2024: Reading through these entries today, I’m struck by the playful experiments and how I don’t do them quite as much as I used to. Time to get back to it! For too long, I’ve been stuck, writing around and against the idea of haunting and being haunted!
march 22, 2017 / 5 miles / 28 degrees
On this day in 2017, I was experimenting for my poetry class. I was particularly interested in breaking the line at my breath. I think the connection between breath and line break was my first door into poetry. Thinking about this breath/break connection, I have an idea: Take part (or all?) of a poem I’m working on it, memorize it as prose, with no breaks. Recite it while I’m running into my phone. Break the line where I take breaths in the run.
I ran an easy 2.5 miles to get to the hill. I took a quick break to set up the voice memo app on my iPhone, then I ran up the hill while talking into my phone. I stopped at 3 minutes and 39 seconds, which was a little less than half a mile. Finally I ran home.
march 22, 2019 / 3.2 miles / 41 degrees
The ubiquitous black glove!
I almost forgot about the black glove I saw lying on the edge of the path looking forgotten. Why is it always black? How long has it been there–was it buried under the snow or lost today? Is it missed? Was it dropped right on the spot where I saw it or had it traveled from somewhere else, carried by the snow? Did a runner lose it? A walker? At night? In the morning? During a snowstorm? So many questions!
march 22, 2022 / 1.25 miles / bike / basement
A constant reminder and a goal for my noticing practice:
I can tell that I am going to have to try even harder to see the best in people. It’s too easy to be scared and irritated by noisy people who take up too much space and don’t seem to care about their impact on others. I want to focus on the people who pay attention and keep their distance–more of them exist, I believe.
Another fun experiment, also posted here:
Decided to cast a spell on the scary, awful word, pandemic. So I wrote it across the top of my notebook and listed as many words as I could think of using the letters p, a, n, d, e, m, i, c. Then I put some of the words together in little lines. My lines need more work before they become a poem, but here a few fun ones:
P A N D E M I C
A dime a dance
Nice denim!
Ma and Pamade camppined-in
end painice mice
Am I amped?
I am in Pac-Man pain
Damn, I can dance
Mince mead
A mad maid made ade
Me, panic?
End a nap, mend a capCap a pen, ape amen
A pea, a panA man named Dan
Not sure if anything will come out of this wordplay, but it’s fun and pandemic doesn’t seem quite as scary as it did before.march 22, 2023 / walk / 29 degrees
I’ve posted about James Schuyler’s poem, Hymn to Life, on the march monthly challenge for 2023, but I also wanted to post about it here. Such a great poem and a fun exercise!
May
Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
Chain saw.
I love this line and how he brings together these two sounds! I’m always thinking about, and writing about, hearing the birds mixed in with the buzz of chainsaws or leaf blowers or lawn mowers. I like imagining that all of these sounds are May speaking.
The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
Or a storm will chip it loose.
Ha ha. I love the word shit and what it does to this image — it doesn’t cheapen or tarnish it, but makes it more real, mundane, less precious. Oh — and it makes it a little gross, which I like.
May is not a flowering month so much as shades
Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
The lilac leaves.
A few days ago, while doing some research on colorblindness for the series of color poems I’m currently writing I came across a video about “what it’s like to be colorblind.” In the video they included some side-by-side images of “normal” and “colorblind.” Both images looked almost the same to me, especially what was green. I could tell it was green, but it also could have been gray or brown (and maybe it was in the image that someone who is colorblind would see). The variations of green, the subtle differences between yellow-green or blue-green or emerald green are mostly lost on me. Instead, I see green or light green or dark green or gray green or brown. This May, I’ll have to pay close attention to green and what I see, then write about it.
In a discussion of Schuyler’s line about red cardinals, I wrote a sentence that became a favorite line in one of my color poems:
I have lost the ability to be shocked or startled by red, especially from a cardinal. There is a cardinal that summers in our yard — my daughter has named him Chauncy — but I never see his red coat. I only know him by the shape of his head, looking like an angry bird, and his birdsong. This month he has decided to help usher in spring by perching himself on the tree outside my kitchen window.
A lot is lost and missed when you can’t see the red flash — the flying cardinal, a small blinking light, a flare somewhere — that everyone else sees and instantly understands and assumes that you see too.
The line:
Much is lost when you cannot see
what everyone else does and assumes
you do too. A shared language,
a way of communicating
without words, birds.