chrisriddellblog:

A.F. Harrold.

Chris doing what he does best - lending his voice to make a poem sing.

In this case a little bit of art-about-art, poem-about-poetry thing of mine. One I’ve always been rather fond of.

I often think of a Garrison Keillor piece, from his 1989 collection We Are Still Married. It’s called How To Write A Letter and begins: ‘We shy persons need to write a letter every now and then, or else we’ll dry up and blow away’.
It ends: 'Probably your friend will put your letter away, and it’ll be read again a few years from now – and it will improve with age. And forty years from now, your friend’s grandkids will dig it out of the attic and read it, a sweet and precious relic of the ancient eighties that gives them a sudden clear glimpse of you and her and the world we old-timers knew. You will then have created an object of art. Your simple lines about where you went, who you saw, what they said, will speak to those children and they will feel in their hearts the humanity of our times.
You can’t pick up a phone and call the future and tell them about our times. You have to pick up a piece of paper.’