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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Off the Cuff / My Other Journal #759093 added August 21, 2012 at 1:48pm
Restrictions: None
Net Surfing: Poetry with the Quija Board?
Who’d have thunk!
This morning, to clear my head, I surfed the net (I think that rhymed).
Anyway, first I read an article in Writers Digest about the new book by Robert Haas WRITING 21ST CENTURY FICTION, about to be published.
In it, the author says what I have firmly believed (for myself) for a long time. That is, to stay away from the popular that sells, the flavor of the times, just to get published, but to concentrate what comes from the inside and reflects human truths, “moving beyond what is easy and comfortable to write what is hard and even painful to face.” Then he says to get over the trends and write 21st century fiction by “becoming highly personal.” I believe it, but it is so difficult to do. My question is how would I or any other writer know that we are not lying to ourselves when we are writing of our "highly personal truths"? Maybe the answer is somewhere inside the book, but I won’t know it until it is published.
Then I followed a Twitter link to an interview in Paris Review of summer 1982, with James Merrill (1926-1995).
I had no idea that this poet used a Quija Board to “channel” his poetry, the board made by him on a cardboard. Because during those years when James Merrill was tinkering with his board I was very busy in my life doing unrelated things, I didn’t get a wind of this trend, and we didn't have the internet then.
Poets have always done strange things, and I’d fear to irritate a dead poet, but this Quija Board thing made me chuckle.
From The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, published in 1982. In this book, he talks all about his ventures on the Quija Board.
“Correct but cautious, that first night, we asked
Our visitor's name, era, habitat.
Ephraim came the answer. A Greek Jew
Born AD8 at Xanthos. Where was that?
In Greece WHEN WOLVES & RAVENS WERE IN ROME...”
Now that I have written this, I hope and pray the spirits don’t break my already idiosyncratic laptop.  
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