Year: 2024

june 24/SWIM

2.5 big loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
84 degrees
20+ wind gusts

Big wind gusts as Scott and I walked on the gravel trail to the lake. I wondered how choppy it would be — not bad. No waves forcing me to breathe on just one side. Felt stronger than last Wednesday.

I’m writing this entry the next morning. What do I remember?

10 Things

  1. swimming through a loose vine — wrapped around my shoulders for a moment — not sharp or scratchy
  2. a swimmer in a pink cap (this year’s cap color is an ugly bronze)
  3. a tangled patch of vegetation growing up from the bottom right by the buoy
  4. black, wet-suited arms beside me for a few strokes
  5. the water above, a dull blue
  6. the water below, a vague empty green
  7. no waves but sometimes it was hard to stay up on the surface
  8. the lifeguard’s kayak gliding by me, fast and smooth and red
  9. more vegetation from below in the middle of lake — how tall are these vines?
  10. last year, the far buoy was placed very close to the swimming area at hidden beach, this year it is farther out

Alice Oswald and Nobody

I’m having fun returning to Nobody, feeling like I’ve found some ways into AO’s watery dream-world. I love reading it and Lorine Niedecker and then swimming across a lake.

1

Reviewing my notes in my Plague Notebook, Vol 21 (!), I found this, from AO in “Interview with Water”: continuous present, dream time. This reminds me of Mary Oliver’s now and now and now, which comes up in The Leaf and the Cloud and “Can You Imagine”:

but now and now and now

Swimming across the lake is both a continuous present and not a continuous present. I’m not aware of time, but I do keep track of loops. Maybe each loop is its own continuous present? It would be interesting to try and get lost in the loops, to not count them. I can set up an alarm or a distance workout on my watch that will alert me when I reached a certain amount of time or distance. (How) would the dream-state be different in this loopy state?

2

I’d like to remember (memorize?) this part of Nobody which I imagine is about making poems:

About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms
and peered around and dived again and surfaced
and saw someone and dived again and surfaced
and smelt all those longings of grass-flower smells
and bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems
that hang in the chills above rivers

Those vaporous poems! The diving and surfacing and diving and surface! I love this as a description of a poet — me? — finding words hanging just above the surface. Could they be there for me today during my swim?

3

This definition of day turning to night — wow!

I’ve always loved the way when night happens
the blood is drawn off is sucked and soaked upwards
out of the cliff-flowers the way they worn out
surrender their colors and close and then the sky
suffers their insights all the shades of mauve green blue
move edgelessly from west to east the cold
comes ghostly out of holes and the earth it’s strange
as soon as she shuts her sky-lids her hindsights open
and you can see right out through her blindness
as far as the ancient stars still making their precise points
still exactly visible and then not exactly

june 23/SWIM

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

Yes! A wonderful morning swim. As usual, always a mix of excited and nervous before the swim, but once I entered the water, all of it went away. Not always easy — sometimes my back hurts or a shoulder or a foot — but almost always wonderful. I love the dream I enter below the surface and the confidence I feel slicing through the water and the warmth of muscles worked after. Nothing feels as natural as swimming across this lake.

10 Things

  1. the crooked line of orange buoys — the one closest to the big beach much further north
  2. the faint outline of vegetation reaching up from the bottom of the lake, just below me
  3. swimming through a net of green milfoil near the white buoy
  4. only the occasional flash of other swimmers — a bent, bare elbow, a black wetsuit, a yellow safety buoy
  5. the brief flash of “buoy” or “orange” or “triangle” in my head, then nothing — I listened and believed and swam towards it
  6. one menacing sailboat — an orange and red sail
  7. open, empty water with vague trees in the distance
  8. above the surface, vivid blue, below the surface, green with hints of blue and the faintest idea of yellow
  9. my hands stretched out in front of me in the water — pale, glowing, a sharp contrast with the dark water
  10. shafts of light illuminating the particles in the water, everything constantly moving

the best moment: Rounding the final orange buoy for the third and final time, heading back to the big beach, the sun came out from behind the clouds. Suddenly the water was a vivid blue when I looked up to sight or turned my head to breathe. When I went back under, everything a beautiful, rich green: blue, green green green green green, blue, green green green green. At some point a cloud came and the blue grew darker, not quite purple. I thought about Alice Oswald and Odysseus and purple robes and being purpled.

Alice Oswald and Nobody

Was thinking about this before my swim:

Well, as you know, I’m quite fascinated, even obsessed, you might say with Homer. And one of the things that really tantalizes me in Homer is what is the Homeric mind? Because I think it’s very different from a literary mind. And it seems not to be inside the skull, but to be out in the world. So, there is a particular simile in the Iliad, which actually that first bit of the poem is based on, where it talks about two goddesses coming from heaven to the earth. And they’re very physically described. They kind of fall down from heaven to the earth. And then when they land, they take little pigeon steps, steps like doves or pigeons. So you can really picture them. But the way their flight moves from heaven to earth is as a man, you know, as the mind flutters in a man who has traveled widely, so you can turn it the other way around and say the way a man thinks is like this incredibly physical flight of two goddesses coming down to earth a bit like pigeons. And that’s always really interested me, that for Homer, the mind has the limitations of a pigeon, if you like. It is this kind of … this physical thing that moves. So, if you imagine a place over the sea, your mind actually has to get there. So, even though it may be as fast as the light, it is physical movement.

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

I’m still looking for where in the Iliad these goddesses/pigeons are. And I’m still figuring out what AO might mean here. But it is helpful to read it beside these two parts of Nobody:

1/ page 1

As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely
and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere
I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind

immediately

as if passing its beam through cables

flashes through all that water and lands
less than a second later on the horizon
and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-form
floating on the sea-surface wondering what next

2 / page 30

When trees take over an island and say so all at once
some in pigeon some in pollen with a coniferous hiss
and run to the shore shouting for more light
and the sun drops its soft coverlet over their heads
and owls and hawks and long-beaked sea-crows
flash to and fro
like spirits of sight whose work is on the water
shading it blue and thinking

I wish I was there

or there

Is the Homeric mind restless? I wish AO would say more about what she means by the literary mind and its lack of movement. I agree, but I’d like it spelled out. Does my mind work this way when I’m out moving by the gorge, or swimming across the lake? Does it move through or above the water? Maybe it became a fish.

Here’s one more line from the interview that I want to respond to:

. . . feeling of characters who have been eroded by the weather and by the sea is really what I’m feeling in this poem. It’s a poem that just opens itself to the elements and gets kind of washed, it gets its features washed off. . . . I think that’s all part of the erosion, really, it’s like even the forms of visible things have been almost worn down to their abstract shapes.

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

Visible forms almost worn down to their abstract shapes — that’s how much of the gorge looks to me. Soft forms: trees, trash cans, big boulders.

june 22/RUN

3.15 miles
river road south/north
67 degrees
93% humidity / dew point: 65

Very tough on the legs! That dew point — ugh! Another difficult run. Still glad I did it. I heard some chattering birds and water gushing out of the sewer pipe near 42nd. Ran over puddles, slippery leaves, mud, recently re-tarred asphalt, dirt, roots. I remember looking at the river through the trees but I don’t remember what it looked like — probably a very pale blue or white, like the sky.

Inspired by all of my time with Alice Oswald lately, I’m thinking of starting Nobody again this afternoon. Listening to an interview she did with Kit Fan, back in 2020, I’m intrigued by what she said about her approach to writing it:

[The poem] sets out really to drown the reader. I wanted it not to feel like a sort of intellectual exercise where you would emerge kind of clarified and simplified, but literally to be as if you were inhaling water. … I find the people who I think get most out of it are those who don’t expect it to be conveying a thought, but expect it to be more like the experience of being outdoors, where you simply are assaulted by all kinds of different tunes and beings.

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

And here, AO talks about color:

Well, I always feel that the Odyssey is a very bright emerald green because it has this incredible sort of vegetative life in it. It’s like a plant that just cannot stop growing. You know, the sentences grow all over the place. So, even though it’s a poem about the sea, I actually feel that kind of bright green of spring leaves in it. But I mean, I did kind of quite terrifying things to my mind when I was writing this poem, because I got quite interested in theories of color and sort of trying to watch what my mind was doing, particularly looking at colors in water and how your mind will tell you that’s green because you know it’s a leaf, but actually when you look at it, it’s not because it’s in a black river. And so, just trying to notice what the mind does and try, as I’m always trying, to get away from my own mind and out into the world. I was trying to see what colors are beyond my mind. And I think they probably don’t exist beyond the mind. So, it was actually an experience of almost unsettling all my perceptions really.

And being stuck, and going nowhere — is this similar to my looping!?

So these stories don’t get anywhere. They’re all stuck. And I like sort of, you know, Celtic patterns that just go on and on doing the same thing. So I didn’t want to make a poem that got anywhere, really. I wanted a poem that was stuck, whose stories couldn’t quite move forward, that had simply been tossed about by the weather, really.

later (5 pm): At the risk of making this entry too long, I’d like to add a few thoughts/notes after reading part of AO’s Nobody again, having read it before in 2022. It was very helpful to listen to AO’s lecture, “Interview with Water” and listen to/read the transcript of her interview with Kit Fan.

Before the poem begins, AO describes the similar (using similar like she does in “Interview with Water” — not the same, but resembling but varied, like water by currents) stories of Agamemnon, whose wife was not faithful and Odysseus, whose wife was.

This poem lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.

Nobody/ Alice Oswald

It helped me to read that beside AO’s words in her interview with Kit Fan:

. . .the poem is very much a kind of strange reading of the Odyssey. The Odyssey I see is a beautifully patterned wedding hymn about Odysseus’s marriage to Penelope and how they are driven apart by the Trojan War, and then they come back together. But embedded in that story, you’ve got the opposite story, which is the wedding of Agamemnon who goes off to the same war and comes back and is murdered by his wife whose taken another. And it’s that reverse Odyssey that I was writing in this poem, partly because the poet who is abandoned on the island is part of Agamemnon’s household. So, from his point of view, the Odyssey is being seen differently, from that other, much darker story. 

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

Her use of darker here, reminds me of something she said in “Interview with Water”: “when you look at water, it allows you to exist twice but more darkly.”

june 21/RUN

4.15 miles
the monument and back
67 degrees
humidity: 91% / dew point: 65

Yuck! The air is so thick, everything heavy with moisture. We were supposed to have thunderstorms this morning — 90% chance — so I ruled out open swim, but they haven’t happened yet. Bummer. I bet it would have been a good swim.

I ran through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the summit hill and to the monument. Then I turned around and ran back, this time running south on the river road path instead of through the neighborhood.

10 Things

  1. 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  2. a strange whimpering, soft howling or moaning sound coming from under the bridge on the east side — a non-human animal? a bird?
  3. no rowers on the river
  4. a foul, rotting smell as I ran over the bridge — I thought of the rot* that Alice Oswald mentioned in “Interview with Water” and the scarlet rot that FWA told me about yesterday when he recounted some “Elden Ring lore”
  5. a dark, deep green everywhere
  6. flowers alongside the trail on the east side: green leaves, fanned like ferns, pale white or purple flowers, small, dotting the green
  7. new (or newly noticed) graffiti under the bridge on the east side — brick red, I think
  8. the dark reflections of tree in the water near the shore — so dark that they look like shadows to me
  9. the faintest trace of a sandbar under the bridge
  10. the usual puddles near shadow falls are back, almost covering the entire path

*AO and rot: “anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell. . .”

