march 19, 2017 / rest
In 2017 on this day, I was writing about the new poetry class I was taking at the Loft — my first ever, the one that changed my l ife:
I’m thinking about trying to write about running for my poetry experiments. In a post for class I wrote the following:
In the editor’s note it’s mentioned that Mayer writes hypnogogic poems. I looked up the word and found the definition (a state between waking and sleeping, when drowsy) and an interview with Mayer about how, after suffering a stroke, she experimented with using a tape recorder to record her thoughts in this drowsy/dreamy state. So cool. Currently, I’m writing about running and I’d like to experiment with ways to express the dreamlike state I sometimes enter during long runs.
Today, in 2024, I’m working, and bit stuck, on my Haunts poems. Thinking about writing about the dream-like state that running provides has given me a new idea for them: write about the dream-like state in running and in living with fuzzy vision. Also: don’t try to fit the poem parts together in some coherent narrative. Instead write a series of poems about different definitions of haunts.
march 19, 2019 / 4.25 miles / 39 degrees
I posted a poem about the relationship between the Body and Soul on this day in 2019. I was preoccupied with these ideas then. Still am. Here’s a part I’m thinking and writing about today:
from Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan
it [soul] would like
to think it has the upper hand
and can leave whenever it wants—
but only as long as it knows
the door will be unlocked
when it sneaks back home before
the sun comes up, and when the body
says where have you been, the soul
says, with a smirk, I was at the end
of my tether, and it was, like a diver
on the ocean floor or an astronaut
admiring the view from outside
the mother ship, and like them
it would be lost without its air
supply and protective clothing,
Reading these lines again, I’m thinking that I might write about this poem for my log entry for today, in 2024.
march 19, 2020 / 2.65 miles / 39 degrees
(2025) I want to try this:
a writing prompt from Sundress Publications
Sundress Publications is posting a writing prompt each day for the next two months to keep people writing. Here’s one from yesterday:
Choose two letters of the alphabet. Select a source material and collect 10-12 nouns or verbs starting with each letter. Use the words as a bank for a new poem.
march 19, 2021 / 3.3 miles / 42 degrees
Just past the top of the hill on Edmund between 33rd and 34th, you can glimpse the river through the trees. Today it was on fire, glowing with a bright white light. Wow. Definitely dazzling. Seeing this bright light, I thought about the Emily Dickinson poem I’m studying and that I memorized before running: “We grow accustomed to the Dark.” The poem is about how we adjust to the dark when “light is put away,” both literally and metaphorically. For many, I’m sure, this poem suggests that the loss of light and the coming of the darkness is always unwelcome and tragic. But not necessarily for ED, and not for me. I had to stop at the top of the hill and record a thought into my phone: “sometimes the problem with light is not its loss, but its abundance.” Too much light is too dazzling, making it too difficult to see or understand what you’re seeing. I have difficulty when there’s a lack of light, but often just as much when there’s too much light. So, sometimes a lack of light is welcome, wanted, offering some rest for tired and overwhelmed eyes.
I remember this, stopping to record my thoughts on a almost-spring day. The white heat of that water — wow! Often when I run on Edmund and see the river sparkling through the trees, I recall this moment.
The rest of this post is a line-by-line response to ED’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” So many good ideas! Too many to post here. Just a reminder to return to this entry — probably even later today!
march 19, 2024 / 4.2 miles / 43 degrees
(from 2025) I want to return to the idea of the body and the soul and their relationship.
Reading this bit, I got an idea, which I typed up in my “Notes for Haunts, fall 2023” pages document:
the dream like state of running, when the mind is shut down
haunting = possessing or being possessed — what if haunting was not just being taken over by someone/thing else (possessed) or taking over someone/thing else (possessing) but becoming untethered or loosely tetered from your body — floating on the path in-between in that strange empty space between banks between sky and ground between worlds between You and I? this could be another form of haunting — what if I started writing small-ish poems that offered different definitions of haunt?
A few definitions of haunt I’m thinking about right now: feeling disembodied, having an out-of-body experience and being obsessed/preoccupied/consumed by a thought or idea — having a bee in your bonnet.
bee in your bonnet
Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself.
Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:
Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads.
Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster?
Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.
When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?
Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?
This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:
If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson
If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,
And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.
So much to think about on my run (I’m writing this before I headed out). Will I see any bees about by the gorge? Very unlikely, I think.
during the run
Thought about a bee in my bonnet as an obsession that I wanted to release, so I imagined opening the top of my head like the door of a cage and letting the bee fly free. What would/could happen if I did this? Would I find some new ways to think about my experiences?
Also, randomly remembered something about bees in a horror movie, then remembered the movie, Candyman. Looked up, “gothic horror bees” and found this 1978 movie, The Bees.
Not too far into the run I think I forgot about the bee. I was too distracted by my heavy legs and wondering if my calf would do something strange, and the wind. No escape from my body today.
after my run
Now, ED’s poem about the lid of her head coming off makes me think of a favorite Homer Simpson bit:
Homer reluctantly listens to Ned Flanders drone on about the differences between juice and cider. A voice says, You can stay, but I’m leaving, and Homer’s brain exits his head and floats away as we hear a slide whistle. A few seconds later his body collapses on the floor and we hear a thud.
I love the image of the brain floating away. And, instead of a daydream where Homer’s brain gets to wander while his zoned-out body stays and pretends to listen, his body collapses, unable to continue without the brain.