“Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.”
– Albert Schweitzer
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/22/one-liner-wednesday-like-a-rolling-stone/
I am slowly growing my readership and commenting base. I appreciate these tips which involve not swearing or being confrontational, neither of which fit who I am. I found this post through a re-blog by Rowena at https://beyondtheflow.wordpress.com/ and am happy to pass it along to my readers. I’m also thrilled to find this blog to follow, too! And thanks so much to all my readers and commenters! As this post reminds us all, gratitude is important!
Reading an article recently on how to get comments on a blog my eyes bulged out of my head. To my horror such suggestions as ‘curse often’, ‘attack somebody’ and ‘buy comments’ were included as the ‘best ever’ ways to ensure blog comments were acquired.
Is this what blogging is about? This is the best advice available to millions who have a blog?
Call me old fashioned, naive and definitely call me disheartened. In particular to every young blogger who may have done the same internet search I did, this old girl can tell you you don’t need to be a nasty person or pay to have readers give you feedback.
Below are my top, and might I say gentle, 13 tips for getting more comments on your blog while being a decent human being. The suggestions are based on reading other blogs with pages of comments and on my…
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I’ve recently joined a new organization, the Catholic Peace Community of the Southern Tier. There are people from several different parishes and we are hoping to build peace through working on different social justice areas.
Our first activities are dealing with the environment and climate change. One of the main tenets of Catholic social justice teaching is care of creation. Also involved are other tenets, such as the protection of the most vulnerable. Those who are living in poverty are much more likely to be subjected to pollutants and also more likely to be impacted by severe weather and sea level rise, as they live in vulnerable areas without strong shelter and do not have the means to relocate out of harm’s way.
We are looking forward to Pope Francis’s upcoming encyclical on the environment and will study the document when it is released in the late spring or early summer. Then we hope to get the word out about the encyclical not only to Catholic parishes but also to the general public in advance of the Paris climate summit in December.
Our first public event is on the 25th of this month when we will have a table at EarthFest. Pope Paul VI said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” We hope to build peace by working on various justice issues, but I am glad that we are starting with this timely work for ecojustice.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness this Saturday is: “piece/peace.” To join in the fun, visit here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1815/
Thanks in large part to lots of “likes” from new follower Dominique and the fact that I put out two posts yesterday, I have set a new record for likes in one day – 48! This far surpasses my old record of 30. Thanks, Dominique and all my visitors yesterday!
Tonight is the public reading and anthology distribution for the spring 2015 workshops of the Binghamton Poetry Project (BPP). This is the fourth time that I have participated in this community endeavor which brings together child, teen, and adult poets for five weekly sessions learning about and writing poetry, facilitated by graduate students from Binghamton University.
The three poems below are my contribution to the anthology. (I read the first two.)
From a prompt about writing about interactions with a parent, I wrote this poem which became a gift to my dad for his 90th birthday:
Hydro Superintendent
– by Joanne Corey
Each weekday, Dad went to his office
on the top floor of the hydroelectric station,
wearing a clip-on tie –
a precaution due to machinery –
with a Reddy Kilowatt pin.
When he was on weekend call,
my sisters and I sat on the wheel wells
in the back of the company jeep –
wearing our hard hats –
jouncing along unpaved roads
to inspect dams, pipelines, reservoirs,
unmanned Deerfield hydro stations.
His work became ours,
generating power.
*****
From a prompt about a place that we had visited, I wrote this poem about singing in Siracusa, Sicily with the Smith College Alumnae Chorus:
Divinity Listens in Siracusa
– by Joanne Corey
Clad in black,
I stand with the sopranos
behind the orchestra,
Requiem score in hand.
As Mozart echoes,
I know this sacred space –
erected as temple to Athena,
over centuries becoming
temple to Roman Minerva,
Christian church,
mosque,
returning to its current identity
as a Catholic cathedral –
is the most ancient place
in which I will ever sing.
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The last is my first ever attempt at prose poetry, heavily edited and expanded with advice from our instructor Cammy and my poetry critique group:
First poems
– by Joanne Corey
I wrote my first poems in a black-and-white marble-covered composition notebook in the fifth through eighth grade room in my elementary school. I wrote about the brook which flowed through the four seasons – the autumn hillside through our upstairs classroom windows as a pirate hat spilling gold doubloons – Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito skating to the Stanley Cup for the Bruins – a song to forgotten children who lacked family and home – the death of my grandfather and playing the organ for his Month’s Mind Mass at Saint Joachim’s – my first free verse poems, after Miss Andersen taught us that poems didn’t have to rhyme like Mother Goose and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” (which we knew by heart for Patriots’ Day recitation) – and on the very first page, in Palmer Method cursive, my hometown tribute to Monroe Bridge, with the closing lines, “There’s only one in the whole USA. That place knows me.”
