August Blog Bash, Day 33 - Darrell Lindsey @haikupoet1 (Sept. 2)

Welcome to the Debut of the August Blog Bash 2012!

I am very much excited and honored to be hosting this new feature series... and it is a great way to end the summer!  This Blog Bash is an impressive talent showcase of poets, artists, and writers/authors from all walks of life.  For each day of this month, one individual will be featured here on this blog, at Origami Lotus Stones, my Twitter (hashtag will be #augblogbash), my Facebook community page, and on my blog page on Writing Our Way Home.  Please be patient while I post on all platforms. 

**Please note that all authors/artists have given me permission to post their work on the following platforms/sites I have just mentioned.  Please do not plagiarize, modify, reproduce, or distribute any work without permission from the original authors/artists.  Thank you!** If you are interested in participating in this Blog Bash, feel free to check out the details here.

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Today's Feature:  Darrell Lindsey

In "Meditation on An Artist," I love the caricature of the artist in this poem.  There is a sense of wonder and mystery behind the artist himself.  For me as the reader, the questions I kept asking are "Why?" such as "Why does the artist paint people in those particular ways in stanza one?  Why is his home a 'ramshackle cabin'?"  I also love the sense of ambiguity because it leaves the imagination and interpretation up to the reader.  For instance, we can only wonder how the artist's relationship is like with his father, or why the artist finds fascination in the dark/broken things (or dark humor) in his subjects.  Finally, Lindsey captures the essense of all things art in that as part of human nature, we will never cease to discover for ourselves "what it means to be human."  Therefore, art is just a translation (or even a transformation) of that human essence.

In this tanka, there is a subtle hint of bitterness and humor (irony) in the speaker's relationship with another person.  I love the contrast between the sorting of junk or "recyclables" in the "blue bag" versus the non-sorting of the "years of love"--that is, something that is tangible versus something that is not.  From a reader's standpoint, we can see how unstable this relationship is, or perhaps it is a relationship that has lost its substance some time ago and eventually dissolved.  And sadly, what is left from this relationship is the "blue bag / of recyclables."  This tanka (more like a kyoka) captures a universal experience we can all relate to. Wonderful work, Darrell!  Thank you so much for sharing and being one of the contributors!  (NB:  Text arrangement on MS PowerPoint by Kathy Uyen Nguyen.  Please note that text/graphics will be in this format or something similar.)

To check out more of Darrell's work, you can click on the following link(s): Darrell Lindsey:  The Haiku Foundation (profile) Darrell Lindsey:  Poets & Writers (profile) Book at Popcorn Press (book available for purchase) @haikupoet1 (Twitter) Please do promote this new feature on Facebook, Twitter, etc.!  Thanks so much for all the support!  And look, my blog now has buttons (see below) to make your life easier!  Come back tomorrow for a new artist/author feature!