{"id":1419,"date":"2010-02-22T16:37:36","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T20:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2015-06-05T14:20:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T18:20:37","slug":"poppies-in-february","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/?p=1419","title":{"rendered":"Poppies in February"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"Photobucket\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of the many things I don’t do that cause me a small pang from time to time, like speak a language other than English,
\nkeeping a book of poetry on my reading table ranks probably in the mid to low range on the list of regrets. A small twinge, barely a pang,
\nunless someone quotes Rilke or Rimbaud or really any poet they truly love. Then my twinge swells to a full-size pang. For a while at least.
\nSoon I’ll be back to my mostly non-fiction reading habits.<\/p>\n

Yet I can’t look at a poppy without having the incantation “little hell flames,” pop in my head, from Sylvia Plath’s poem on poppies from Ariel<\/em>.
\nAnd I’m one that never<\/i> remembers anything I’ve read verbatim, so this doubly astonishes me. In fact, I had to look up the title, which
\nis “Poppies in July,” a cold, bitter poem of betrayal, of which I retained just those three words that, 20 years later, incongruously enough,
\nI still mentally recite in delight at the sight of….poppies.<\/p>\n

Which just proves that, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, when asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, you can lead a horticulturist
\nto culture….but you can’t make her miserable with sad poems when spring is here.<\/p>\n

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Of the many things I don’t do that cause me a small pang from time to time, like speak a language other than English, keeping a book of poetry on my reading table ranks probably in the mid to low … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[35,36],"tags":[14,13,15],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paNJ2E-mT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65840,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions\/65840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agrowingobsession.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}