Linkage

Thanks to a student who pointed out how many of the links to the right (on this blog page) were inoperable, I have finally updated them. Well, most of them; I have limited time for tweaking around on my WordPress settings page.

Links appeal to me because they mean connection. The interconnectedness of the web parallels the many relationships among human beings, societies, and environmental entities from forest to desert, as well as infrastructural connections from town to city and across waters and the physiological connections that make life in a carbon-based embodiment possible. And neuro-connections that maintain our pulses and our consciousness–without such linkages, what would we be?

linkage-5 University of Utah

see link in para. 3

Our genetic linkage influences what we look like, what forms of illness or robustness our bodies possess, and the likelihood of carrying those traits to our offspring.

When we link ideas or concepts or theories, the resulting concatenation can be innovative, revelatory, novel–even if the result is a failure, there’s much to learn from trying to solve the puzzles we encounter when putting together unlike things.

Writing a poem, for example, involves such a combinatory effort. Combinatory logic is a mathematical concept but an intriguing metaphor for what poets do when we mash together observations with ideas and emotions and whatever values each writer operates under.

Linkage permits us to steer things, too, and to integrate systems elegantly:

baesystems-parallelhybridrives_OEMoff highway

[thanks to OEM Off-Highway]

So, please check out the links to my work and to the interesting sites on the right of the page on this post. And likewise, links below (yes, I am still taking part in reading blogs on the Blog Tour!)

On capital letters in poems and making craft choices in poetry, an interesting blog post by Marly Youmans.

And Leslie Wheeler on whether a poem can be a monument.

~

May you remain always connected, one way or another.