I’m running a marathon on October 6th, so September involved a lot of long runs: 14, 16, 18, and 20 milers. Before, during, and after those runs, I was inspired and came up with some great ideas to pursue in the future. Any of these would be fun to write about.
Also this month, I worked on water poems and tried to weather the stress of a son in his senior year of college feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, and a daughter deferring her first semester of college to come to terms with the impact of a decade’s worth of extreme anxiety on her body. What a month.
2 sept: an underground stream
Recently read:
I feel like poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.
John Ashbery
I’d like to do something with this idea of the underground stream, especially in relation to daylighting — the process of bringing streams buried in concrete and under city infrastructure back into the light.
3 sept: writing skills, foolishness, a godhead without an anus
from Heather Christle: Writing essays develops skills necessary for . . .
- delighting in the diction and syntax of your beloveds and strangers
- recognizing the nature of lies uttered by those who wish to wield power over you
- composing nonsensical songs while puttering about one’s day…
Instead of trying to get stronger, why not try to be more free, flexible, and foolish?
Nothing is the Godhead
that gobbles the world
in one fell swoop,
but has no anus.
(from Fullness/ Edward Salem)
I think I’ll add the first part of this — Christle’s writing skills — to my goals/purpose section on Undisciplined, and the second part — nothing as the Godhead — to some definitions of Nothing.
10 sept: stillness and re-wilding,
Thought about wild as the (not quite) opposite of still. At the beginning of my walk, an idea: wild is not only a place, but a feeling — movement, untamed, uncontrolled, frantic frenzied jittery non-stop, restless. Stillness is controlled, steady, a nothing that is something, the core, a straight spine. Then I started thinking about my diseased eyes as wild — uncontrollable — which led to the idea that my eyes aren’t wild but undergoing a re-wilding. The aftermath of a catastrophe — a forest fire — where new (and different) growth occurs. Here I’m thinking about fungi and how they grow in places that have been destroyed, especially how Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes them in Mushrooms at the End of the World: On the Possibility of LIfe in Capitalist Ruins.
17 sept: running inside of the beat, or becoming the beat, or being a bell that’s been struck
I liked running to the metronome (through my headphones, from the metronome/tuner app on my phone). I was able to match my foot strikes with the beat fairly quickly, but it took a few minutes for it to lock in. When that happened, I could feel the transformation from the edge of the beat (just before or after it) to the deep center of it. My foot strike seemed different, more solid and strong. The beat sounded different, less generic and more connected to a physical source (my foot). And I felt different, inside the beat, no longer a body but that steady clicking sound. Very cool.
It’s not quite the same, but I’m thinking of myself as Annie Dillard’s bell being struck. Also, Emily Dickinson and these lines:
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –
24 sept: translation as movement from one thing to another
I want to remember an idea I encountered in an explanation of yesterday’s poem of the day on poets.org. The poem was “Villany” in LA by Gabrielle Civil. Here’s their explanation:
About this Poem
“More than just rendering something in another language, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries remind us that translation is ‘the process of moving something from one place to another.’ What better way to signal that than a poem about public transit? In their book Villainy, Andrea Abi-Karam moves love and grief for those who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship [warehouse] fire in Oakland to me [as I’m] riding the train in Los Angeles. As with most translations, I move my reading into something else: this time, a new poem, which receives the original and carries it like a holy relic into a different city.”Gabrielle Civil
I’d like to think more about translation and this movement and how I might play with it in my writing about running and swimming and my running/swimming-as-writing.
26 sept: an ekphrasis mindset
read this wonderful quote from Hanif Abdurraqib the other day in one of my favorite former grad student’s newsletter. It’s about the ekphrasis form and is helpful for thinking about my “How to See” project:
Many of us live in an ekphrasis mindset. We are often executing ekphrasis storytelling…creating a story based off of that witnessing. I don’t ever want to move beyond that desire to say, I saw something and I know that you were not there to see it. But I can build the world wherein you felt like you have witnessed it alongside me.via rachael anne jolie
I want to build a world about how I see with my dead-coned eyes in my poems, partly to feel less alone and isolated and partly to invite people to think more what it means to see (and to not see).
Last night, Scott and I were watching “Escape to the Country” and one of the escapees (Carol from Hertfordshire) was registered blind. She sometimes used a white cane and had some help from her husband in navigating, but she could make eye contact and see some of what was going on. When the host (Jules) asked her to explain her vision, she said she could see about 20% of what he could, enough to get a sense of the space, but not clearly. I appreciated that Jules had asked her to explain her vision (and impressed with the positive, non-tragic way they depicted her throughout the episode), but I wanted more. I wished she (and/or the show) had had an ekphrasis mindset and offered additional details about what seeing/not seeing is for her. The host, Jules, suggests, “Fundamentally, understanding how she sees the world is going to be crucial to finding properties that will absolutely deliver.” Even a sentence or two more might have helped in that understanding.