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About ten years ago I lived on the Canadian West Coast together with a lovely family and quite a few foreign students from Bresil, France and Japan. I wonder what has become out of the little boy. I also wonder what has become out of my French Au pair children. I wish the best for all of them. But I want to talk about a trip to California I did with a friend of mine. We went to San Francisco by Greyhound Bus. Long distances but it was fun. I did not have flowers in my hair but on my mind because I had always wished to go to San Fran. I did some typical touristy things of course but what impressed me most were the Sequoia trees near the city… The city is pretty, too, though. I like original means of transport like the cable cars but most of the time I walk when I am on holiday. I let myself to be carried along… Most of the time. But I went to City Lights Bookstore on purpose. I’ve always loved bookstores and libraries. A bookstore is like an oasis in a bustling city. You can retreat and submerge in an ocean of literature, or just one poem…

I got the collection of poems ‚A Coney Island of the Mind‘. Ferlinghetti considers his poems to be „a kind of circus of the soul“ (p.8). That is a great description of poetry. Some poems express a feeling of great joy, joy doing somersaults… But there is also the feeling of sadness and melancolia omnipresent in poetry and in circusses. I once stayed with an English lady from Middlesbrough when I did an internship in the North of England. We had tea and she gave me a poetry book. Second-hand. I found it great because there were commentaries from other people, which allow you a glance into their thoughts. I will look at the book again for sure…

The poem I would like to present here is called „Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass“. I think everybody must have experienced something similar as Johnny Nolan, whoever that is. I leave it uncommented:

„Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass“

Kids chase him

thru screendoor summers

Thru the back streets

of all my memories

Somewhere a man laments

upon a violin

A doorstep baby cries

and cries again

like

a

ball

bounced

down steps

Which helps the afternoon arise again

to a moment of remembered hysteria

Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass

Kids chase him

 

Pobrecito.

 

 

Good morning! My name is Doris Anne and I would like to welcome you to my literary blog “Paraules i pensamientos”. I want to write in English to use it as a lingua franca to reach, first of all, as many of my friends as possible and of course, secondly, other people from different backgrounds interested in literature . Of course, this makes things a little bit more complicated for me but it’s also a challenge to find the right words in a language that is not my mother tongue. I’ll briefly explain why I have chosen the title of this blog, “Paraules i pensamientos”, i.e. “Words & Thoughts”. I would like to use this blog to present works of literature: poetry, short stories, drama and novels. Little by little… Just a few ideas for each work of art. A few thoughts for many words if we deal with a novel for example. Or a few thoughts for a few words when it comes to poetry with its sometimes incredibly dense and complex language. I would love to get some sort of feedback (and/or corrections). You can use the contact formular to get back to me if you want to.

The first book I would like to deal with is called “Une rose seule” by Muriel Barbery. I’ve found it by chance. Maybe it was not accidentally: The book has a beautiful cover. You see a woman’s face, or let’s say half of it. The woman’s mouth is painted in bright red and on the right part of her face, the one we can see, there is a tree with its branches reaching to the sky, the clouds, that is her hair. I think it’s a beautiful picture and it made me probably buy the book and read the story of Rose, a young woman, who goes to Kyoto in Japan to follow in the tracks of her dead father, thereby learning a lot about the Japanese way of thinking. The story is interrupted by little chapters with beautiful anecdotes from Japanese history and mythology. I marked quite a few sentences. These sentences are like little treasures for me. Maybe I’ll write them on cards and but them into a little box. So let me tell you the little anecdote: There are thousands of prune trees in the courtyard of a temple in Kyoto but Issa, a marvelous poet, only walks around before the blossoming of the trees. When the first blossom appears, he leaves the courtyard to come back the following winter. When people, worried about his taste, talk to him he just laughs and says: “J’ai attendu longtemps dans le dénuement, à présent la fleur est en moi.” (“I’ve lived in misery for a long time. At present, the blossom is within me.”) One sentence. Beautiful language. Beautiful thoughts. Beautiful.