March’s Mess (2024)

I’m calling this month’s challenge, March’s Mess, because it was all over the place with ideas, and sloppy with starts and stops. One promising poem, or series of poems, came out: Birding. Also, many promising ideas or threads of thought to follow in the future.

A Poem, A Practice

On March 6th, I decided to write a bird triptych: 3 poems about how I see birds. Each poem would use an Emily Dickinson poem and would be in my 3/2 running form. Over time that idea transformed into my current birding practice: outside, while moving — or, at my desk — notice the birds. Turn what I noticed into a poem in the 3/2 form that describes how I “see” birds through my peripheral or my dead cone cells or without seeing at all. This practice is a great opportunity both to work on turning what I notice into poetry and to describe how I see (or don’t see) the world.

Threads of Thought

body and soul

  • 1 march: where do mind brain soul and spirit fall? Ed and the process of transcending the self involving feet treading and the repetitions of a beating drum and a religious ceremony (a service) and bells tolling/ringing and moving beyond reason and Knowing
  • 2 march: the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world | Courtney Dauwalter (CD) and how we can change the stories we tell ourselves when we’re in pain | I need a new story — new stories? — about my aging, anxious body | an opportunity for me to pay attention to a body that had been neglected for decades | Emma Bates talks about greeting the pain like an old friend.
  • 3 march: What if the soul was populated by selves? what if Sara was a city, not one Self? or a lake — Lake Sara? or a gorge? or a river — the river Sara?
  • 19 march: haunting as untethered and out-of-body, (day) dreaming, ED, Homer Simpson

ekphrastic poetry/vision

clocks / pace / rhythm

  • 6 march: Inspired by my 2023 entry on march 6th 2023 — my pace = 3/2 | pausing stopping suspending time
  • 8 march: references to time in poetry and Robin Wall Kimmerer

silence

  • 7 march: Goodman’s types of silence | poems with lines about silence | data silence

bells

  • 10 march: meanings for bells, a poem, bells’ cousin, wind chimes

line breaks

shadows

20 march: as more real than the “actual” thing; crossing the path; a poem

secret life of plants

  • 22 march: Stevie Wonder, 1970s and the plant craze, talking fungi, Robin Wall Kimmerer

making the strange familiar

  • 27 march: being familiar as a form of knowing, poetry as explaining my strange new world

Haunted again by Haunts

On March 10th, I returned to my haunts poems and attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to rework them in ways that would satisfy and allow me to move on. Decided near the end of the month that this satisfaction might not ever happen, or at least not for sometime. Until then, the haunts poems will not just continue to haunt me, and I will continue to haunt them.

  • 10 march: haunts, some main themes and bells
  • 13 march: Lorine Niedecker, water, stone, erosion
  • 14 march: Lake Superior/Lorine Niedecker; Alice Oswald/Dart River; Susan Tichy/Shetfield
  • 16 march: agates and Lorine Niedecker
  • 19 march: haunting as untethered and out-of-body, (day) dreaming, ED, Homer Simpson, bees in bonnets, obsessions

Will April be as much of a mess? Possibly. Reading back through these entries, I think I should keep pushing at the ekphrastic. More gathering vision and ekphrastic resources. More reading and reading Kimmerer and Kleege and Dilliard on seeing. More attempts at describing what I see out by the gorge and capturing it with a photograph!