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Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged

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The Wall Street Journal details its views of the flawed vetting process of Miers. || Laura and Harriet: Are the nominee's critics sexist? Get serious.

exceprt of a post I made in a poetry community

I wrote rap lyrics before I ever wrote a poem. So before I began fiddling with words academically, I had access to concepts like syncopation and internal rhyme. And surprise. Rap in the mid- to late eighties was all about one-upping someone (which I didn't like) or fooling the listener as to where the rhyme would end up next. I stopped rapping because I realized early on that I couldn't make up things on the fly--too shy, not witty enough.

When I started writing poetry, I don't know who I may have come across. In high school I gravitated to strong voices. Plath's "Daddy" had a profound impact on me insofar as I understood, and continued to be utterly floored by, the rhyme she put in the reader's face as well as the import of her subject matter. She understood the musicality of words. But I didn't seek out her poems; I just enjoyed what I came across in high school. "The Road Not Taken" also hit me, but that may be because my 10th grade English teacher made all of her students memorize it.

My first true influences I can identify are Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. The confessional drew me in and gave me permission to write about subjects I didn't know could be poetic. I loved Sexton's playfulness and seriousness about sonics, and Olds' ability to lay everything out for the reader inspired me to be as risky as she was, to say the things she did. This was about the time I was in college.

After college, my major influence has been Wallace Stevens, for his determination to force his words onto the page. He deliberately pushed the limits concerning informal rules about repetition and rhyme. He wrote nonsensical poems that feel like poems because of the way they sound. His poems did what Dickinson said poems should: took the roof off the top of my head. His poems exposed the inner workings of poetry for me, and his prose about poetics was liberating and eyeopening. (I heartily encourage everyone to read The Necessary Angel, if you haven't already. Or even if you have.)

My goal in writing poetry? To keep honing my skills. Poetry is like a sword that can just keep getting sharper and sharper.

sparkin' up (thanks, nwmann

Marijuana may spur new brain cells

Scientists said Thursday that marijuana appears to promote the development of new brain cells in rats and have anti-anxiety and anti-depressant effects, a finding that could have an impact on the national debate over medical uses of the drug.

Other illegal and legal drugs, including opiates, alcohol, nicotine and cocaine, have been shown to suppress the formation of new brain cells when used chronically, but marijuana's effect on that process was uncertain.

Now, a team led by Xia Zhang of the department of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon may have found evidence the drug spurs new brain cells to form in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, and this in turn reduces anxiety and depression.

Marijuana appears "to be the only illicit drug whose capacity to produce increased ... neurons is positively correlated with its (anti-anxiety) and anti-depressant-like effects," Zhang and colleagues wrote in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The paper was posted online Thursday.

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