4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
9 degrees / feels like 0
50% snow-covered
The coldest run of the season, so far. All the layers, including the hand warmers, which I wouldn’t have used if I didn’t already have an open pair from FWA. No yaktrax today, and I (think I) regret it. I thought the path would be clear enough today without them, but I was wrong. My feet felt very strange when I first started running without the spikes (and without the more cushiony Saucony rides that I’ve worn all week — today I wore Brooks Ghost). It was hard, my legs felt heavy. I only wanted to to run a mile. But I kept going and by the time I got to under the Ford bridge I decided that I could keep going to the falls.
The creek is half frozen, and the water still flowing seemed thick and sluggish. Water was still rushing over the ledge, but there was less of it. About half of the falls is frozen with huge columns of ice.
10 Things
- the strong smell of weed in the 44th street parking lot
- the voices of kids playing on the school playground
- the river surface is more ice than water, and white
- very few people out walking or running
- the rumble of a park worker’s mini-truck at the falls
- empty parking lots at the falls
- empty benches, too
- the smell of a fire on Lena Smith bvld — coming from someone’s chimney
- the wind rushed through dead leaves on a tree — they sounded like rushing water
- the green gate at the falls’ steps is now closed and locked
I just checked out Jana Prikryl’s Midwood. It’s all about the middle of things, and midlife.
MIDWOOD 1/ Jana Prikryl
Out of the garment of the land
out of the
of
There in the ravine the place
that’s deepest,
bent
I found an interview with her, and found this last bit interesting:
So there is little punctuation, and I avoided titles at first because they’re so performative. Ultimately I realized that without titles the poems ran together too much, but I stuck to two-word titles to keep them all quiet. Many of the titles repeat words from the poem because often the extracted word pair, as a title, pulls new meaning or significance from the phrase. That kind of underlining, and the other kinds of repetition in the book, seem like ways of tightening the screws, bringing the writer and reader into a smaller and smaller room to study these documents together. Hopefully a transaction takes place that is confidential—somehow secret, transgressive, inexpressible in any other form.
Short Conversation with Poets: Jana Prikryl
I’m using repetition in my collection, but I think (or, I’m hoping, at least) that it creates more space, instead of less.
Random things that happened today:
first, an hour or so before heading out for my run, I got another rejection email about 3 of my poems. Slowly I’m getting better at not letting it upset me. Intellectually, I know how hard it is to get something published (5% acceptance rate, roughly), and how much it’s based on fit or reader/editor preference, or some other thing out of my control. Still, it can sting, especially when I really believe in something I’ve written. Today, I’m okay.
second, RJP had to go to a textile event for her textiles class, so I went with her to the Textile Center. Wow! So inspiring and exciting to see RJP in her element and tender as I thought about my mom, a fiber artist, who would have loved coming here.
Third, I’ve known about this song ever since I saw Camp in the theater, back in 1999 (or 2000?), but I don’t think I remembered that it was a Christmas song. I guess because it has turkey in the title, I thought it was a Thanksgiving song. A video of it being performed on The Ed Sullivan Show came up this morning, and I have decided it’s the Christmas song of 2025: