Spirits In Peace Blog

Late last evening, I, and many others in the literary community, learned of the passing of poet and publisher Sondra Ball. This is a great loss, and one need only type her name into a web search to gain an inkling of this woman’s remarkable accomplishments.

In a world too often replete with pretension and elitism, Sondra was one of the genuine ones who cared for literature and poets as opposed to mere person gain and advancement.

Sondra lived in New Jersey with her husband, Mario Cavallini, and she and I often exchanged notes about the weather - especially signs of spring and the beauty of autumn, relative  to the nature poetry we both so loved.  Since its inception in 1997, her e-zine, “Autumn Leaves” was an excellent forum wherein aspiring poets could be published. It was published twice monthly and apparently received 300,000 hits monthly, which shows both the magnitude and the quality of this remarkable woman’s undertaking. One might wish to peruse the following link:One final edition of Autumn Leaves will be posted at that site.

http://www.sondra.net/al/

One final edition of Autumn Leaves will be posted at that site.

Recently, Sondra’s breast cancer, which had been in remission for many years, returned, and notes from Sondra became less frequent. Unfortunately, the cancer was found to have metastisized. In the early morning hours of in the first hours of Tuesday, March 16th, Sondra passed away after a difficult illness.

I have written the following piece in memory of Sondra:

Often poetry is designated as spiritual and I suppose such a term might easily be applied to certain pieces that clearly have this type of focus. I view every poem as a gift, my Muse being most generous, and those who are poets, as contrasted to simply writing doggerel or cute little ditties, are often very aware that poems often arrive as if almost pre-written in some other dimension. The poem, in effect, chose the poet, as opposed to the poet sitting down and laboriously composing the poem, with many corrections and revisions necessary.

Such pieces present themselves as polished gems, with little or no editing required, and that often involving merely the correction of typographical errors. In many cases, one cannot type fast enough, as the mental and spiritual processes are occurring with such rapidity.

Thus, are not all poems in some way spiritual? If I were to forget about Spirit (if such a thing were possible) and attempt to write, what am I doing other than playing at penning poetry, as everyone does, say, in elementary school? In that case, I am simply doing a creative exercise, rather like knitting a sweater from a pattern.

The poem cannot be separated from the poet. They are one and the same; as the poem arrives as a gift of the Universe, the Oneness of which everything is a part, the poet cannot be divorced from his or her work.

Such is the nature of One, and as such poems to me are gifts of Spirit, and in some way spiritual.