Tag: Alice Oswald

june 21/RUNSWIM

run: 2.3 miles
lake nokomis
64 degrees

Decided to run a loop around lake nokomis before open swim in order to be warmed up when I entered the cold water. The run was hard. It felt warm and my gait felt awkward. My favorite part about the run was nearing the big beach and hearing, then seeing, swimmers rounding the far green buoy. I thought: that will be me in a few minutes! And it was.

Overheard: a group of 7 or 8 runners, one of them calling out to the others: They didn’t give us any room. I guess they thought it was their path. Yep, I’ve thought, and probably said, that same thing to Scott on some run around this lake.

I was just reminded of this when I heard the bells of St. Thomas as I write this at my dining room table: When we arrived at the lake, I heard some bells chiming in the distance. I’m assuming a church service was starting somewhere — maybe at the church on Cedar, near Fat Lorenzos?

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

It felt warmer today, maybe because it was sunny. I noticed pink and yellow and orange safety buoys tethered to torsos, bent elbows, glittering water, a few splashes. Some swimmers wore wet suits, some wore training suits. I don’t think I noticed any swan boats or non-lifeguard kayaks.

I’m not sure I felt strong, but I felt stronger in the lake than last week. I decided as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left that June is always a more challenging month for open swim: the water’s colder and I’m using muscles that I haven’t used for 9 months.

The milfoil in the swimming area and near the start of the loop was terrible. Thick stretches of it, with individuals vines wrapping around my wrists and feet. I managed to avoid the worst of it on the way out, but when I returned I got stuck in a wide patch of it that I struggled to swim out of. As I have said to more than one person, I am a very strong, experienced swimmer and, even so, I had a few flashes of panic as I wondered how to get out and around these vines. I am seriously concerned that someone will drown in them. They are in the swimming area.

I wonder, is there anything Minneapolis Parks can do about this? Also, if enough people complain, will they have to close down the beach? I don’t want that, but I also don’t want someone to drown in this water or these vines to not be addressed. Sigh.

I’m glad that I ran and that I was able to swim 2 loops in slightly warmer water. Unfortunately, it didn’t help my mood. A few days ago, I wondered what was worse: perimenopausal anxiety or perimenopausal irritability. I thought anxiety was worse, but today, I am irritated and upset and I think it’s just as bad as anxiety. Oh well, like a wave, it will pass over.

Speaking of passing over, I noticed the dark shadow of a plane, blocking out the sun for a few seconds. Even though I know what it is, it is strange and settling (and kind of cool) when it happens.

10 Things

  1. bubbles — surrounding my hands as they entered the water
  2. clouds
  3. breathing to one side: blue sky
  4. breathing to the other side: clouds
  5. stopping in the middle of the lake: silence, solitude
  6. the bright orange first buoy, sometimes looking orange, sometimes white, once or twice green, a few times not there
  7. swimmers: 3 across, a good space between us, all heading towards the far green buoy at the different angles
  8. overheard before beginning: Theo, get your shoes! It’s time to go!
  9. exiting the water, watching as a toddler in a polka dot bathing suit ran across the sand and towards the swings
  10. chanting to myself, lifts the lid and shuts1
  1. I need to re-memorize the A Oswald lines so that I can recite them properly! ↩︎

june 19/SWIM

3 loops / 1733 strokes
lake nokomis open swim
65 degrees / drizzle
water temp: < 70 degrees

Cold water! I might need to wear my wetsuit for the next swim. I can handle feeling cold at the beginning; it’s the deep cold that I feel in my hands and feet after an hour of swimming that I don’t like. Is it that I have poor circulation? Whatever it is, my right middle finger was starting to go number halfway in. I didn’t want to stop swimming, so I kept wriggling it mid-stroke and trying to punch the water extra hard with that hand. I wonder if it would help if I ran a mile or 2 as a warm-up before the swim?

Cold water aside, it was a great swim. A little drizzle, overcast. Not too many people or boats. Only a few swan boats and one paddle boarder.

I decided to try swimming through the milfoil again at the start. It was still there, but not too bad. The trick: don’t try to swim freestyle through it; don’t try to swim at all. Just glide over it with the occasional breaststroke kick.

I saw a few silver flashes under me near the first orange buoy and one small dead fish, belly-up near the beach. No minnows, but a few bubbles and my sparkle friends — sediment particles coming at me as I swam towards the big beach.

I followed a swimmer — I think it was a woman, but why do I think that? Did I see something other than their orange buoy for a second? — for at least 2 of the loops. I wasn’t trying to follow them — I didn’t want to follow them — but we were going almost the same speed and taking the same trajectory from buoy to buoy. In addition to their orange buoy, I noticed some pink and yellow safety buoys, too. Also noticed at least two people swimming the wrong direction. You are supposed to always keep the buoys to your right, but they had them to their left.

There weren’t any waves, but sometimes the water was choppy, and sometimes it felt like it was being sucked from under me, which makes it harder to feel any power or control in your stroke. Swimming back to the big beach, I often had to breathe every 2 or 4 — always breathing to my right, because the water was high on the left side.

Right before I left for the swim, I reread one of Alice Oswald’s description of swimming in Dart. So good!

Here’s what I read:

Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding
where my body was in some way a wave to swim in,
one continuous fin from head to tail
I steered through rapids like a canoe,
digging my hands in keeping just ahead of the pace of the river

—

He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

What I remembered (but slightly wrong) was this:

open the lid and shut, open the lid and shut

I recited it for a few minutes as I punched through the chop, lifting my head to breathe, then dropping it again to avoid a face full of water.

I heard then saw some military planes taking off. The water was blue-ish gray, the visibility low. At one point, I had a moment of panic when I was so used to the safety buoy belt around my waist that it felt like it wasn’t there. Oh no, did I lose my phone? Nope. I checked and it was still there.

It was a good swim. Again, I swam straight to the buoys even when I didn’t think they were there. I had the occasional flash of panic when I suddenly though, what if I got a cramp or felt faint here, in the middle of the lake?, but those flashes didn’t last long.

june 8/RUN

3.15 miles
locks and dam turn around
70 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 67

Sticky. Moist. Steamy. Wet. Not raining, but water water everywhere. It felt cool on my fingers and face when I brushed against a bush or when the wind shook the leaves.

Sometimes I felt great, sometimes I didn’t. I was wearing my old black Sauconys because it was so wet and they made my toe hurt for the last mile. My heart rate was higher too. I’ve determined (decided?) that my heat tolerance has decreased because of perimenopause. I’m having some hot flashes and struggling to run/move/stand/be in the heat. I’m thinking of asking for Hormone Replacement Therapy.

As I ran, I recited Wallace Steven’s poem, “Tattoo.” The light is like a spider./ It crawls over the water./It crawls over the edges of the snow./ It crawls under your eyelids/And spreads its webs there. I love this idea of the light like a spider spinning its webs under your eyelids. I also like that the first thing Stevens’ spider-light does is crawl over the water — a good connection to my water season, which starts tomorrow! Open swim!

10 Things

  1. a biker blasting music from speakers — country music (I think) — before I could hear much of it, it was distorted by the Doppler effect
  2. the brown sign that reads, caution, coyote den, is still there — are the coyotes?
  3. bright headlights piercing through the dark green and gray
  4. the sewer pipe near 42nd was gushing
  5. a long line of cars on the road
  6. a string of bikers on the path
  7. a few puddles
  8. the wind picked up, the trees shifted, making me wonder if it started raining agin
  9. a group of kids laughing somewhere in the distance, approaching
  10. 2 lime scooter parked on the edge of trail — both times I neared them, I thought they were people

lines / strings / webs / spiders

a spider moment: As I was about to take a shower, I noticed spider traveling down the tiles. I didn’t want to kill it, or douse it with water, so I turned on the water with the spray pointed away from the tiles and asked the spider to leave. They did — not because of the words, but because of the pressure/feeling of the water.

how long do spiders live? Although most spiders live for at most two years, tarantulas and other mygalomorph spiders can live for over 20 years. (source)

how long have modern spiders existed? The main groups of modern spiders, Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae, first appear in the Triassic well before 200 million years ago. (source)

orb orb (spiral) webs, orb as eye, orbiting, encircling/enclosing, a spherical body

Alice Oswald, a spider reference in Nobody

A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress
sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature
whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her
and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea
but she as if a dash of hope
discoloured her sight stands waiting
the way a spider when it wishes to travel
simply lets out a silken

aerial

electrostatically alert through every hair
to the least shift of the atmosphere
at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold
like a bare twig it begins to blow
wherever the wind will take it but the wind
is the most distracted messenger I know

After citing this, Kit Fan writes:

The new lines at the end of the page carry a rhyme scheme (aabcbc) rare in Nobody and connect the goddess (the owl-eyed Athena who is Odysseus’s protector in The Odyssey?) with the precise, calculated work of a spider, breathing a different kind of life into the “discoloured” world without the watercolors. The two versions of Nobody create a counter-parallel universe for Oswald’s reimagination of The Odyssey, revisualizing the epic as a collage made out of imagist fragments or glimpses of “water-stories,” as the jacket to the UK version calls them. The two texts speak to each other like twins staring at themselves in the mirror, registering uncanny similarities and differences.

