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October 17: Today my rescuer* is Marton Koppany, who e.mailed me a poem yesterday about which he said, "This morning I saw Tim Willette's beautiful piece with an accent upside down (and 'sun' and 'rain' and 'drain') on your site":
* from having to continue with menteforms or figure out something else to write about here
 I told Tim this piece was "fun--'brain sinus?' with 'sprain' amusingly, and 'sun is brain' or 'brain is sun' lyrically there, too. Not sure of the significance of the upside-down apostrophe, or reversed comma. A pointer. It makes some kind of visceral sense to me, but little conceptual sense. So far."
I always am taken by the mistakes and omissions my responses to poems often have. The punctuation mark is reversed and upside-down, whichever it is. No big deal--I was rushing. Even rushing, though, I should have mentioned, "drain," which is there and fits as a kind of synonym for "sinus." I definitely saw the d but "brain" hums too much in my brain when I see it for me to think of anything else, I guess. The omission of mine that most fascinates me, though, is of "rain," so perfectly there with "sun," but I just didn't see it, maybe again because of "brain." But "brain" is still there! It and the rest concatenate a rather full outer weather cycle with an inner one.
Back to Marton, who continued, ". . . and wanted to mention to you an interesting coincidence. There's a piece of mine online at Crag Hill's Scorecard (it was put up ten days ago or so), which tells a similar story. It was inspired by Crag Hill's Six Word Story: "I cried; spinach goes to seed", and it is dedicated to him. Here I'm sending it attached. Its full title is: "Forecast for Crag Hill":
 Gorgeous piece. Marton has become possibly unique at minimalist, sharp in all senses, combinations of punctuational poetry and postcardic visual poetry (and, remember, I sincerely believe the best post card scenes are as good as representational illumagery can get). As is frequently the case, I have a strong, favorable reaction to what he's made, but am hesitant to try to explicate it. As always, I'll go ahead and try, anyway. I see it as a happy rejoinder to Crag's poem--an ellipsis ( . . . ) taking a stormy day into a bleak night . . . where spinach begins to sprout. The upside-down and reversed comma in the clouds shrinking into less relaxed periods raining downward rights itself in my favorite thing, spring. Which pushes into a night in which sun has turned to moon, to represent winter. But, ho, I'm sure I've gotten less than halfway to a full explication. I'm also sure that it is wonderfully effective as "nothing" but an illumage, nothing but an arresting scene containing clouds and punctuation that make archetypal statements about language, abstract thinking, primal realities like sun, moon, clouds, the seasons, life, you-name-it--all of them beyond narration, just there.
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