John Keats himself, certainly one of the greatest English language poets since Shakespeare, pointed out that he believed he had exactly 24 regular readers of his revolutionary verse as it appeared. Twelve adored what he wrote. Twelve were miffed at and annoyed by it, but also deeply interested. Keats was grateful for both kinds of readers.

    It’s also worth pointing out that the great Danish philosopher and parabolist Soren Kierkegaard believed he had exactly ONE true reader while he lived. But he knew he would inherit the earth, the wind, and the net eventually. It was enough for him, so it should be (and is) enough for us.

    I can say that the poems of mine which will appear later this month are among some of the best things I’ve ever managed to get written, bar none. In my five upcoming poems, I’ve tried to write so that every single line, and even every single word, as in a Leonard Cohen song, are a world unto themselves while also remaining part of the unity of life – a cohesive whole.

    The prose essays which will introduce my poems will include presentations and reflections of such characters as Gertrude Stein and Mary Baker Eddy (an American visionary who was a prose poet of the mythic and was lauded in her own day by none other than Mark Twain himself), Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, and Lou Reed and Henry Miller, among many others.

    The Readers of, and Writers for, this site are part of the Avant-Garde of “NOW,” and the avant-garde now is one of the only places where genuine new creative writing can and does appear amongst a moribund mass culture that is not headed for the toilet and the ditch, but has already landed there in both places, respectively.

    Like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, we talk on, and continue to tell the truth in original words, even as the rest of the world seems to be crumbling around our ears and eyes.

    I can also add that despair and disaster have been my constant companions in a life of (so far) 58 or so years. Even when they go away for a little while, I know they await me around the corner again. Shame has never been a big emotion of mine, unless that includes simple and pure humiliation (which I think it does), in which case I can say that it’s another very old, and very dear, friend.

    Endless gratitude to you, Leila, for creating, providing, offering, curating, this site. It is nothing less than a hand of authenticity held out to the rest of us, in the middle of a place Bob Dylan called “a world full of lies.”

    DWB

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    • Thank you Dale

      I look forward to your week this month and I feel that the whole thing will be a success. Just how big, well I never think that way. I just let it happen as it will.

      Thanks again!

      Leila

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