Here’s another Alice Oswald water poem that I uncovered in a dissertation about Oswald, Jorie Graham, and water!

Sea Sonnet/ Alice Oswald

Green, grey and yellow, the sea and the weather
instantiate each other and the spectrum
turns in it like a perishable creature.
The sea is old but the blue sea is sudden.

The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,
each point of contact biggens and is gone.
And when it rains the senses fold in four.
No sky, no sea – the whiteness is all one.

So I have made a little moon-like hole
with a thumbnail and through a blade of grass
I watch the weather make the sea my soul,
which is a space performed on by a space;

and when it rains, the very integer
and shape of water disappears in water.

Almost forgot: japan is a new word for me. Here are some definitions, both noun and verb:

noun:

  1. any of several varnishes yielding a hard brilliant finish
  2. a hard dark coating containing asphalt and a drier that is used especially on metal and fixed by heating — called also japan black

verb:

  1. to cover with or as if with a coat of japan
  2. to give a high gloss to

june 20/RUNSWIM

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls
65 degrees

Overcast this morning. Cool, but humid, sticky. Another run that wasn’t easy or effortless. Keep showing up. It will get easier or you’ll get better or it will (eventually) get cooler. I’m not too worried. Is it the lexapro, or am I just satisfied being able to get outside and move by the gorge?

10 Things

  1. the crater with the tube sock/Florida outline is gone, filled in yesterday
  2. a gnat flew in my eye — a fullness, than a small sharpness, then a watery eye, finally gone!
  3. a motorized scooter on the bike path — hey, you’re supposed to be on the road! (thought, not said)
  4. today’s color palette; green and gray
  5. dark mud, not gooey but slick
  6. laughing kids on a playground
  7. the surreys, all lined up at the falls, one being readied for a family as I ran by
  8. rushing falls, roaring creek, gushing sewer pipe near 42nd
  9. some loud rustling in the bushes
  10. passing a walker, a whiff of subdued perfume — fresh, floral / passing a biker, a sniff of cologne — fresh, earthy

At some point, looking up at the green trees, remembering green water, I thought about Alice Oswald and the connection between water and grief. Then I recalled Tony Hoagland’s poem about swimming and cancer and thought about water and relief.

a few hours later: It’s raining — a soft, light rain — right now (2:30 pm). I’m hoping that open swim will still happen at 5:30. Tomorrow it probably won’t: thunderstorms all day. Anyway, I’m continuing to listen to and think about Alice Oswald’s “Interview with Water.” Very cool! Here’s the next little bit:

Find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging wave that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang, “But Odysseus taking his bluish gown in his big hands drew it over his head and hid his face ashamed to let the Phaeacians see his tears.” The gown goes over the head like a wave, the human sits under its sea color with salt water pouring from his eyes. It is one of those places where the form of the poem hurries us forward, the form of the language pulls us back. Porfurion is a word with water inside it like a bucket down in the middle of a line. Already if you look hard at the word you can see the widow’s simile underneath it but Homer is not yet ready to make that gift. With magnificent theatricality, he draws a blue gown across the mind and we, like the Phaeacians, are left looking at it, waiting.

Homer is the foremost poet of the visible. Homer delights in surfaces, but the surface of water is complicated by transparency, and its transparency is complicated by refraction. Water is never the same as itself. Rivers can only exist as similarities, lakes reflect more than their own volume, and what’s more, when you look at water, it allows you to exist twice but more darkly. When you look at it again it evaporates as if moving in and out of existence — it simply requires a bit of sunlight then it reappears as frost. Perfectly symmetrical as if discovering pre-drawn diagrams in thin air. Then it reappears as tears so that any attempt to describe the surface of water tells you to hide your face and inspect your innermost thoughts. All these waverings are part of the word porfurion. The physics or nature of water is metaphysical meaning that its surface expresses more than itself.

