Looking back at entries from this day, I was reminded of an annual tradition: every year in early September, after lake swimming is over, I work on swimming poems, trying to capture some of the wonder, delight, tenderness, satisfaction, irritation that I felt in june, july, and august.
sept 11, 2021 / 1 mile swim / 70 degrees
In 2021 I wrote about my fear of big fish below me and how to use Anne Sexton’s amazing lines, all the fish in us/ had escaped for a minute in a poem — I’m still working on that. Someday…
I also included a wonderful list of 10 Things I Noticed while I was swimming:
- A seagull perched on a white buoy, flying away only seconds before I reached it
- Small undulations in the water, sometimes looking like waves, sometimes something else (a fish?a stick? another swimmer?)
- A few small vines brushing my shoulder, a leaf touching my finger
- A family of 3 on a kayak or a canoe or a paddle board — I couldn’t tell with my eyes half in, half out of the water
- Drums beating across the lake from the Monarch Butterfly Festival
- A little girl repeatedly singing while in the water, “Swim with me in the sea!” as I waded out from the beach
- Fluffy, shredded clouds covering the mostly blue sky
- A plane flying fast overhead
- The bubbles from my hand as it entered the water and pushed down below my torso
- The dude standing on some motorized paddle board/hoverboard, speeding across the lake after my swim — a strange, unreal sight
I don’t remember the little girl singing, but I do remember the seagull, the drums, and the strangeness of the dude traveling across the water.
sept 11, 2022 / 3 mile run / 53 degrees
In this entry, I’m thinking about a poem I was working on last September about how I like choppy water and punching waves. I included a voice memo I recorded at the end of my run:
There’s something about this relentless pounding…the waves just keep coming. Sometimes it’s just one, sometimes they just keep coming…this could be represented by these rhymes — splash dash slash or shatter clatter batter — but then, when the wave breaks, it breaks the rhyme.
transcript
I think I will revisit this poem and see if I can put in any of these rhymes — the trick is to make it subtle and not forced.
In this entry, I also discuss the mind body split and swimming without thinking, knowing innately how best to stroke, doing not being. Pure verb or all verb or (just?) Verb. And I ended with words from Alice Oswald:
I sometimes wonder whether I’m a very keen swimmer, and whether for me, poetry is equivalent to swimming. I’ve often noticed when I swim, the strangeness of the way the body literally turns into a fish, but the head remains human and rather cold, and looking around at this strange flat reflective surface. I’m often very piercingly aware of the difference between my head and my body when I’m swimming because I’m not necessarily someone who goes underwater, I love swimming along the surface of rivers. Perhaps, my poems do feel a need to convey that continued separation of the head remaining human and the body becoming animal, or plant, or mineral, or whatever it can be. In some way, I suppose I’m trying to find rhythms that will heal that divide.
I think that’s exactly it, that we seem to exist as bodies and minds. That’s always slightly troubled me that I can’t quite make them be the same thing. I always have two narratives going on and it’s extraordinary the way the mind is floating around seemingly quite untethered and yet the body has all these laws like gravity, and limit, and size, and hunger, that it’s obeying. How those two interact and how they come to define what it is to be human is again—I’m wary of using the verb think because I don’t think poetry is necessarily about thinking—but it gets hold of questions, and reveals them as questions, and then reveals what’s underneath them, and then what’s underneath that. I suppose each book tries to peel away a layer of that problem and present it again.
Between the Covers interview with Alice Oswald
There’s something about her mention of turning into a fish that makes me want to revisit my poem about letting the fish within me loose — how to contrast that with surfaces and the head staying above and needing to be both human (mind/head) and animal (body/fish). Also, I’m thinking about where my desire to be a boat fits into all of it.
sept 11, 2019 / 5 mile run / 64 degrees
In 2019, I wasn’t thinking about swimming but running and rain and chanting about running in the rain — very fun! I ended with a cento poem (Saltern) and an idea for a possible poem. I wrote, “I love how this poem is constructed entirely out of lines from a few different articles. I’d like to experiment with this form.” Yes, and I have a project in mind. Tentative title, The Eyes of Emily. It’s combining lines from Emily Dickinson poems about vision that I’ve been using with bits from articles/essays that discuss ED’s vision and how it comes up in her poems.