Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

[I start each week of the Five by Friday series by visiting a blog I already read and just randomly clicking an unfamiliar link on their blogroll. Unfamiliar because the point of this exercise, for me, is to move out and beyond routine and see a little of what else is out there. Then, I click a link on their blogroll, and then the next, so that by Friday there is a sort of six degrees thing going on from the starting blog/site.]

So, from Quiet Bubble I clicked our next site, Five Branch Tree (which name I may steal for this series, as it would fit so well), and wouldn’t you know it – the last one this week and it’s poetry!

Not that there is anything wrong with poetry, of course… I quite like much of it. I just don’t really know how to talk about it – but that’s okay. I guess I didn’t really delve into the depths of any of the topics in the profiles of the previous sites, so will just give an overall flavor of this one, too.

An auspicious beginning; the first poem on the page is a very short poem, accompanied by a cat. The result of a collaboration between Archie Rand and Robert Creeley – I believe part of a series where Rand does a drawing and Creeley writes a short (or maybe long, too, I don’t know) poem to go with them.  Five Branch Tree’s author, Brian, appears to be spending a bit of time with Creeley’s work, so there are several posts dealing with his poetry and life. Pretty interesting, actually. Including this one, where he wonders if Creeley is a solopsist, giving a several poems as examples – this one struck me as funny (for me, in this place in time):

egocentric
abstraction–
no one

else but
me again,
and people,

people as if
behind glass,
close

but untouchable.
[from 'Hong Kong Window']

Brian gives the same treatment to other poets throughout the pages, a brief glimpse at some of their work along with commentary. It is good reading, this site, I think – nothing too detailed or involved, lots of introductions to new (to me) authors and poets. Well worth a read – probably one I’d visit maybe once or twice a week, during a quiet time, and just absorb for a bit.

Well, that’s the end of our first weeks series. I think it went pretty well (well, except for that starting at the beginning of one week and ending at the end of the next thing, but anyway… ). There are maybe some parts I will change as this goes along, and I need to figure out better ways of bringing the sites alive to the reader as I’m not doing so great a job on that right now. Time and concentration and all that.

This weekend I’m going to try and write something about the blogrolls on the five sites we’ve visited. We’ll see if I can crib something profound out of them. Next week, we start with an entirely new site and take our five branches off from there.

Five by Friday – week 1 theriomorph —> Breakfast with Pandora —> Gridley Fires – A Blog About Books and Writing —> The Millions —> Quiet Bubble —> Five Branch Tree

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Five by Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.