The Way to LitQuake is 8 hours of Reading

I love the train. Time seems to stop on a train, while the whole world rolls before me. When traveling by train, I get to watch the sky change colors–watch the ground in all its variations–glow. I also like to eavesdrop and read on the train.  Paradise is a train.

Trains remind me of John Keats. Admittedly, most things make me think of Keats but the train has strong draw for me when making a metaphor of such a poet.

Keats, with little no money, held tight to the conviction that all people (rich and poor) deserve beauty.  The train is economical, and it is beautiful.

On the way to LitQuake I read (0f course Keats) but also the works of Kelli Allen and Jessy Randall. Kelli’s poems are terrifying—beautiful—but hollowing. Jessy’s poems are witty and inspiring.  I highly recommend reading Allen and Randall; I’m trying to pen out all the reasons why I recommend these books, but that will take time. I find writing reviews to be difficult–delightfully difficult. How to say “I love you?” It requires thought, when translating the heart.

You can watch Kelli Allen’s Otherwise, Soft White Ash (OFFICIAL TRAILER) on YouTube; it is beautiful.

I also read Juan Felipe Herrera new play/poem, which should go to a live show on the 2nd of November. Ah, this work! I must have looked like a fool from crying on the train. Juan Felipe Herrera (like Keats) writes from and for the heart.

Then I read Keats. I read his poems. I read his letters. Then I copied as much of Keats as I could onto postcards. I hid the postcards all over the train from Bakersfield to Oakland. Keats knows how to travel–he travels by the heart.

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John Keats (1795–1821).  The Poetical Works of John Keats.  1884.

28.  On the Grasshopper and Cricket

THE POETRY of earth is never dead:   When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,   And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead         5   In summer luxury,—he has never done   With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never:   On a lone winter evening, when the frost         10     Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,   And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,     The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills. December 30, 1816.