In June of 2025, I was all over the place, taking up old threads and starting new ones. No single theme, no systematic study, just jumping around from there to there to there.
1 june: Brian Teare, Companion Grasses, and translating journal entries/moving notes into poetry
2 june: Rob Macaisa Colgate, Heavenly Creatures, and what migh make a poem accessible — space to breathe and reflect, less words to hurt my eyes — accessibility as “meeting the needs of the reader”
4 june: an experiment to try — at the end of a run, quickly make a list of 10 words related to what you noticed. Later, explain the words, and/or use them in a sentence
voices identified in the margins — see Brian Teare, Companion Grasses, Alice Oswald, Dart and Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
5 june: Hardly Creatures, new forms to try: terms defined + table of contents as poem
8 june: Hardly Creatures and a new form: an original “artwork”, then an erasure of it, then a condensed version
9 june: rivering and swimming Sara and Anne Carson and rules of water and more from RMC and Hardly Creatures: a collection arranged like a museum with different wings, a series of bench poems for resting/gathering yourself — think about what benches at the gorge mean to me, descriptions of social media posts as alt-text (“Hopescrolling”)
10 june: 9 benches and Jay Hoppler and a return to the “still” and still life paintings
11 june: chants about the rain and rust in A. Van Jordan’s poem “Que Sera Sera”
13 june: Wallace Stevens’ “Tattoo” and light being like a spider
16 june: a new way of posting a poem: the poem in 1 column, my thoughts/analyses in the other. Today’s poem, “Love Poem with Tumor and Petrified Dog”
18 june: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and converting notes into poetry, Kristin Dykstra and using research in poems, and Lorine Niedecker and condensing in “Lake Superior”
19 june: Unseeing the Beheld, unseeing as a process of erosion, a practice of swimming
20 june: a new experiment to try that I’m tagging as “5.” Find all of the 5 letter words in a log entry and then turn them into phrases or ideas or lines for a poem
21, 22 june: naming, Anne Carson, and water words in The Anthropology of Water, like marble hands and a dark green geranium of ice
23 june: 3 threads — a murky mess (1), moving bodies death rearranging (2), the Homeric mind (3)
24 june: listening to layers of sound with CAConrad and floating with Anne Carson
25 june: a potential winter water project — ice dipping at lake nokomis!, and a new show for the Saturday Night Line-up: Under cover Peach
27 june: a chant to birds to memorize; a form fitter from Tomas Tranströmer; playing with the word “about”; a question: how many minutes/hours do I spend underwater during open swim season?
30 june: revisiting my colorblind plate test and thinking about what this test means to me — thinking of the dots in the plates as loops, circles, Os