Looking Backwards and Asking Why

     This blog is about returning to a place in my mind (Ridgewood in the 1960s and 1970s), and commenting upon how it seems some 30+ years later. The poem cited below by Joyce Sutphen describes this process and alludes to one of the best poems of a Romantic period poet to illustrate the point. You don't have to know the poem to understand what she is saying about returning to place which you once regarded as being larger than life, and seeing it now as being much more manageable than you previously believed. I guess that is what's called being a grown up. The Wordsworth Effect by Joyce Sutphen Is when you return to a place and it's not nearly as amazing as you once thought it was, or when you remember how you felt about something (or someone) but you know you'll never feel that way again. It's when you notice someone has turned down the volume, and you realize it was you; when you have the suspicion that you've met the enemy and you are it, or when you get your best ideas from your sister's journal. Is also-to be fair-the thing that enables you to walk for miles and miles chanting to yourself in iambic pentameter and to travel through Europe with only a clean shirt, a change of underwear, a notebook and a pen. And yes: is when you stretch out on your couch and summon up ten thousand daffodils, all dancing in the breeze.