57 degrees? Wow, was I over-dressed. Shorts + tights + shirt + jacket. Ran with Scott through Austin, ending at the coffee place downtown (as usual). No snow on the ground, hardly any puddles on the sidewalk. Returned to Minneapolis in the afternoon: a mucky mess! Lots of snow and puddles. Still, spring is coming.
What a morning. After talking with one parent about anxiety, and another about the gamma ray that obliterated their small brain tumor, I only read a few pages today of Dart. Here’s some of my favorite lines:
woodman working on your own knocking the long shadows down and all day the river’s eyes peep and pry among the trees
when the lithe water turns and its tongue flatters the ferns do you speak this kind of sound: whirlpool whisking round?
woodman working on the crags alone among increasing twigs notice this, next time you pause to drink a flask and file the saws
5.75 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 35 degrees almost invisible streaks of ice
Almost spring! Birds, sun, the smell of fresh earth! The beginning of the run was not as fun; too many invisible slick spots from the barely melted puddles. By the end of the run, the ice was gone. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker twice. Ran down the Franklin hill then back up it, stopping for a few minutes when I encountered some ice. Settled into an easy pace that felt almost effortless. It didn’t feel a little harder until I had to climb up the Franklin hill.
10 Things I Noticed
the drumming of woodpeckers on different types of wood — trees, a utility pole
geese, part 1: one goose, with a painful (extra mournful?) honk, flying with at least one other goose, pretty low in the sky
geese, part 2: 3 geese on the path in the flats. Even though I was looking carefully, and noticed the orange cones that they were standing beside, I didn’t see the geese until I was almost next to them
geese, part 3: running past these 3 geese again, I kept my distance, crossing to other end of the trail. Two of the geese were too busy rooting through the snow to notice, but the third one faced me, as if to say, “back off!”
geese, part 4: as I neared lake street, there was a cacophony of honks trapped below the bridge
in the flats: the fee bee call of a black-capped chickadee, both parts: the call, and the response!
Daddy Long Legs sitting on his favorite bench, above the Winchell Trail, on the stretch after the White Sands Beach and before the Franklin Bridge
the wind of many car wheels, then a whoosh when one passed over a puddle
open water
watching the traffic moving fast over the 1-35 bridge near Franklin as I ran under
Before my run, I spent the morning with Alice Oswald, gathering materials, skimming interviews, reading a few more pages of Dart. So cool to make the time to learn more about Oswald’s work and to read and think about poetry and how it might speak as/with the river. I found a wonderful article in a special issue on Alice Oswald in Interim, When Poetry “Rivers”: Reflections on Cole Swensen’s Gave and Alice Oswald’s Dart / Mary Newell. Newell says this about Oswald’s Dart:
Marginal glosses introduce workers for whom the river is a resource, interspersed with local tales, as of Jan Coo, a swimmer who drowned and “haunts the Dart,” local sayings (“Dart Dart / Every year thou / Claimest a heart”), and ancient legends from times when the local oaks participated in sacred rituals. While each voice is distinct, Oswald writes that the marginal glosses “do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”
I had never heard of Cole Swensen before this article. In the bibliography at the end of the essay, I discovered that she’s written a chapbook about walking and poetry! Very exciting. Here’s something she says in the introduction about walking and place:
Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well.
I’m excited to read the rest of this chapbook. As I was reflecting on the value of walking, my mind wandered, and I started to think about why I prefer running to walking in my practicing of attention. Walking opens me up, enabling me to notice new connections, access new doors, but because it involves wandering, and is fairly slow, it doesn’t offer any limits to that wondering. I get too many ideas, wander too much. With running, the effort it requires forces me to rein in some of my wanderings. I can’t think in long, meandering sentences; I need pithy statements, condensed into a few words I can remember. These limits help keep me from becoming overwhelmed with ideas. Does this make sense? I’ll think about it more when I have a chance to read Swenson’s chapbook and some of her other work.
