Hours in the Day
Published 8 December 2004
Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.
Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.
I've slowly begun to realize the danger of working full-time. It's a vortex. What was once a free-wheeling unstructured college life is now six hours within which I must squeeze business, pleasure and creativity. Pets—maintenance, feeding and entertaining—usually take about half.
I apologize, then, to my readers (both of them) whom have been lacking new content over the past few weeks. I am in the processes of creating a leaner, better maintained RyanCannon.com, so I beg you, be patient.
I have provided, at the bottom of this article, a form to join my mailing list, which will alert you every time I publish something new. No spam, promise. If you do not have access to a newsfeed reader or access to live bookmarks, this is your best way to get notice of updates quickly.
I have, however, changed my radio dial to International Public Radio in the mornings, and have been lucky to hear The Writer's Almanac. The show hosts a poem or two every day in addition to important dates of writers artists and other cultural events. As a writer and poet, I often speak with other writers and workshop with poets, and throughout these discussions I've always had one pet peeve:
Poorly choosen words.
Usually this takes the form of a metaphor that sounds good, but no matter how you look at it just doesn't make sense. I am taunted by the smell of hunger
, for example sounds really cool,but what does hunger smell like? Poverty could smell, drunkeness has a smell, but hunger…no. Hunger specificly lacks a scent.
The Writer's Almanac yesterday presented an excellent example of how to avoid this. In Last Hired, Mark Turpin Writes:
On Monday returned the man I fired
wanting the phone number of the laborer he loaned money to,
and stood while I wrote it out on a scrap of shingle
and the crew on the floor kept hammering
with the silence of three hammers tapping out different beats.
...
Hammers? Silent? Of course not. But maddening they must have been in the otherwise silent situation. The hammers are the focus that makes the silence so powerful.
Good Poems are hard to find, so I cherish the ones that make me gasp.