Water Stories

The precise calculated work of a spider. Tomorrow, I want to write a little more about the making of a web and the use of spun silk to travel. I also want to return to Alice Oswald and reread The Odyssey again. I love the Wilson translation! I just looked it up and the movie coming out next month is based on this translation. Excellent!

feb 3/RUNGETOUTICE

4.1 miles
river road, south / lena smith, north / hills
13 degrees

13 degrees sounds cold (I guess), but with the sun and all of my layers, I was too warm. Lots of sweat dripping down my forehead. On the way to the river, the sidewalks were bare, but on the trail, they were covered in slick ice and uneven snow. Bummer. Decided to turn off the trail at 42nd and run north on the Lena Smith Boulevard, and then do some hill repeats. It was wet with wide strips of icy snow. If it hadn’t snowed 2 days ago, the path would have been dry and it would have been a wonderful day for a run to the falls or the flats or the lake.

After a fun day yesterday, getting lost in baking m-n-m cookies for Scott and crafting erasure poems out of local business statements, today felt draining and a bit overwhelming. I’m not anxious, just tired and uncreative, which is not surprising. It’s an exhausting, unrelenting time here in Minneapolis.

One bright spot: I discovered this morning that there’s a new Mary Oliver book out: Little Alleluias! It’s 3 books in one: The Leaf and the Cloud, which I own and have taken notes all over the margins, so a fresh copy will be nice; Long Life, which I have checked out of the library enough to wish I owned it; and What Do We Know, which I haven’t read; plus, a foreword by Natalie Diaz. I bought it online from Moon Palace, and will pick it up in a few hours!

Alice Oswald

Still making my way through the Alice Oswald interview for the Paris Review. Here are today’s lines to remember:

Interviewer: Is swimming important to you?

Alice Oswald: It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking–that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

I like the distinction between thinking and being, and the idea that doing something physical, like gardening or swimming, will move your mind. What does it mean to be thought through by the water? I’d like to pose this question before/during/after a swim at the Y — which I hope to do this week — and a swim at the lake — which I won’t get to do for 4 months.

Get Out Ice

1 — caregiving as resistance

Here’s a great article that I want to read more carefully when I have a chance: ‘We have to keep showing up for each other’: In Minnesota, caregiving is a form of resistance Wow, I would have loved to write about this on my TROUBLE blog!

2 — protectors not protesters

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Welcome to the American Winter

3

Minneapolis Parks invite kids to write love letters to the city. I love Minneapolis Parks!

At parks around Minneapolis, heart-shaped love letters from kids are providing some wholesome relief during an especially grueling winter.

(source)

jan 28/RUN

3.5 miles
under ford bridge and back
7 degrees
50% snow-covered

A run outside! Cold, but not even close to some of my coldest runs in past years (I’ve run in a feels like temp of -20). I haven’t run outside much this month, so I forgot how to dress for it. Today, too many layer. Hand warmers and foot warmers and 3 shirts under my jacket.

Hardly anyone else on the river road path. A few walkers, a few bikers, any other runners? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. Heard some cars honking in the distance. ICE must be nearby.

The river was white and looked cold. The parts of the path that weren’t covered in snow were stained white from salt — was it salt or something else? I know Minneapolis Parks is committed to not putting down salt because it ends up in the river. Most of the walking trail was buried in snow. Only one stretch, just north of 38th had some bare asphalt. I walked on it, then got stuck when it was covered in snow again. The snow looked brittle and made a sharp crack as I stepped on it. Mostly it wasn’t deep, but when it was, it was uneven and awkward to walk through. Empty benches, sharp shadows, blue sky. A strange feeling all around: unsettled.

Alice Oswald Interview, part 3

[on the idea of a Homeric formula] That seemed entirely wrong to me, this habit of draining the meaning out of the poems, of seeing orality as a machinelike way of composing. I was enraged by being given statistics about how many times a certain word or simile is used. To me, it felt clear that it was a more entranced way of composing, thta the poets would get into a kind of intoxicated state where they could incredibly, almost magically, find exactly the right adjective, the right meaning for the right place in the right melody.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

Get Out Ice

1

a fragment from Facebook: Not deescalate but:

abolish
withdraw

prosecute
witness

2

Love #9: After

We are still here.
We are still loving our neighbors, 
still supporting our community, 
still caring about the constitution.

We are staying warm, 
staying strong, 
staying impossible to ignore. 

Read this poem this morning and remembered when my mom died, how a colleague took me out for coffee and told me that grief is a continued connection to the person you lost. I’ve often thought about her words, and I use them to embrace my grief.

Sisyphus / Sharon Lessley

As if weightlessness were aspirational―
what nonsense―

                                  your death,

        a stone 

I can only hope to shoulder forever. Imagine
it gets better―

                                  what nothing

        am I left with

then? Even despair carries a particular
charge: that fantastic

                                  last whiff of lavender

      detergent

imprinted on the collar of a holiday sweater―

                                    mama,

the mourners are assembling. March me 
up that hill …

Your death a stone I can only hope to shoulder forever.

jan 26/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.35 miles
outside: 13 degrees

Read a few pages of the Alice Oswald interview in the Paris Review then watched the Las Culturistas podcast with Amy Poehler while I biked. I love Alice Oswald and I love Amy Poehler. So good! I don’t have time right now, but when I do, I want to post some quotes from the podcast episode.

Listened to the first 3 songs on TS’s “Reputation” while I ran. It felt good, and I felt more relaxed than I have in many days. I think it’s the combination of almost being done with my 2-week cold, and news that some Republicans are taking back some of their more extreme statements in support of ICE. But, I know that we’re not close to being done with this nightmare.

1

I think there are places you build in the imagination that become stable. I love the metrical forms, the sonnet and the ballad, but to me the real thing is what I call patience, the idea of creating your own stability within a length of time. I responded to that when I discovered Homer. There was something in that poetry, because it was orally composed—I could feel Homer making forms of patience within the poem, lines coming back and coming back and then coming back. It makes habits. There’s something steady and reliable about its way of moving, while at the same time, it loops wherever it wants to go, and remakes itself.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

2

I could feel straightaway that Homer was quite different from the other types of poetry I’d read. I can remember, when I was told that he was blind, having this dizzy feeling of what a poem would be if you were hearing it and speaking it rather than reading it.

 an interview with Alice Oswald

This year, I want to keep pushing at this question of what a poem would/could be if you’re hearing it and speaking it instead of reading it? I want to do more poetry that does just that.

Get Out Ice

A slightly more helpful, less terrifying day than Saturday. Some Republicans are speaking out against the shooting of Alex Pretti, Walz talked to Trump and he agreed to send Greg Bovino somewhere else; Rand Paul is asking for ICE to testify at the hearing next month. Only very small successes that are possibly only offered to get Democrats to pass the budget and give ICE even more funding by the end of this week. Don’t do it Democrats!

I surrounded myself with the loving words of other Minnesotans again this morning, and created 2 more love poems. Here’s one, both are posted here.

Love #6: How to Be a Better Person

Hold space for pain, anger, confusion.
Make hope happen for others.
Open the door for love, close it in hate’s face.
Wear boots, a lot of wool, scarves, and mittens. Bring extras to share.
Believe in small acts: they matter.
Demand the exit of ICE from our beautiful cities.

jan 25/BIKERUNGETOUTICE

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
outside: 0 degrees

Still too cold and too icy (and ICE-y?) outside, so more time in the basement. Watched the men’s 2024 Kona Ironman while I biked and tried to focus on my posture and my knee lift. As always, I’m wondering why my left knee often gets stiff after biking for a while. Listened to Lawrence, Acoustic-ish while I ran. I tried to empty my mind, but bad thoughts crept in: how far will the federal government go to keep power? I’m always thinking of Heather Cox Richardson’s refrain: it’s going to get worse before it gets better and her prediction that it will go one way (the people win) or the other (democracy in the U.S. dies) by March — or did she say May? Ugh.

Get Out Ice

Still reeling from the terrible murder yesterday, but going to my block’s vigil and witnessing how Minnesotans stayed peaceful and people around the country/world expressing outrage, is helping a little.

I read a post on facebook about how hundreds of Target employees have signed a letter pushing the CEO to do more against ICE. In the post, it was mentioned how people are going to Target at the same time, buying salt, the immediately returning it, as a way to disrupt business. This action is modeled after an earlier one at Home Depot: buying ice scrapers then immediately returning them. Is this effective? Looked it up and found this Guardian article which describes many different actions against Target, including the salt:

On Martin Luther King Day, SURJ-TC said it had gathered 70 people at a Minnesota Target to “interrupt business as usual”. Participants repeatedly lined up to purchase salt, return it and repeat the process as a way to hold up lines, representing a desire “to melt ICE”, the organization wrote online. The organization plans to repeat this tactic at five Twin Cities Target stores until the company speaks out against ICE.

sit-ins and salt purchases: activism takes many forms

Alice Oswald

Started an interview with Alice Oswald in the Paris Review (thanks to my library, which makes it possible to check out current issues of some journals online!). So far, she’s talking about teaching Palestinian kids via Zoom and then getting arrested for protesting against the UK’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. When she’s asked if she planned on being arrested when she joined the protest, she said she did and:

One direct consequence of allowing genocide, though, is that, in order to excuse it, you have to pass all kinds of laws that destroy democracy from the inside. I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief.

Paris Review

This is how she describe the arrest:

They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, ‘I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,’ and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.

Paris Review

I love this idea of imagining herself as her heaviest self, as gold or lead. Sometimes I like imagining myself as a boulder — I turned into some poetry lines: be a boulder/too big to/lift too much/trouble to/move.

When asked if she’s always considered herself an activist, she says:

Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Bible, Paradise Lost — all the poems that profoundly shake me are really about how we manage kings. The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense. Quite often it’s not activist in the superficial sense. You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poems has to exist.

Paris Review

Yes! I feel that with my poetry about vision loss and the new ways I’m learning to see and be now.

Wow, there is so much in this interview that I love, so much about Oswald that I love, including her discussion of insects as speaking with wings instead of mouths. And then there’s this bit about an old woman, “an angry old battle-ax,” who had only ever been one village over:

I used to go up the road just to talk to her, and during one of these conversations she broke off because she’d heard a bumblebee go into a foxglove and change the tone of its buzz. She said, ‘Did you hear that? I love that sound.’ I remember thinking, If you don’t move away from a village, that’s the sort of thing you notice. I made a determination at the point that I wanted to be that sort of person.

Me too! Oh, thank you Alice Oswald for saying such beautiful and interesting things and making me imagine the current world otherwise for a few minutes!

dec 29/SHOVELBIKEWALK

shovel: 30 minutes
12 degrees / feels like 0
bright sun

The official word is that MSP (airport), which is only a couple of miles away, got 5.8 inches of snow. It wasn’t too hard to shovel; thankfully it got a lot colder yesterday and overnight. No longer heart attack snow. Under the powdery stuff, there was some crust, but it didn’t seem too slippery either. I would love to go out for a run by the gorge, but I don’t think that’s a good idea for my glute/hip/back. It’s tough to resist.

10 Things

  1. bright blue sky
  2. warm sun on my face
  3. fogged up sunglasses
  4. an unsettling creaking noise above me: some frozen branches on our big maple in the front which seems to be dying (evidence: big branches have already fallen this fall + several woodpeckers have been drumming on the wood)
  5. the whiny rumble of a snow blower in the distance
  6. a cold spray on my face when the wind blew some of the snow I’d just shoveled
  7. the recycling and trash can lids frozen shut
  8. rabbit prints along the side of the house, near the garage
  9. a sharp rumble nearby: another slow blower, closer and in the alley
  10. sprawled branches of the crab apple tree, weighed down with snow and ice

bike: 35 minutes
basement

Resisted the urge to go outside and run; biked in the basement instead. Almost finished the first episode of season 2 of Wednesday. Like in the first season, she attends a boarding school, Nevermore. Did I know that Edgar Allan Poe was the founder? Probably. Some outcasts are psychics or wolves, can control bugs or shoot electricity out of their fingertips. I can’t remember if there’s only one siren or more. This season has Steven Buscemi as the principal and a scar-faced crow. It was helpful to watch the episode with audio description on — such relief to actually see and understand and to not not know what is going on. Yes, that is a double negative, and yes, I meant to write it — the feeling of uncertainty is not knowing, so the relief is in not being in that state of not knowing: to not not know

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
13 degrees

Managed to convince Scott to go outside for a quick walk around the block. It was cold, especially walking into the wind, but I had hand warmers in my gloves, which helped a lot. Scott did not, so he was very cold, and didn’t want to walk for long.

