Whoaaaaaaa! for a minute i thought i was on one of my two writer's lists. 
Such a literary work. Did you unintentionally post this to the wrong list? 
If so, don't worry, dear, all of us have done this at one time or another. 
If I were you I'd repost it to whatever list you really intended. Funny 
thing what those mice will click on when you have pd, eh? :))) BTW, I've 
been known to my family as the Queen-of-missent email. LOL

How are things going for you lately? If you'll post me privately I can 
suggest software which will give you a little variety in your email but 
still stick to straight no-nonsense oldfashioned text-only email if you 
want that too. I also have some interesting info you may like to hear about 
the part "counters" play on webpages and where you can find some quite 
humorous ones.

Oh, and--jp

Sorry this isn't in rhyme,
saving it for another time. :))))

hoping to hear from you soon via cyberspace-only

bk


At 11:47 AM 11/28/00 -0500, you wrote:
>(note from jmp - i think i have found another hero]
>
>
>Self-Reflection
>
>In this poem, I promise, you will learn everything I know
>about myself. Despite the fact I get it wrong, I've been
>looking in the mirror my whole life. I think I see myself,
>but as you know from your own experience, that's rarely
>the case. How ridiculous that we spend so long gazing at
>the unattainable, fooling ourselves with our own faulty
>facts, our faces flying toward us exactly backwards. We
>could spend that time dancing or reading out loud. We
>could make love more often and try to keep our minds
>from wandering. After all of these years I can't even pick
>myself out in the class photograph. But I can recognize
>your face anywhere. It could be that, actually, objectivity
>is underrated and love its greatest example. This relegates
>relativity to twentieth-century egotism, nothing more than
>a medieval scheme to place the earth at the center once
>again. Just a theory. And there are others. For example, I
>have believed that growing a good tomato is as important
>as writing a poem. For example, I have believed in the
>open exchange of ideas. I have believed we are not the
>same and this is the greatest liberation.
>
>
>
>Cathryn Hankla
>from her book Texas School Book Depository
>Copyright 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 by Cathryn Hankla.
>All rights reserved.
>
>
>
>Cathryn Hankla, professor of English at Hollins University, is the author 
>of three previous collections of poetry—Phenomena, Afterimages, and 
>Negative History—a collection of short stories, and the novel A Blue Moon 
>in Poorwater. She is poetry editor for the Hollins Critic.
>
>About Texas School Book Depository: Humorous, quirky, and spiritually 
>meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative 
>leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A 
>shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who 
>survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of 
>adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller 
>realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, 
>allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local 
>and familial lore—all become ready touchstones for the revelation of 
>feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom.
>
>While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in 
>questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep 
>emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy, as when she 
>attempts to find the center in "Turn Something Inside Out": "Would I 
>discover you there, poised like a prayer to be answered? And if you were a 
>prayer, how would I find the center? If at the center there were a fear, 
>like a stitch left in an incision, how would I know how it began unless 
>you told me, unless you held me, upside down, and shook until you faked 
>nothing, neither interest nor passion nor forever."
>
>In the title poem, the Louvre's huge cache is searched, not for the famed 
>Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for 
>something now forever lost—a nation's collective naïveté, destroyed with 
>Kennedy's assassination from the gunman's nest in what was then the Texas 
>School Book Depository. In "Self-Reflection" the critical irony turns 
>inward, amplifying the usual solipsistic despair—not even the self can be 
>known: "Despite the fact that I get it wrong, I've been looking in the 
>mirror my whole life. I think I see myself, but as you know from your own 
>experience, that's rarely the case." Yet the poem ends by offering hope, 
>in a series of comical but potent "theories": "For example, I have 
>believed that growing a good tomato is as important as writing a poem. For 
>example, I have believed in the open exchange of ideas. I have believed we 
>are not the same and this is the greatest liberation." Intimate and 
>unusual, amusing and moving, Texas School Book Depositor!
>y is
>  a truly wondrous offering.
>
>"From the strikingly smart 'God Attack' to the wryly speculative 'Turn 
>Something Inside Out,' wherein the speaker notes that penetrating to the 
>core of things 'would be easier if I were you, carefully promising 
>nothing, delivering the same,' this collection invites us to see a self as 
>a 'whole thing' that reveals itself only as it is turned inside out 
>through the agency of art.... Toughened, not jaded, Hankla promises much 
>and delivers." — Kelly Cherry
>
>Louisiana State University Press
>Baton Rouge, LA 70803
>http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/
>
>Poetry Daily
>http://www.poems.com/
>
>
>janet paterson, an akinetic rigid subtype parkie
>53 now /44 dx cd / 43 onset cd /41 dx pd / 37 onset pd
>TEL: 613 256 8340 SMAIL: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada
>EMAIL: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/