Tag: Chloe Garcia Roberts

may 22/WALK

60 minutes
winchell trail, south/grassy boulevard, north
55 degrees

The rain is over. Now, warm sun and green green green! A beautiful morning for a walk with Delia the dog. Calm and quiet and wonderful.

10 Things

  1. lilac bushes
  2. BLUE!
  3. BEEP! BEEP!
  4. velvet
  5. squish
  6. tin-whistle
  7. friends
  8. dappled
  9. dandelions
  10. unruly

Walking by a row of lilac bushes up against a fence, breathing in the sweet, flowery smell. No memories conjured, just a smile spreading across my face and a feeling of satisfaction.

With my polarized sunglasses on, the sky looked almost too blue to be true. The kind of blue that is so intensely BLUE! that it seems ominous.

Walking in the grass with Delia, our reverie was interrupted by a BEEP! BEEP! as a car attempted to pass 3 cars on the river road before quickly slotting in behind a fourth right as a car was approaching from the other way.

On the winchell trail, I reached out to a basswood (also known as linden) tree and its lined leaf. A soft shock — the leaf felt like velvet!

After the rain, I wondered how wet the dirt would be. Wet! I stepped cautiously on it and squish, mud!

That sound! Sharp. Metallic. I think it was a robin with its tin-whistle call, echoing throughout the savanna.

Up on the mesa, we encountered another dog and their human. Delia and the other dog, about her size and temperament, chased each other while we — the humans — wished good morning to each other. A brief encounter with new friends.

The trees cast their shadows on the grass. All around, dappled light.

The slender, rubbery stalks of dandelions with their fluffy white heads dotted the grass. I wondered what this stage is called so I looked it up: AI says, seed head or blowball. I prefer blowball!

Everywhere I looked, green. Green grass, green trees, green view. Unruly green leaves reaching through the slats of the fence. Oh, to be that green! To claim space with such wild abandon!

note: This is the second day I’ve tried a new experiment with my 10 Things. Instead of describing the things in the list, I’m picking 10 words and then writing about each in sentences and/or paragraphs.

air / breath

Was reminded of this beautiful poem from my entry on this day in 2017:

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.
(This Connection of Everyone with Lungs/ Juliana Spahr)

I want to connect this idea of lungs and breath to a favorite fragment of mine about feet first, following. Feet syncing up with breath.

Spahr’s lines make me think of the moment as a space, a Nothing space. Not empty, but no words or memories or history or self. A shared space possessed by no one, Chloe Garcia Roberts’ the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection.

In the time that it took me to find the Roberts line, I lost my train of thought. Maybe it is dwelling in that space between? Can I return to it?

Not sure if this is the thought I lost, but I’m also thinking of this space/time — moment — as when/where I encounter a walker on the winchell trail and I thank them for moving over to let me pass. The moment after I say, thank you, and before they say, you’re welcome, when the you is floating between us, in the process of being exhanged from them to me.

No, I think this might have been it: Not the floating passivity of Roberts — a nothing in-between — but more like dirt in Sharon Olds’ “Ode to Dirt“:

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you, I thought that you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. It’s as if I had loved only the stars and not the sky which gave them space in which to shine.

That space, that air — and here I’m thinking especially of the air above and within the gorge — that is a character in my story, not just the background —

When I understood I had never honored you as a living equal, I was ashamed of myself, as if I had not recognized a character who looked so different from me

I’ve devoted a lot of attention to water and stone beside the gorge, but the air has always been there, too. Air as the space between things, which isn’t really empty, but filled with stuff too small to see.

sinkhole

Last night at dinner, FWA mentioned that a sinkhole had opened up somewhere in St. Paul. I hadn’t heard about it. Just now I looked it up. A 35 foot — 35! — hole happened in the middle of busy 7th street. Watching a news clip about it, the director of public works said, we’re not sure how it happened yet. We need to dig down 35 feet to the sanitary sewer and fix that. Wow — so the sewer line is 35 feet below the surface? 35 feet is more than 6 Saras stacked! The sinkhole opened up on 8 may. I couldn’t find any update about it. I wonder when and if we’ll find out what caused it.

may 20/REST

Rain, all day. Soft, soothing, but maybe only from inside somewhere, looking out and listening. I’m devoting the morning to Chloe Garcia Roberts. I discovered her yesterday on Poetry Daily, when her poem-essay, Temporal Saturation, was the poem of the day. Yesterday I wondered if I should buy the book that this piece comes from, but today I know for sure. Yes!

It started when I noticed that Roberts had written an essay for Poetry Daily about the poem, Towards (A) Lyric Science. Here are some bits I’d like to remember today:

on teaching poetry like it was a high school shop class

Each week I bring a selection of poems to class which manifest some particular structural element we are learning. We read these poems aloud and observe their movements, and as we dissect them, we analyze their poetic systems, their energy sources, their gestures. We then reconstruct and rebuild approximations of their functions so as to better learn how to create our own poems from our own language and experiences.

Towards (A) Lyric Science

She envisions poetry as (a) technology. Describes the pleasure of reading “Goethe’s “Theory of Colours” as an example of writing that blurs and even perhaps erases the line between what they [her engineering students at MIT] are learning in my classroom and what they are learning outside of it.” And aims to combine the lyric and the analytic:

Temporal Saturation” was an attempt to build a poetic form that reflected that reality, between poetry and prose, in English but articulating an existence between languages and cultures, and a first foray into a place that lies between the poles of the lyric (the melodic, subjective, sentimental) and the scientific (systematic, objective, and exacting). In other words, in this piece I am writing towards the beckoning betweenness of a lyric science.

Towards (A) Lyric Science

I checked out her website — love the content and the design.

Read an excerpt from Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology.