What did I notice? One neighbor had put salt down on their sidewalk (boo). Most of the sidewalks were shoveled. The street 2 blocks over had lights strung up from one end of the street to the other. I never see these lit up, because I don’t walk this way at night. A friendly woman greeted us halfway down another block — hello! / hi!. She was giving treats to a cute dog. Anything else? I can’t remember.

Found a purple poem earlier this morning:

an excerpt from Language Lessons/ Judith Kiros

Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson with Judith Kiros

is it only words. On and on. If you shook up the words. On a
particular shade of purple being extracted from spiraling shells.
If the repetition had less to do with the broken-apart sea, see my
skin and my arms rippling like a wave, on and on again, I’ve
dyed them navy. On receiving a gift in your childhood, a purple
doll with foaming skirts, beneath them nothing, between her
legs nothing, what a perfect wave of black nymph. On violet.
Or on lavender. On being lowered into an ocean of colors. On
your head being pushed beneath the surface, on and on again,
to the tune of seashells knotting their purple insides. Don’t give
yourself up for free; there is a point in talking back to the sea. On
a particular shade of vague purple. On the way a shadow struts,
violet, across the page.

a particular shade of purple: tyrian purple, made from snail shells
violet, lavender, being lowered into an ocean, pushed beneath the surface: this makes be think of Alice Oswald and Nobody and Odysseus and his purplish-blueish cloak

I like the idea of being lowered into an ocean of colors
shade of vague purple

My favorite: the way a shadow struts,/violet, across the page

I love the word strut, especially when it involves a shadow! Immediately, it reminds me of another favorite line from “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency “/ Matthew Olzmann:

I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world 

with less hatred strutting the streets.

Also discovered this morning: Fragment Thirty-six / HD and the reading guide by Dan Beachy-Quick — I’d like to return to this some other day, when I have time.

one final note: I have posted a log entry, either running or biking, on this day every year that I’ve written in this log: 2017-2025. Tomorrow, I’d like to experiment with mashing up or combining or erasing or scrambling or cutting up the words in these entries to make a new piece of writing — most likely, a poem.

oct 10/HIKE

60 minutes
Minnehaha Off-leash dog park
63 degrees

Wow, wow, wow! A beautiful fall hike with FWA and Delia-the-dog at the dog park. Sun, shade, a cool breeze, yellow and red leaves, sparkling water, soft sand, cute dogs, great conversations — less abstract and theoretical and more personal this time. About anxieties and social norms and traumas and friends that don’t get you.

10 Things

  1. soft sand
  2. a motor boat, floating slowly
  3. small stones just under the surface of the water, near the shore
  4. a small stretch of beach, populated by soft sand, frolicking dogs, the bones of an old tree
  5. a loud cry — was that human? FWA thought a kid, I wondered about a fox
  6. someone far off whistling badly
  7. the surface of the water sizzling white
  8. sitting on the smoothest section of a log — how many other people, and for how many years, have sat in this very spot?
  9. top of the limestone steps — jagged, steep
  10. comparing Delia’s short, quick, little steps to a much bigger dog’s loping, floating strides

GGG (girl ghost gorge), today’s update

before my hike: Reading through the last section of this collection — Air — I had some ideas about time and Endi Bogue Hartigan’s o’clock poems, specifically these lines from oh orchid o’clock:

it is morning 
birds plus 
socket sound of
car closing / 
21st 
century 
pastoral
o’clock

A 21st century pastoral! Yes, I’d like to write some triple chants and offer a twist on the pastoral. The twist = critical of the romanticizing of land, of understanding land as object and background, etc. Fun!

Also, I want to write another poem — possibly a chant? — in this o’clock form that mixes my timeline with that of the gorge.

Other things yet to write: more on air in terms of lungs and breath; a looping poem using the last section of my poem, “Conservation”

anti-pastoral

I decided to start by searching for “pastoral” in my old log entries.

1 — 13 april 2021

I posted and wrote about Forrest Gander’s poem, “Pastoral.” He’s critical of the idea that we observe landscapes/land from a distance, as if seeing were a process, and not an instant act. I appreciate his challenge to the idea of distance, but don’t agree with his suggestion that seeing is instantaneous. Looking does take time to happen, for everyone.

dispossessed (not owned or occupied)
a process
encounter — a process / between two / actors / the beheld / beholder
no study, absorption
immediate, gradual

2 — 28 dec 2021

In the poem, “The Grand Scheme of Things,” Maggie Smith links the eye to the pastoral, too.

We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world

that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs. 
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,

and it’s not waxing pastoral.

Yes! The pastoral is all about a certain understanding of sight and vision and how/what we see, how we look.

how we see / a soft sight
filtering
what is “real”?
no access / to the Truth / through our eyes
surely you/can’t imagine/the trees look/like they look/when we are/not looking (MO)

(side note: I’m realizing that the pastoral — paintings/poems — are all about how we look and see. I need to turn to this in my ekphrastic/how I see project. )

after the hike

3 — 6 feb 2022

Pastoral turns up in A Nearly Perfect Morning/ Jessica Greenbaum:

It was a nearly perfect morning—bucolic, pastoral—

bucolic: related countryside, farm fields, pastures, rural, rustic, countrified

bucolic
countrified
a plowed field
managed land
rusticate

4 — 21 march 2022

From an interview with Alice Oswald:

there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

…more interested in the democratic stories…the hardship of laboring, looking for food…the struggle of a tree trying to grow out of stone…always looking for that struggle. I’m allergic to peace. I like this restless landscape. I like that it won’t let you sit back and say, “what a beautiful place I’ve arrived to.” You’ve never arrived. It’s moving past you all the time.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

idyll = “an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene, typically an idealized or unsustainable one.”

non-human / perspective

AO rejects the beautiful, as in, what a beautiful place, let me just sit and admire it! I’m thinking of 8 dec 2024, and my discussion of beauty as awe inspiring and awful, beauty as not perfect and relaxed, but pain and grief and struggle

struggling
suffering
laboring
a tree’s struggle / to make a home/ out of a stone
a river’s/fight to be free
restlessness / not relaxed
never here / always there
difficult / not easy (see 14 april 2021 and MO)
lacking peace

5 — 2 may 2022

she discusses William Blake’s poem, “The Ecchoing Green” and how the green in it is not the pastoral but the communal/village green, “where people mix with one another, young and old, playing and slowly fading, ecchoing. Green, as it echoes on the green, is the color of human community” (6)

Green Green Green

communal
village green / public space / gathering
not alone / solitude / together
echoing
mixing/ together
mingling
young and old/ animal, / mineral, / plant

6 — 21 may 2023

anti-pastoral poets

As for the pastoral poetry tradition, two poets and influences come to mind: Vievee Francis and the “anti-pastoral” poems in Forest Primeval, and Jennifer Chang’s Bread Loaf Lecture, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place” (June 2019, available here.)

interview with the poet, Sarah Audsley

this is not / nostalgia. / this place has / a context, / histories / visible / and erased.

Many contemporary pastorals investigate power dynamics, status differences, and the hierarchies of classification.

Pastoral in the Back Yard (essay)

7 — 2 feb 2024

Pastorale, mentioned by Robert Fripp in a blog post about his “Quiet Moments” playlists. Ambient music, Brian Eno, music creating a space to dwell in, not a narrative. Not tightly structured, directing the eye one way, but an open field allowing the ear/the eye/the whole self to wander.

open field
opening
wandering
dwelling in / dwelling with / dwell among
solitude

8 — 24 july 2025

OED: landscape — “A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.”

“A field is used more often to describe an area managed by people. The field before you was once an orchard and pasture belonging to a farmer. A meadow is used to describe a wild area.”

“Fields and meadows start when trees have been removed from an area. This can occur naturally with a forest fire or flood, or humans may cut down a forest. Seeds from grasses and weeds take root shortly after and a meadow is born.

As the trees within my macula disappear, my forest meadows. here I’m thinking about my classic memory from science class with the inverted tree in the back of the eye.

as the trees
within my
macula
disappear
my forest
fields and
meadows

cultivate
management
removal
forest fire
open field / empty field / unused field
no longer / occupied

—

So many great ideas from this wander through my archive!


oct 3/HIKE

60 minutes
with Delia and FWA
Minnehaha Off-leash Dog Park
80 degrees

A new ritual: hiking at the dog park with Delia-the-dog and my son, FWA. Every Thursday or Friday, more often Friday. What a park. On the edge of Minnehaha Falls Regional Park, next to Coldwater Springs, heading towards Fort Snelling, down in the floodplain, across from Hidden Falls in St. Paul. Such a great space for Delia to run and play with other dogs, and for FWA and I to hike and talk about roots and fungal nets and Mars and abundance and scarcity and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the sand mafia and Fall Out 76 and poetry and anxiety and . . . . In past years, parts of this park have been flooded. Hiking through, the evidence is everywhere: soft sand, the bones of giant trees, ridges and cracks and wide open spaces with tall canopies, dirt studded with rocks and pebbles and stones.

