Again, my bike-life has taken a back seat to my music-life. I can only manage one ridiculous side-project at a time. Hmph.
Not so for the new poet lauriate of these United States. It happened like this:
In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”
“Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer?” The answer came back as a question, she said. “Do you like it?”
“So it was quite simple for me. I went home and began to work.”
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