2024: On this day in 2024, I’m trying a different format for this page by combining the years and writing about common themes.
2017 / 3.1 miles / 54 degrees
2020 / 2.5 miles / 43 degrees
2021 / 2.7 miles / 46 degrees
2022 / 4 miles / 35 degrees
2023 / 5.3 miles / 44 degrees
(re) surfacing
In 2022, two poems — Pear Snow/ Todd Dillard and After the Rain/ jared Carter — inspired me to think about dug up ghosts, and past stories, and remembering and caring for them.
What do we do with the ghosts that resurface, whether we want them to or not? How do we care for the stories of those who came before us?
2022
In 2017, this excavating took a different approach. In April of 2017, during my first poetry class, I was turning most of my entries into erasure poems. The one for april 18th was surprisingly dark — about finding a dead body — and a sharp contrast to the actual entry, which was joyful. It was so surprising to me that I wrote about it on another page, An Unexpected Erasure.
After my initial surprise and reservations about creating such a dark poem, I realized that the words were revealing a truth about the river road path and the Mississippi River Gorge Regional Park that resides below: I’m a bit scared of it and what might lurk in those woods. Coyotes, foxes, feral dogs, drunk or deranged humans. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in or near the gorge, but I’m cautious and I’ve read, or heard, too many accounts of women runners being sexually assaulted or attacked by wild animals to not feel uneasy when I run on the parts of the path that diverge from the biking path and the road. It’s fascinating to see how my uneasiness appeared in the log entry without me expecting it.
An Unexpected Erasure
The process I used for creating these erasure was to not think too hard or try to write a new poem, but to let the words surface:
When I write these poems, I slowly read through my prose, waiting for words and phrases to appear to me. A few days ago, I found myself seeing “eat crow” in the words threat and crowded. Yesterday, I had a fixation on critters: crow, eel, ant, ass (as in donkey), roach. I don’t think too much about the words and phrases I see, I just use them to create new poems.
At the end of my 2022 entry, I returned to the idea of surfacing, linking it to the poems about digging up ghosts and to past reflections I’d had about water and humus:
One other thing I remember was thinking about surfaces and depths, and the value of both. And now, writing this entry hours later, I’m thinking about how both of the poems in my “before the run” section involve water (rain) and how it brings the things buried to the surface. This reminds me of writing about water last July and Maxine Kumin’s idea of the thinker as the sinker (july 22, 2021). I’m also thinking about floating and bobbing to the surface and how humus (which I wrote about earlier this month) is the top layer of soil — 12 inches at the surface.
2022
to flare
Things can surface by bobbing up through the water or popping up through the soil. They can also burst up into the air, like a flare. In 2021, while reading Mary Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud, I was thinking a lot about what it means to flare:
Reading more Mary Oliver and thinking about the idea of the flare–a sudden burst of light, or understanding, or ecstasy, or illumination, or lifting out and free of yourself, or experiencing eternity “now, now, now, now.”
2021
Here, meaning isn’t dug up, but bursts/breaks through, pierces.
question: If erasure poems can be used to excavate meaning, what form might allow meaning to flare and burst through? I want to think about that some more!
In 2023, I discussed a close cousin to the flare: the shiny, shimmering, sparkling, dazzling, glittering. I offered 6 different inspirations from my notes:
1
Eamon Grennan’s beautiful silver ribbon in “Lark-Luster”: when summer happens, you’d almost see the long silver ribbons of song the bird braids as if binding lit air to earth that is all shadows, to keep us (as we walk our grounded passages down here) alive to what is over our heads—song and silence—and the lot of us leaning up: mind-defeated again, just harking to it.
2
Tell me how do I steady my gaze when everything I want is motion?Saccadic Masking/ Paige Lewis
3
dazzle
razzle-dazzle
radiate
gleam (as in gleaming bronze)
glimmer
spangle
catch the light
twinkle
glint
reflect, echo, bounce
4
texture — unsteady rough, not smooth ridged, not flat, patterned — and its influence on light: bird feathers, wind on water/waves, crumbling pavement potholes asphalt pools (puddles), gray depressions — holes/pits in snow casting shadows that look gray
5
heat energy flame burn flicker flare: a. giving forth dazzling, unsteady light, b. sudden outburst, short-lived, intense, c. gradual widening, spreading out, display in expanded form
6
A. R. Ammons and another wordless language, not made up of reds and blues and yellows: mutual glistening in a breezy grove of spring aspen speech
forms to revisit
Speaking of forms, in 2017 it’s an erasure, in 2020, an abecedarian:
- thread on twitter about abecedarians
- 2 interesting takes on the form that I’d like to try: ABC/ Robert Pinsky and Disorderly Abecedarian 2: Return/ Devon Miller-Duggan
Pinsky’s poem uses 26 letters, one for each letter of the alphabet, and in that order but not with each on a separate line. Miller-Duggan starts each line with a different letter but not in the order of the alphabet.
I’d like to use the abecedarian and erasure forms again! Also, I should add these poems and the thread to my “translating wonder into words” exercise!
some links to remember and return to
- rust: March 13, 2023
- Emerson Circles and ED and her idea of Circumference