Earlier this morning, Scott sent me this link: Minneapolis witch coven takes to their paddleboards for spooky lake gathering. I wish I could have seen that!

After reading the witch article, I returned to Girl Ghost Gorge and my air section. A thought: Instead of Girl Ghost Gorge, should I call this collection, River Rock Air? I don’t think so, but I’ll keep it open as a possibility. Today’s focus started out as time and the re-reading of Chloe Garcia Robert’s “Temporal Saturation,” and I’m still thinking about that, but it shifted slightly when I reached this line:

Temporal saturation . . . is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.

Temporal Saturation/ Chloe Garcia Roberts

canyons. The gorge! The gash, gap, open space where more is possible, between beats, where Nothing happens and where there is (good) Air to breathe. Does it entomb an incarnation of the self which will never again exist? Ooo–I have thought about the idea of different Saras intermingling above/beside/in the gorge. It’s not that they don’t ever exist again, but that they only exist (together) here in this space. It’s the gorge as holding everything — not trapping or entombing, but holding — beholding, witnessing.

inside moments of great rending: rending = tearing — splitting and cracking open, ripping, breaking, eroding

floating passivity — resist recollection, or thinking, those spaces on the trail that are lost, when you let go, stop thinking, soft attention?

amplifies the moment, in joy or terror, both feeling like falling, joy, a falling into, terror a falling through

When I first encountered this book last spring, it wasn’t too long after I had read JJJJJerome Ellis’s amazing book, Aster of Ceremonies, which inspired me to think about my blind spot as (almost) a gorge, similar to how Ellis imagines their stutter as clearing. So now I’m reviewing my old Plague Notebook from that time, vol. 24. Here are some notes:

We all have a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours (sight unseen/ G. Kleege). Not a lack, not nothing, Nothing. A gap, a gorge, an opening, both solid and unstable / limestone and sandstone / a break, a rupture

And then a Plank in Reason, broke/ and I dropped down and down/and hit a World at every plunge/and finished knowing then (ED — from memory so punctuation is a bit off)

a going under — not a drowning/disorientation/underwater/submersion/immersion/more porous, less divisions

cracks/erosion/waring away

from Octagon of Water, 3/ JJJJJerome Ellis

The name of that silence is these Grasses in the wind, and the name of these Grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time.

time stopping, pause

erosion = pressure + time

ED’s elemental rust: ‘Tis first a cobweb in the soul/ A cuticle of dust/ A borer in the Axis / An elemental rust

big enough to hold all — expansion/room/possibility/generosity/holds multitudes — WWhitman — contradictions, ambiguities

entangled connected not needing to be resolved

a silence — And me and Silence some strange race wrecked solitary here (ED)
unseen unstable

weather — a different language of time (See Jenny Odell, Another Kind of Time)

extraction, dehumanizing, people outside of time, with no history

“Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering for Ellis and the People he is communicating with” (Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis).

erosion can lead to reclaiming, re-wilding as less abundance, a clearing away

a blind spot — no critical judgment, usually read as uncritical, but what if we read it as free of judgment, a generosity? See 19 march 2025 for more on this!

AOswald on erosion: worn down to abstract form, anonymity of weathered sculptures — “I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.”

erosion, a softening, a vulnerability, a tenderness

Find the ceremony in every instant. — Ellis

At this point in the notebook, I moved on to color and my chapbook, I Empty My Mind.

Reading through Plague Notebook, Vol 25, I stopped on a mention of familiar with intimate. Yes! I’ve been thinking about worn in as a form of familiarity. Habit, accustomed to, familiar, family, and now, intimate/intimacy.

Okay, it’s Friday almost evening, and I need to stop!

recap for next time: exposure to air = rust = erosion — write more about the process / I’ve written about the open space of the gorge in time (Between Beats), now I need to write about in space, with an engagement with the blind spot! / the familiar/family/intimacy among us edge-dwellers at the gorge / keep revisiting Roberts’ temporal saturation / and, more on Air