Back to Oswald. I’m planning to read Dart several times through. This first time I don’t want to stop and think through every word or rhythm or image. Instead, I’m reading through it and noting any passage that I want to remember — that I like or surprise me or make me wonder, etc.
if you can keep your foothold, snooping down then suddenly two eels let go get thrown tumbling away downstream looping and linking another time we scooped a net through sinking silt and gold and caught one strong as bike-chain
I never pass that place and not make time to see if there’s an eel come up the stream I let time go as slow as moss, I stand and try to get the dragonflies to land their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand)
Dartmeet — a mob of waters where East Dart smashes into West Dart
two wills gnarling and recoiling and finally knuckling into balance
in that brawl of mudwaves the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny
the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall from Cut Hill through Whystman’s Wood
Partly because I wanted to watch more Dickinson, and mostly because of the thick, wet snow that has covered the huge puddles on the sidewalk making everything a mess, I decided to bike and run inside this late morning. Before I started biking — on my bike, on a stand — I pumped up my back tire. There’s a small leak, so I’ve been pumping up the tire all winter. Finally, I have gotten the hang of my complicated pump and the strange (to me) tire nozzle!
While I biked, I watched another Dickinson episode. I stayed on the bike longer to finish it. In this one, Emily realizes (again) her Dad is a sexist jerk and that her brother Austin was right. Then she meets up with Nobody and falls through an open grave to travel to the other side of false hope. This part of the episode was difficult for me to see, it was too dark, but it looked like she was in a bizarro version of her house (with weird lighting). She ends up on a Civil War battlefield, dressed in uniform, watching as Henry calls out something like, “victory is ours!” Then, Emily sees true hope: a bird in the tree. I checked and I have 2 episodes left.
While I ran, I listened to the first three songs on Taylor Swift’s Reputation. I didn’t think about much, just moved, which I always like to do.
Yesterday, I came up with a project (or experiment?) for the rest of March. I will closely read Alice Oswald’s 48 page poem about the River Dart. It’s called Dart, and I got it for Christmas this year — after years of having it on my wishlist. I’ve wanted to read it for some time (I first mentioned it here on June, 2019) because I love rivers and Oswald and I’m very curious about how she writes about a river. Plus, after working for some time on a series of poems, then a proposal for a class, I’d like to dive deep into someone else’s words for a while.
Today, some background and a few pages. First, here’s how Oswald describes her project at the beginning of the book:
This poem is made from the language or people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two year I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters — linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a singing from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s muttering.
Dart / Alice Oswald
In an earlier description of her project for The Poetry Society, Oswald offers more details about this project, both before and during her work on it. All of it is interesting, but I was especially intrigued by her method for combining the recordings of others talking about the river and her imagination.
I decided to take along a tape-recorder. At the moment, my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record – one precise, one distorted by the mind – to generate the poem’s language. It’s experimental and very against my grain, this mixture of journalism and imagination, but the results are exciting. Above all, it preserves the idea of the poem’s voice being everyone’s, not just the poet’s.
I’d like to try doing this with the documenting of my runs: experimenting with combining recordings with my memory/imagination of what happened.
This poem begins at the start of the east River Dart at Cranmore Pool with an old man (Old Man River? or is that an American expression?) who walks the river. Here are a few lines I especially like:
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking, rustling and jingling his keys at the centre of his own noise, clomping the silence in pieces and I
I don’t know, all I know is walking.
What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out
Speaking of the bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out, I found a BBC tour of the Dart. The opening lines seem to speak about that echo-trapping moor. Also, the line, “What I love is one foot in front of another,” is wonderful. I could imagine that as a poem title.
Here’s another bit that I especially like:
one step-width water of linked stones trills in the stones glides in the trills eels in the glides in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
5.25 miles bottom of franklin hill and back 7 degrees / feels like 0
It’s supposed to be getting warmer, starting today and into next week, but it was cold this morning. Sunny, not too much wind, but cold. No frozen fingers or toes, but I felt the burn of cold air, especially after I was done. A harder run. As I’ve heard some runners say, the wheels came off in the second half. I wondered why and then I remembered I didn’t have any water this morning, just coffee. That might have been a big part of the problem. I stopped to walk at least twice, on the walking path, closer to the river but also covered in uneven snow. I noticed the river had a thin sheet of ice on it again. That should melt this afternoon or tomorrow.
Heard some black capped chickadees and the fee bee song, some cardinals too. Encountered two large (10+ runners) groups on the trails — the first one, just as I entered the river road trail, the second, not too long after the lake street bridge. The first group was all men, the second all women with 2 dogs. Right before I reached them, the women stopped to walk. After I passed them, I could hear cackling and an occasional sharp ruff. For some time, they seemed close, then they disappeared. Near the end, I saw some sledders about to go down the Edmund hill. I wonder how crusty and hard that snow is?
