The Red Engine Press January 2006 Newsletter and Wordweavers Yardspinners, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the paths, writes

Auden thought the purpose of poetry is disillusionment. That, dear reader, may be why I'm not much of rhyme or nice, but I like pictures of food, especially sweets. I prefer the melancholy, nostalgia and if a song sung, let discord to keep the reader alert to reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nursery, sunsets to be seen first hand a lantern, preferably while the hand with someone cute. The tendons of the best poetry is politics, introspection and abominable snowmen hardened among us - sometimes - by a look back at what we've done. Oh, and irony. That's better than the tiramisu and coffee with milk to keep people talking late into the night.

In the preface Hundred and One Famous Poems, published in 1929, Roy W. editor Cook talks about the great need for poetry in modern industrial era.

While the modern age, with podcasting and blogs, has become more accessible poetry, poetry is also considered frivolous - and certainly not profitable. It's a shame, because poetry Carolyn Howard-Johnson can make a sound air raid and still low. She can let ourselves be next to a guy who smells like Barbasol and is on course to war. The subtle message is clear Stop. Pay attention. Listen.

Most of us wrote poetry in high school that included protests against the parents, teenage crushes requests, or smell my life, what is the meaning of all the usual poems. As adults, we can bargain our anguish wine and cappuccino soaked to the page. Private therapy, often poetry can not be better, and that certainly helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal after a car accident. However, Reed returned the recovery of a passion for writing poetry that led to China recently.

Poetry is important in text messaging today's world of high technology, as evidenced by all websites poetry. It speaks of love, as in the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It has to do with eternal truths epic, as in Paradise Lost of John Milton. Capturing the cry of a generation, as in Allen Ginsberg's Howl. It reflects, as in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It makes a statement about freedom film behind bars, like in the movie Slam. We speak of the divine, as in the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. I agree with Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poetry moves us - or, if we happen to others. Poetry Howard-Johnson moved editor compulsive reader Magdalena Ball on behalf of paths to the list of compulsive reader Top Ten Reads of 2005.

Howard-Johnson scoffs at the portraits of poets in the poetry magazines, but clearly loves poetry

So long before he took a pen, wrote images
he imagined blue liquid, the stories of others,
your own.

It's easy to get caught in our own stories, without understanding them. Howard-Johnson peppers his poetry with images of travel, travel is not only global, but time. She says in Poetry, Quantum Mechanics and other trifles her critique group warns that complicates his poems with many layers

My ingredients, they say, are hidden
behind an opaque ceramic bowl;
its parent misunderstood.
We are children. Nobody says
us the truth of a large
dessert.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, which shows a young ballet dancer, dead, not gone forever, but it is not visible to us. That is the truth of a big  dessert. That's what poetry is about - revealing, recalling, describing, for reflection. Poetry connects past with present and future. Howard-Johnson will visit the historical, the war museum in Oslo, and reflect on the war that affected the entire world

Fjords of Norway to spill the drops of salt
on the faces like my father. Round faces. Dilute blue eyes
pale as the sky above them. Men who fought

Churchill as the voice crackled through the vacuum of contraband
tubes .

Howard-Johnson believes the war and now affects your family

Only a few days before
I came to this stimulus, I saw my grandson to war alone.
A sacrifice. A trade. For my father, who never left.

We feel a sense of place in poetry, but the place is fluid, as in the work of Howard-Johnson - a flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City can take her own childhood home, where his mother was washing a sheet every night . The units of time and place in a good drama or short story can be set to the poetry - though often the poet, painter, wants to focus attention on time, place, concept. Good poetry can tell a story or capture a mood in both directions.

Dr. James Ragan, director of the University of Southern California Master's Program in Professional Writing where I graduated in 1999, says in an interview quoted in the Master of Professional Writing website

You want to be tested. Ask yourself, is my time here will have the meaning I need to have Poetry has given me that sense. But then I had to write at a level that allowed me to cross borders and time, and that is the challenge of creation.

Ragan, like Howard-Johnson, strives to universal themes. The personal and the universal are not mutually exclusive. A poem can be sprinkled with personal details, but can capture a common history (the Second World War), the need for tolerance (a favorite theme in the work of Howard-Johnson), aging, fear that a poet has begun too late in life that capture Howard-Johnson Running a left reel

Now the old dark images, pulled taffy,
took the merengue, which melt, the struggle in anonymity.

Whether there is to say, his art has been inactive for years,
tools fallow, and now, now there is so little time.

With poetry, is not the way that matters - many college-age poets and their older colleagues, produce reams on reams of the same poem at all times. William Wordsworth was never the same from poem to poem, Ginsberg poetry went through stages; Arlo Guthrie was Alice Slaughter Restaurant, This Land is Your Land and the post-Katrina anthem played so many times the City of New Orleans. Emily Dickinson's poems have a common style, but they are all different. While common themes and images (such as cooking and desserts, as she points out) is threaded through chapbook Howard-Johnson, his poems do not give you the feeling you're hearing the same story over and older.

Dessa Byrd Reed said it best during the night of writers at Barnes and Noble in Palm Desert Poetry is the language of surprise. The surprise in this modern world is that our language, with his insults, That's hot phrases, e-mail shorthand (not inspired by eecummings) which inspired the book Eats, Shoots, and leaves, leaves room for yet poetry and beauty.

Does this mean that a poem has to be deep and important to be meaningful and beautiful You may have heard heavy bombastic poems on the meaning of everything. Lobo gentleman, a poet of Ann Arbor, Michigan, scoffed at teachers whose dusty books sitting unread in university libraries. While the classic poems may demand more of our time and attention, making it easier to read a thoughtful twenty pages on the meaning of a fly on the wall (although a fellow poet and medical student after the University of Michigan was a great poem of a fly.)