Interview with Water

All of AO’s mention of surfaces makes me want to think about surfaces during my swim. I swim on the surface, wanting to stay with my head just below as long as possible. What does the surface look like or feel like when I’m breathing every five (or more) strokes? What if I tried every 2 or 3? What is the color of the surface — from above or below?

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
68 degrees

Wow, what a perfect swimming night! The water was warmer than the air temperature. The sky was white and heavy. Everything calm, quiet. I felt fast and strong cutting through the water, breathing every 5 strokes with the occasional 3, at least once, after 2. I tried to give attention to the surface. Just under the water, I watched my hands stretch out in front of me, covered in bubbles. The water was a beautiful deep (but not dark) green, with the feeling of deep blue and gray. I could see the sediment swirling. Above the water, the surface was silver, still.


june 19/RUNSWIM

2.5 miles
2 trails
64 degrees

A quick run before meeting my college friends for lunch. Cooler today. Heard the rowers. Spotted: at least 2 bright yellow shirts, one bright pink. City (or county or park?) workers were out re-tarring a few more spots on the trail. Hooray for less craters! Last week, they finally filled in the big crack that had white spray-paint around it, making it look like a tube sock or Florida (I’ve written about it before). I wonder if they’ll finally fill in the hole that’s been getting deeper every year? The one that would definitely twist your ankle if you stepped in it. I hope so.

I don’t remember hearing any birds or roller skiers or laughing kids, but I do remember the squishy mud on the winchell trail and the bug bite I got as I walked home.

color in/on/under water

Listening to Alice Oswald’s lecture, Interview with Water, I came across this great passage about color. First she’s mentions that poets performing The Odyssey always wore blue robes, then she mentions a line from book 8:

Odysseus
with his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak
of purple, and he covered up his face.
He was ashamed to let them see him cry.
Each time the singer paused, Odysseus
wiped tears, drew down the cloak (8:84-89)

Then she references something she said a few minutes earlier —

I keep a bucket of rainwater under my window and it delights me that green leaves reflected in a black bucket are not quite green. I don’t know what color they are. At certain moments, early in the day, they might be called pre-green, but then the clouds change or the wind moves the surface mark and all at once they seem bright dark and blind silvery then foggy emerald.

— and says this:

To go back to that bucket of water — to wave a blue gown above it and ask, What is that color which Homer calls porfurium? It is not blue exactly; it gets translated as purple but purple is a settled color whereas Homer’s word is agitated. It derives from the sea verb porfurion which means to roll without breaking, so it is already a fluid word, a heaped up word, a word with underswell, not a pigment but an emanation from the nature of water. To get a true sense of porphyrion you need to see the sea in it and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures missed colored unplowable and this is my favorite word it is a peritone meaning unfenced. If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. Yes I’m afraid you will have to find your way to the p volume of Johnson’s unwritten dictionary. There you will discover a dark light word an adjective for edgelessness — a sea word used also of death smoke cloth mist blood between bluish purple and cobalt mauve. It appears mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of backblowing glitters that the underswell moves sideways as when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart meaning his heart was a heaving not quite broken wave. It indicates a surface but suggests a depth a mutation of flatness or noiseless sheen, a sea creature, a quality of caves, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone, a type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell, a list of low sounds, an evening shadow or sea god, a whole catalogue of simmering grudges storms waves and solitudes or deep water including everyone who has drowned in it. To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light. to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams — find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang.