Practiced reciting (almost always in my head) some lines from Emily Dickinson and Richard Siken. First, from Siken, the opening words of his great poem, “Love Song of the Square Root of Negative One”:
I am the wind and the wind is invisible
All the leaves trem ble but I am invisible
(in the actual poem, the line is broken like this: “I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves/tremble but I am invisible”)
I like reciting this when I’m running into the wind. Then, I returned to ED’s “Life is but life/and breath but breath/Bliss is but bliss/and breath, but breath.” Yesterday I had chanted it with slightly wrong words: “Life is but life/death is but death…” It was difficult to train my brain out of reciting it that way. I played around with different ways of saying it, including:
Life but life Death but death Bliss but bliss Breath but breath
Death is but death and Bliss but bliss Breath is but breath and Life but life
Just thought about this as I was writing this entry:
Life is but death and breath but bliss Death is but life and bliss but breath
Here’s a recording I made after I finished my run and was walking back. You can really hear the wind!
Dickinson chant after run / 12 march
Speaking of the wind, here’s a poem I found yesterday from Alice Oswald that I love (like all her poetry):
Describe the Wind, Wind! Say something marked by discomfort That wanders many cities and harbours, Not knowing the language. Be much travelled. Start with nothing but the hair blown sideways And say: Gentle South-easterly Drift With Rain. Say: Downdraught.
Unglue the fog from the woods from the waist up And speak disparagingly of leaves. Be an old man blowing a shell. Blow over the glumness of a girl Looking up at the air in her red hood And say: Suddenly Violent Short-lived Gust. Then come down glittering With a pair of ducks to rooftop.
Go on. Be North-easterly. Be enough chill to ripple a pool. Be a rumour of winter. Whip the green cloth off the hills And keep on quietly Lifting the skirts of women not wanting to be startled And pushing the clouds like towers of clean linen Till you get to the Thin Cry That Suffers On seas.
Ignore it.
Say Snow.
Say Ditto.
Wait for five days In which everything fades except aging.
Then try to describe being followed by heavy rain. Describe voices and silverings, Say: Strong Wet Southwester From December to March.
Describe everything leaning. Bring a tray of cool air to the back door. Speak increasingly rustlingly. Say something winged On the branch of the heart. Say: Song. Because you know these things. You are both Breath And Breath And your mouth mentions me Just at the point where I end.
So much in this poem to discuss, but what jumped out at me right away was: “Describe everything leaning”. For the past few days, but especially yesterday, I’ve been noticing the bare trees and how some of them lean in one direction, both their trunks and their branches. Usually leaning towards, sometimes away. These leanings can look menacing or graceful, threatening or like surrender. I love straight trees, but i think I love leaning ones more. It would be a fun exercise to go out for a run with the task, “describe everything leaning.” I think I’ll do that tomorrow!
Keeping up the Saturday tradition of running the marshall loop. Got a later start so it was sunnier, with less shade. Listened to a iTunes playlist that I created a few years back–The Black Keys, Fall Out Boy, Billy Joel, ACDC, Pat Benatar, Jamirquai, and perfect timing for John Williams’ Theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark: running up the last stretch of the marshall hill, almost at the top.
Running over the lake street bridge to St. Paul, I watched a big bird–I think it was a turkey vulture–soaring high above the river. Running back over the lake street bridge to Minneapolis, I looked down at several shells. Rowers! Right below me, just crossing under the bridge heading south, was a single scull. The rower was wearing a bright orange shirt. Since they were facing me, I thought about waving, but then decided I was too high up and moving too fast.
Reaching the top of marshall, running by Black Coffee and Waffles, I could smell the waffles and their sweet bakery smell. I used to love waffles, piled high with whipped cream and chocolate. Now that much sugar gives me a headache. What a drag it is getting old.
There is still a lot of smoke in the air. It didn’t bother my breathing too much. Crossing the bridge, the smoke made everything hazy and the sky was almost white.
what is water in the eyes of water loose inquisitive fragile anxious a wave, a winged form splitting up into sharp glances
what is the sound of water after the rain stops you can hear the sea washing rid of the world’s increasing complexity, making it perfect again out of perfect sand
oscillation endlessly shaken into an entirely new structure what is the depth of water from which time has been rooted out
the depth is the strength of water it can break glass or sink steel treading drowners inwards down what does it taste of
water deep in it sown world steep shafts warm streams coal salt cod weed dispersed outflows and flytipping
and the sun and its reflexion throwing two shadows what is the beauty of water sky is its beauty