2.4 miles
river road, south/north
77 degrees
humidity: 80%/ dew point: 72
Hot today. No sun. Oppressively green. Decided to do a short run with headphones. Listened to Lorde and Beck and can’t remember who else. Saw some runners, walkers, bikers. No river views. No bird songs. No Daily Walker or the tall octogenarian in his running shorts, walking the trail. As I ran down the hill above the tunnel of trees glanced down–a thick blanket of dark green. It would probably be fine to run in that tunnel, even if I encountered someone; it seems like the real risk is being inside with other people. Still, I’m not planning to run it anytime soon.
Finished my third plague notebook–a black medium sized Field Notes notebook. These notebooks are a mix between my own notes/thoughts + quotations from books I’m reading + poems I’m liking. A commonplace book or M Foucault’s huponemata. I’d like to scan the notebooks and put them online but that seems pretty tedious and challenging for me, with my questionable vision.
Found this interesting one word image poem the other day by Aram Saroyan:
Very cool, although difficult for me to see, with my weak central vision. Makes me think of my Snellen Chart poems. I would still like to try and publish my chapbook–when I cannot see straight, I will see sideways.
update, 14 april 2024: Yesterday I mentioned this eyeye poem to Scott and when he asked what it meant, I had an answer, but not one that I was completely satisfied with. So I looked through my notes and found an article that I had archived about one-word poems and Saroyan. This bit seems helpful in understanding the poem:
Saroyan’s isolation of the single word had powerful effects: It denarrativized and decontextualized language, and it placed the word, typically a noun, in stark relief. In a letter which accompanied the poem, Saroyan wrote to artist Vito Acconci in September 1967 that
“I’ve discovered that the best work I can do now is to collect single words that happen to strike me and to type each one out in the center of a page. The one word isn’t “mine” but the one word in the center of the page is. Electric poems I call them (in case anyone starts throwing Concrete at me)—meaning that isolated of the reading process—or that process rendered by the isolation instant—each single word is structure as “instant, simultaneous, and multiple” as electricity and/or the Present. In effect the single word is a new reading process; like electricity—instant and continuous.”
Aram Saroyan and the Art of the One Word Poem/ Paul Stephens
Saroyan also did this poem, which I encountered on twitter about a year or two ago:
The eye word poem is also a play on a palindrome.
Palindromes
- eye
- eve
- madam
- tot
- poop
- refer
- racecar
- level
- kayak
- never odd or even
- Madam, I’m Adam
- Do geese see god?
- Sara’s or Saras
In looking up palindromes (I was having trouble figuring out my own), I discovered this delightful variation: semordnilap. A word that spells another word backwards.
- stressed (desserts)
- dog (god)