I wish I still had that notebook to bridge the poemless decades that followed, to rediscover the girl who sluiced inky torrents between faint blue lines on crisp white pages, to remember when a town was a world, to again feel fully known, to recover the voice that went silent when severed from that place.
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Reading at the Binghamton Poetry Project
My poems that have appeared in the two prior anthologies can be found here and here. Our summer sessions are more low-key and don’t publish, so while this is my fourth set of session with BPP, it is only the third anthology. Another fun BPP-related post is my first and so far only attempt at slam poetry. I leave it to the readers to decide if my poetic skills are improving with time, experience, BPP, and the example and generous assistance of my fellow poets.
Why is it that I never seem to be able to type the word “because” accurately? I know how to spell it, but somehow my fingers always seem to rush the U in before the A. Is it just me? If you have a word you can’t seem to type right, please share in comments.
“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.”
– Albert Einstein
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday. Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/15/one-liner-wednesday-end-of-story/
Anne Frank: A Global Tribute… Tuesday 14th April, 2015.
Thanks to Rowena for posting about this special tribute to Anne Frank on the 70th anniversary of her death. I would participate if I weren’t so technically challenged on the video-recording front, but hope that some of my friends will consider taking part.
I just saw a piece on the Today Show about the only remaining theater organ in Seattle, which in the 1920s had fifty in silent film and stage theaters. The organ in the piece was a Wurlitzer, which was one of the most common manufacturers of the day.
It reminded me of the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York, which housed a Link theater organ, built by the firm of a local family. Edwin Link went on to found Link Flight Simulation, which used the technology of the organ business to craft the first mass-produced flight simulators, the Blue Boxes that trained many pilots in World War II.
When we moved here in the 1980s, I studied organ with M. Searle Wright, who was an enormously talented classical organist, teacher, and composer, and, at an age when most people are retired, then the Link Organ Professor at the State University of New York-Binghamton. He also was one of the few remaining masters of theater organ, able to sit at the console and accompany silent films, bringing to life the sounds of the world and the moods of the characters. It was an amazing experience to hear him accompany a film! Talented younger organists would travel up from New York CIty to study theater organ techniques from him.
We more often heard Searle’s theater organ talents when he played a 45 minute prelude of classic American songbook and Broadway tunes before each Binghamton Pops concert on the Morton theater organ at the Forum. On the music stand, he would have only a list of the pieces (perhaps with the key structure, he planned to include that day and would weave those songs together, showing off the fun aspects of theater organs, the literal bells and whistles.
A magical art, which is, thankfully, still being kept alive by those to whom an older generation of organist like Searle Wright passed on to them.
OK – this is another one of those weeks where I am writing on Friday morning and scheduling the post for publication tomorrow. The weekend is going to be busy as there will be open mic poetry tonight – my second time reading, if I make it – you can read about the first here. Saturday morning we will scoot up to Syrcause to pick up our younger daughter to bring her home in time for my dad’s rescheduled 90th birthday dinner. There will be a post about why it had to be re-scheduled eventually. Have I mentioned yet how I’m sort of behind on posting?
At any rate, my sisters and families will be coming up for the festivities which will be at a local Mediterranean restaurant, so there will be much yumminess and laughter and storytelling and dessert.
Provided things don’t get derailed by the crisis du jour.
It’s become a bit of a standing joke with me that I can’t make a plan because something will intervene. I wrote about the most dramatic of these events here. Long post but the condensed version is that my parents unexpectedly wound up in the hospital for two days at the same time with two totally unrelated problems.
Right now, I am waiting to hear back from my mother-in-law to see if we need to get her to her doc or to get an X-ray to investigate why her back pain has ramped up – after we thought we finally had her pain meds adjusted properly. I admit I’m operating on not a lot of sleep, mostly because I was worried about what is going on.
Right now, I’m trying to breathe and not make something into a crisis before its time. Maybe it’s just a pulled muscle from PT. Not really crisis du jour.
Please?
[Update from Friday night: My mother-in-law’s doctor decided to just let things ride for the weekend and she improved through the day today. So fingers crossed that we make it through the weekend crisis-free, awaiting a previously scheduled Monday afternoon doctor’s appointment.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “-jour-“: add a prefix or suffix to complete it or use it as the French word for “day.”
Please join us! Details on how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1115/
Joanne Corey 