Interview with Water

Wow! So many wonderful things to do with this passage! For now, I want to think about how color works underwater. In an hour, I’m heading over to deep (at least, deeper than Lake Nokomis) Cedar Lake to swim across it. How will color work as I swim? Below water? Above? Is this agitated, moving purple similar to how I see all the time? (Yes, I think.)

swim: 4 cedar loops (= 2 nokomis loops)
cedar lake
72 degrees

The first swim at Cedar Lake! As I’ve mentioned here before, Cedar has a very different vibe than Nokomis. Hidden away, at the end of a gravel road. A small beach. No buildings, the only bathroom a port-a-potty. Chill lifeguards. Today the water was cold but (mostly) calm. Not too many swimmers. 2 lifeguards on kayaks, 2 orange buoys, too much vegetation growing up from the bottom of the lake. I overheard another swimmer mentioning the vines too.

color: Inspired by Alice Oswald, I tried to think about the color of the water. Cloudy, not clear. I could see the vines and the bubbles from my breathing and my hands entering the water but not much else. Not purple or blue but green — not dark green but pale green. Maybe some pale blue — yes — and light gray. Occasionally a shaft of light from above, a dark vine below. Textured bubbles. Not much to see, but not nothing there. Instead, everything small, packed, too dense to decipher. No color and too many colors. Impossible to pin down with “green” or “gray” or “blue.” Not grief, but uncertainty.

june 18/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
76 degrees / feels like 82
dew point: 71

Ugh! I knew it was going to be tough when I felt too hot even before I started running. More rain last night — enough to cancel our final community band concert — and more thick, sticky air this morning.

Greeted Mr. Morning! and Mr. Holiday. Saw Dave the Daily Walker but he was too far away to greet. Counted the stacked stones on the ancient boulder: 4. Heard some strange creaks below the trestle — what were people doing down there? Also heard the rowers on the river. Felt the sweat pooling on my face, my shorts sticking to my legs.

When the dew point temperature and air temperature are equal, the air is said to be saturated.

Observed Dew Point Temperature

Almost saturated — temp = 76, dew point = 71.

Looking through the trees somewhere near the trestle, I could see the river burning bright white — even the water looked hot!

Oh, this beautiful poem by Tony Hoagland! He died in 2018 (at the age of 64) from pancreatic cancer. My mom died from pancreatic cancer. It’s terrible. This poem was published in 2007.

Barton Springs/ Tony Hoagland

Oh life, how I loved your cold spring mornings
of putting my stuff in the green gym-bag
and crossing wet grass to the southeast gate
to push my crumpled dollar through the slot.

When I get my allotted case of cancer,
let me swim ten more times at Barton Springs,
in the outdoor pool at 6AM, in the cold water
with the geezers and the jocks.

With my head bald from radiation
and my chemotherapeutic weight loss
I will be sleek as a cheetah
—and I will not complain about life’s

pedestrian hypocrisies,
I will not consider death a contractual violation.
Let my cancer be the slow-growing kind
so I will have all the time I need

to backstroke over the rocks and little fishes,
looking upwards through my bronze-tinted goggles
into the vaults and rafters of the oaks,
as the crows exchange their morning gossip

in the pale mutations of early light.
It was worth death to see you through these optic nerves,
to feel breeze through the fur on my arms
to be chilled and stirred in your mortal martini.

In documents elsewhere I have already recorded
my complaints in some painstaking detail.
Now, because all things are joyful near water,
there just might be time to catch up on praise.

june 17/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
65 degrees / dew point: 61

Today’s word: saturated. What Lorine Niedecker aimed for in her water poetry. Not floating or dry but sinking and soaked.

Rain off and on all day. Maybe thunderstorms starting in the afternoon.

No rain as I ran, but everything was wet or dripping. Moist. My face, more moist than a sponge. The falls, gushing over the limestone then rushing down the gorge to the Mississippi.

Evidence of the rain and thunderstorms last night all along the trail. Above the oak savanna it looked like some creature had tore through the green, ripping small limbs and leaves off the trees and throwing them to the ground.

The parking lot at the falls was packed with cars. Not the best day to be at the falls — but maybe it was? A chance to witness the falls in full cry, I guess. Also a chance to get wet or slip in the mud. I thought I might, but didn’t.

