Wide-Awake City Poetry is what makes sure we are awake.

It's start-over day! 

This blog is going through a transformation.  Same address, new plan.  From here on out, I'm going to use it to post (mostly) poems.  Usually other people's poems, maybe sometimes mine, maybe sometimes some other wordy things or facts or lists.  (For example, look for "Your favorite word that rhymes with ___________" posts.) 

The new title comes from an Annie Dillard essay.  I love Annie Dillard, and I think she is one of the most wide-awake-sounding authors I've ever read.  Her powers of observation sometimes make me feel like my eyes aren't even open.

This line comes from an essay called "Total Eclipse" in Teaching a Stone to Talk.  In it, she and her husband are going to great lengths to get a good view of an eclipse, including driving five hours through the mountains where an avalanche had just happened, and hiking up a hill on a very cold morning.  It was actually February 26, 1979, in the same month that I was born. 

After describing the eclipse in apocalyptic words and colors, she writes this:

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up.  We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust.  As adults we are almost all adept at waking up.  We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it.  yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge.  We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.  Useless, I say.  Valueless, I might add- until  someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. 

Hope you like it.