Tag Archives: The Washington Post

Reading by day

https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/barefoot-girls-by-ann-e-michael-p-317.html

While I await the eventual drying-out of the garden soil so I can plant a few early veggies and herbs, it seems a good time to ready a few more poems. I’m revising, drafting, but not sending out work. That feels comfortable at the moment; anyway, I much prefer writing to submitting poems.

I’ve also reserved myself some quiet hours to read books of poetry and a novel or two. Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature just arrived in my mailbox, and I’m on an Isabel Allende kick at the moment, so I definitely need some time to devote to reading. My husband, who tends to do his reading in the evenings, recently forwarded a Washington Post column by Stephanie Shapiro about why so few people read for pleasure during the day. Its title is “Why Does Daylight Reading Feel So Wrong?” She writes, “Although I am retired, I find it hard to allow myself an afternoon with a book or a long magazine article. Just the thought of settling onto the sofa in daylight hours, especially on weekdays, smacks of laziness and stirs up guilt. If I must sit at all, it should be at a desk or a countertop to do something ‘useful’— answer an email, write a grocery list, look up a recipe, what have you.”

I’m sure this is a common feeling, but it isn’t one I acquired, probably because my dad was ALWAYS sitting around reading a book, newspaper, or magazine–day or night. Reading during the day seemed normal to me. It still does, I’m happy to say.

~ Here’s a poem from my chapbook Barefoot Girls.

Night Drawn

I drew the night
with a number 2 pencil
I'd sharpened with
a Girl Scout penknife.
It was 1969. Night
needed blurred edges
so I smudged at it
with two fingers of my
right hand. And then
night left its prints
on my thumbs and palms,
somehow, on the yellow
print blouse and blue
jeans I wore.

I sketched shadows
the way I saw them
under beds and outside
windows, how they
deepened the early hours
when Grandmother
wakened by gaslight
to start her chores--
in darkness
which I learned to draw
with a pencil and
which stayed on my skin
the whole day.

Weight of words

Words are making the news again–this time, the list of seven words that the Centers for Disease Control has been told may make the Center’s research proposals less likely to be approved by the government’s budgeting agencies and which should be avoided in reports to Congress.

Futurism and The Washington Post reported on the purported ban, and a CDC official responded to clarify that the words’ negative connotations were discussed as “part of a suggestion to use words and phrases that ‘might be more likely to win support for the CDC’s budget in the current Congress.’ The idea is that favorable word choice could help ease the budget’s passage through Congress.” Watch your words, scientists!

Words matter. Anyone who has ever written a grant proposal has first of all to learn the appropriate jargon and phrases that the funders expect. Job applicants need to suss out the keywords that a potential employer has submitted to its application software.

~

Then there are euphemisms–a pernicious variety of jargon that obscures, elides, or otherwise weakens meaning--misleading, mostly, euphemisms take the punch out of a sentence. I heard just this morning the term “fatals” in the description of a train accident: “There were three fatals and numerous injuries we haven’t yet accounted for,” said a safety official. Fatals used in this way is a “functional shift” (see Oxford blog). The adjective has become a noun, and the noun has become a euphemism for “deaths.”

Officials may rationalize that language used this way softens the blow somehow. I see it as another method of obfuscating fact and in particular, minimizing or hiding death. Deaths are too real, too weighty; the fact of death is a thing we would rather deny. Just as we might deny that there are vulnerable populations in our citizenry. Or that the scientific method requires evidence.

For some poetry that responds to the use of words, check the cdcpoems blog here.  And Paul E. Nelson’s poem in Rattle, here.