2.25 miles
2 trails
70 degrees
14 years ago today, I started running. I wanted to mark the occasion with a longer run, but it’s warm and I don’t have time. This morning we move RJP into her first apartment. It’s difficult to put into words how I’m feeling. I will miss her being here, but I’m not sad. I’m excited for her and for me. She’s ready, and I am too.
10 Things
- bugs
- breeze
- drip drip drip
- mulching leaves
- bird chorus
- hazed surface
- distanced
- shrill
- dark green
- wood chipped
Something new to try: if I look at this list in a few days, are these words enough to remind me of what I noticed and experienced on this run? Future Sara, let us know!
Discovered this book today, Hardly Creatures. It looks amazing! I found out about through Poetry Daily, which is where I’m finding out about most of my new favorite poets. I think this should be an early birthday present to me! (update: bought it!)
I found out about this book from this interview, which was linked to on Poetry Daily.
I want to remember this part:
The question I asked at the very beginning, before writing many poems from this, was: what would accessible poetry mean, maybe not in the ways that mean “easy to read” or “intelligible,” but as in “meeting the needs of the reader”? How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader? That questioning drove the whole book, the individual poems themselves, and especially the access symbols.
JGJ: “Meeting the needs of the reader” is exactly it. I felt like needs I didn’t even know I had were accounted for while reading this collection. Sometimes there’d be a poem that was just the title, and the rest of the page would be blank. Those moments helped me realize that I actually needed to just sit and take the previous poem in, because maybe it had a lot of heavy material, or had a lot happening in it. Those moments give the reader their own authority over the reading experience. One could choose to just sit there in the blank space, or choose to reread the poem, or move on.
There’s one poem, “History of Display,” that really stuck out to me. While reading, the poem was at once being really guiding and gentle, but didn’t let that tenderness stop it from criticizing the absurdity of our ableist world. How did you learn to strike such a balance in your writing, of making sure to meet the needs of your reader, while also remaining critical?
RMC: I paid a lot of attention to my own experiences reading. I’m not always the best reader… I’m a very tired and sleepy person, and I would sort of pay attention to things like, Okay, how many poems can I get through before I feel like I need to stop? Or, What order of poems is helpful to keep me reading? If while reading I encounter a super dense, lyrical poem on one page, enough to make me think, I hope the next one’s shorter, and then the next one would be just as dense, it would pull me out of the work. I would feel bad about that because it’d be wonderful work, but because my needs weren’t being met, I wasn’t able to give my fullest attention to the work.
My inclination towards form was very helpful, because it helped to break apart the book into smaller units, poem by poem, and then wing by wing. It was a lot of reading, paying attention to how reading felt, and thinking about what made me feel better when I was reading.
I can’t read a lot of words; it hurts my eyes/brain and I often fall asleep. I’m drawn to shorter forms that I can easily hold in my head. One approach to accessible could be making all the words available in a recording, but I’d rather reduce the number of words altogether!