Gratitude 5

I am especially grateful to my assistant, Heidi Varian, who has shown an amazing determination and ability to help me structure and record my poetry. Thus, the world of poetry remains open and viable for me. What Heidi does is help me to work on my poems with huge amounts of patience, allowing me to dictate and revise, dictate and revise, dictate and revise. And then, she builds a readable, large version of small segments of poems on a huge computer screen that works much like a teleprompter. She paces the text to the rhythm of my voice so that I can read the poems and record them. This process allows me to participate in readings. By playing back these recorded versions of my poems. This allows me to promote my work like our new book The Art of Healing, with the use of I-phone, wireless Bose speaker, and playback capability. Like Borges, as I work with Heidi, I find my way into the magic of language as a supplicant, listening to mysterious inner voices that show up in my understanding of syntax and music. I am intrigued with a quote of Oscar Wilde, brought to me both from the essay of Borges and blogger Matt Reimann, “I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth created in critical days, and serving to remind us not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again till he has caught the secret of its melody, chanting in darkness the words that are winged with light.”