Anything else? A black squirrel sighting, which reminded me of the line from “What Would Root”: scolded by squirrels in their priestly black

Discovered the poet, Maureen N. McLane this morning and was delighted by her serial poem about Mz. N. Requested the book from the library. Possibly an inspiration for some writing about Sara, age 8?

an excerpt from Mz N: the serial/ Maureen N. McLace

The child Mz N sat on her bed
and wondered: that tree
outside her window
shifted
when her eye
shifted. What to make
of that?

                                          §

Mz N and her siblings
had a dog for some time.
They went on vacation &
when they came back
no dog.
They asked the parents:
the dog?
who replied:
what dog?
And some people wonder
why others distrust the obvious.

Speaking of the serial poem — LN’s “Paean to Place” is considered one — here’s a helpful definition:

The serial form in contemporary poetry, however, represents a radical alternative to the epic model. The series describes the complicated and often desultory manner in which one thing follows another. Its modular form–in which individual elements are both discontinuous and capable of recombination–distinguishes it from the thematic development or narrative progression that characterize other types of the long poem. The series resists a systematic or determinate ordering of its materials, preferring constant change and even accident, a protean shape and an aleatory method. The epic is capable of creating a world through the gravitational attraction that melds diverse materials into a unified whole. But the series describes an expanding and heterodox universe whose centrifugal force encourages dispersal. The epic goal has always been encompassment, summation; but the series is an ongoing process of accumulation. In contrast to the epic demand for completion, the series remains essentially and deliberately incomplete.

Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem/ Joseph Conte

I had to look up a few words from this excerpt that I wasn’t quite sure of:

desultory: marked by lack of definite plan/purpose, not connected to main subject
protean: displaying great diversity or variety, versitle
aleatory: relating to luck, depending on an uncertain event or contingency

This idea of a serial poem as “an ongoing process of accumulation” is very cool and fits with my approach to Haunts and a story in long form.

june 16/SWIM

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees / choppy

A choppy swim. Fun, but not easy with my out-of-swimming-shape body. I didn’t swim at all this winter: sore back, neck, shoulders. Wow, do I love open swim! I was nervous before the swim, wondering again if I’d be too disoriented. Nope. I just kept swimming and made it to all of the buoys. I love how approximate open swim is; you don’t have to take the straightest, most direct line, you just need to stay on the right side of the 5 buoys and on the left side of the 4 or so lifeguards on kayaks.

10 Things

  1. the water felt COLD when I first entered, but wonderful as I swam
  2. a strange pale vine just below the surface
  3. small waves to my right, making it harder to breathe
  4. swells from behind making it hard to stroke on the stretch parallel to the big beach
  5. my eyes couldn’t see the far orange buoy, but my brain did: sighting, a voice in my head said, it’s straight ahead — this happens a lot, these days. The trick, to trust
  6. on the other loop: that same orange buoy in sight but so far away, seeming to get farther away with every stroke
  7. breathed: a mix of every 5 or 4 or 3, a few 2s when it was extra choppy
  8. more vegetation, pale, ghostly, reaching up from the bottom
  9. exiting the water, a woman speaking to some friends: I was nervous, so I didn’t wait. I already swam./ another woman: Did you like it?/I loved it!
  10. no birds or planes or strange noises underwater

An essay to return to: Friday essay: ‘an engineering and biological miracle’ – how I fell for the science, and the poetry, of the eye

Okay, I’m returning to it now (added a few hours later). I wasn’t planning to, but I read something in a recent New Yorker story that decided for me that I should. Two moments, one from the article and one from the story:

1

Iris presents to me with failing vision. Examining her eyes, I see “geographic atrophy”, little islands of missing retinal tissue worn away over time. This is a form of incurable, age-related, macular degeneration. It results in permanent loss of central vision, with peripheral vision remaining intact.

It’s not good news; my stomach tightens as I prepare to deliver it.

Iris replies, tearily, that she just lost her husband of 60 years. She’s now alone and becoming blind. I’m taken aback – what can one honestly say to this?

