Text matters

These four pears come from the garden of Grazingllama. She pulled them out of her bag for me when we met for lunch today at this sweet little park in downtown Portland. We met through Blip, and I posted the obligatory “Blipmeet” photo of her two years ago . I’m blipping her pears because I want to talk about her journal, and about text in Blips. There are many journals I subscribe to just for the writing. The photographs are as good as anybody’s, but it’s the writing that calls me back.

Grazingllama specializes in the six-word poem (a form I think she invented), and she scatters these throughout her journal and often comments on my blips with six-word poems. When I posted Chris’s story two blips ago, she wrote,

“A piece lost

We look everywhere”

In one of her own blips, celebrating high summer on July 22, she observes, “All year, we live for this.”

Sometimes six words won’t quite do it, so on the day after that last bit, she wrote, “I had to go to bed before the moon disentangled itself from the fir tree.”

Sometimes you need a bit of backstory; this one ends with a six-word poem so profound I’m still meditating on it.

I know that for some on Blip, English is not a first or even a third language, and I appreciate the efforts of those in places like Turkey and Brazil to say something in English; I don’t expect everyone to write poetry or spell-binding prose in English any more than I could do the same in Chinese, and I am not critical of those who don’t say much. Two of my all-time favorite journals almost never have more than a sentence of text. Silence is also eloquent. Sometimes a picture does stand alone. But this is my encomium to those English-speakers for whom words are as important as pictures.