Sure, there are visual magnifiers, home modifications, other practical aids that may guardrail her physical safety. But her anguish goes beyond this; she’s on the edge of a personal precipice, and teetering. There’s electricity in the consult room, a lightning-rod moment for sure.

How might a poet view this scene?

Then, a few sentences later:

Good poetry must go further, seeking the patterns beneath the surface. What precisely is it about Iris that moves me so? She is losing things, important things. Witnessing this touches my deepest fears, knowing that, like an unwelcome house guest, loss visits us all, sometimes staying for good. 

As my Persian countryman Rumi wrote, “this human being is a guest house”. Losing our own physical abilities or our loved ones, what would become of us?

Distilling this further, what exactly is loss, its weight and texture?

Inversions,
your cherished glass of shiraz shatters
on the tiles, your laden table
upended. Warmth whistles
out through the cracks, cold rises up.
Midnight:
your reasons for living dwindle,
walking out the door
one by one.

Friday essay

2

Farah put up her hand. She said, “I don’t find it difficult to think about . . . ,” then paused in surprise at not being able to say “dying,” “about choosing not to live if I’m going blind.”

Beyond Imagining (fiction) / Lore Segal

Wow. I am not as old as Iris, and I didn’t just lose my husband, but the description of her vision loss (albeit a different condition) is the same as mine: all central vision gone, peripheral sight stays. I don’t doubt that many “Irises” feel this despair when confronted with this diagnosis, but it’s not the only way that people respond. It is not how I responded. It is, however, the way that most haunts our imaginations — the blind specter. I’d rather be dead than blind!

I’ve read the whole article, but I stopped reading the short story. I should return to it and see what happens. Maybe I’ll be surprised, maybe it will go deeper than the tired trope of the blind specter.

june 15/RUN

5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
72 degrees / dew point: 60

Whew! I was sure the dew point would be even higher. It felt very uncomfortable out there. And difficult. But I kept moving and didn’t push myself too hard. I ran to the bottom of the hill then walked up it. Then ran, walked, ran until I was back to the ancient boulder — no stones stacked on it today.

Last night RJP graduated from high school. I’m very proud of her for surviving it. I’m proud of myself too. It was very hard and I am tired. No more k-12 public school! Hooray! I loved many of the teachers and the music programs, but I won’t miss being subject to this schooling process.

RJP’s graduation was delayed by almost an hour because a fight broke out at the previous school’s graduation and someone was hauled away in an ambulance. FWA said he saw the guy, and he looked like he was probably fine and not in much pain. Other than the delay, the graduation was great. The awesome poet Bao Phi gave the address — so good! He, along with the student speakers, centered the experiences of BIPOC students.

10 Things

  1. white sky
  2. dark green mystery
  3. at least 2 specks in the sky — a plane? a bird?
  4. click clack — roller skiers powering up the franklin hill
  5. foamy water
  6. glowing orange shoes on a runner
  7. voices below near white sands beach
  8. one runner to another: well, that killed about an hour and a half — huh?
  9. a greeting from Mr. Holiday!
  10. a few days ago I mentioned something in orange spray painted on the sidewalk — it’s the outline of a cat (but not Garfield, I think?)

a section from Wintergreen Ridge/ Lorine Niedecker

Reading (again, for the 3rd or 4th time?) LN’s “Wintergreen Ridge,” I was delighted by her connections and associations:

Women saved
a pretty thing: Truth:

“a good to the heart”
It all comes down
to the family

“We have a lovely
finite parentage
mineral

vegetable
animal”
Nearby dark wood—

I suddenly heard
the cry
my mother’s

where the light
pissed past
pistillate cone

how she loved
closed gentians
she herself

so closed
and in this to us peace
the stabbing

pen
friend did it
close to the heart

pierced the woods
red
(autumn?)

Sometimes it’s a pleasure
to grieve