Listened to the podcast, Voices in the River, and an episode with CG Roberts, Translating the Trees. She gives some background on Fire Eater:

So I had been working for many years on a translation project of a classical Chinese poet, Li Xiangyin, and in order to do that and give myself permission to even approach this canonical poet’s work in a language that I had learned, not grown up with, was I kept lists and notebooks of word choices and where those words came from and mapping them onto the English. And then I finished the product and I had all these notebooks and I went back to them and they were maps.

And I thought, could I use these maps to translate my own life, to articulate episodes or questions that I have about my own memories and my own experience?

And yes, they did. They did. A word would come to me, and then I would look it up, and I would look deeper and deeper and deeper into its root, and I would find, oh, it connects this meaning with this meaning, which then connects to a certain episode of my life.

So it’s 10 essays, poem essays. Writing the book felt like remembering it. It did not feel like creating it.

Translating the Trees

She describes it as a “divination with the dictionary.”

Wow. How wonderful to have found this writer and to dwell in the place she has created with her words and ideas! I can’t wait to get her book — I definitely can’t wait until my birthday next month!

Early on in the podcast, Roberts offers these words about being like a tree:

Each memory felt like a little root that I was extending and connection to that present moment [sitting inside her childhood home, creating memories, before it was torn down], not separate, not the past, not the future, not the present, but all together. This is like living like a tree. The tree is all of the moments of its growth at the same time.

Like a tree!? This reminds me of something I wrote last week in here, on 16 may about Lorine Niedecker and her line, stand among the birch, where among, at least to me, means to be a birch, to become one of them. I also wrote about noticing the split in a tree between two main branches and seeing a crotch and two legs and imagining a person, upside down, planted in the ground. And realizing that Katie Farris’s poem, “What Would Root” ends with the beginning of this image as the top of the narrator’s head comes off and is placed in the ground to drink/absorb water.

And now I’m thinking of the wonderful challenge (and, to Roberts, spiritual practice) of translating the feeling of being/becoming a tree into language.

may 19/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
54 degrees
wind: 15 mph

Even though I’ve run the past 3 days, I decided to run again today for 2 reasons: 1. it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow and Wednesday and I don’t want to run in the rain and 2. we have leftover butternut squash mac and cheese, and I always like to run before eating it for lunch. A good run. Managed to keep my heart rate lower until I reached the falls. Had to stop at the bathroom in the park building for some unfinished business. Will that be a problem again this summer? After, I put in my “Moment” playlist and ran again until I reached the bench above the edge of the world. I was planning to stop, but I noticed someone was sitting there. Bummer

Because I wanted to eat right when I got back, I gave myself about 3 minutes to jot down 10 things I remembered from the run (the jotted list was brief; below was written after I ate):

10 Things

  1. didn’t see the falls, but heard it — not a roar, but a rush of water
  2. looking ahead, seeing someone on the dirt trail next to the path — is that a kid? It looked like they were moving towards me. As I got closer — 15 or 20 feet, I realized it was not a person, but a bike — and a bike that had been parked there yesterday too
  3. a strong wind — for one stretch I was worried it would rip my cap off of my head
  4. 2 plastic white chairs stacked on the side of the park building — later in the summer they will be unstacked and people will usually be sitting in them
  5. a long row of port-a-potties (20 or more?) still standing after Saturday’s race. I wondered if they were planning to pick them up or if there was another race this weekend
  6. a walker, passed twice, bundled up in a winter coat, a winter cap (with a ball on top), and a mask
  7. the faint laughter and yelling of kids on a playground
  8. the dim roar and rush and rustle of the wind moving through the trees
  9. a fully parking lot at the falls
  10. noticed beneath the dirt next the trail just north of the 44th street parking lot: netting left behind from a failed attempt at re-grassing this stretch

more on the moment

Looking at my Plague Notebook, vol. 26, I saw that I had written CONTEXT for yesterday’s entry — as in, moments have a context, a history, a location in space. I remember being reminded of context as I walked back home after my run while listening to Rut by Wimps:

Each day is
the same as the last
There is no future
There is no past

I like routine
It’s my favorite thing
No new memories
Don’t change my scenery

Note: I listened to some other songs on the City Lights, the album “Rut” comes from. Wow — it’s all about losing your Self when you become a Mom.

Responding to the word context in yesterday’s entry, for today I wrote: Yes, context is important! A moment is not out of time, but deeper in it — geologic time.

For future Sara, who will want to bring context into any writing we do with the moment, past Sara discussed it in these entries: 6 may, 7 may, 8 may 2025

Poetry Daily’s poem-of-the-day is a great one for thinking about moments: Temporal Saturation by Chloe Garcia Roberts in their book, Fire Eater. I might want to buy this book for my birthday?

temporal saturation—the explanation for why certain moments of your life seem to spill or shrink, to transcend or subvert their physical duration, and color differently their surrounding time.

This is a wonderful description of a Moment!

Temporal saturation is an elusive measurement disproving any correlation between quantity and influence that 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.

Difficult to measure / length of time does not determine significance / the canyons inside moments — canyons = the Mississippi River Gorge?! / not entombing a past or gone self but holding it / floating passivity = the space between beats?

saturation = the state or process that occurs when no more of something can be absorbed || Can I make a connection with the dew point and its impact on a moving body? dew point = “the temperature at which the air becomes saturated with water vapor”

High levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by a languorous stretching of the experienced present, which then refracts and amplifies the emotion of the moment. The joy making this spreading pleasurable, the fear terrible, though both poles can be described in terms of the sensation of falling. The difference being that the first is a falling into and the latter a falling through

refracts = deflects / distorts / bends / disrupts

falling through = And then a plank in reason broke / And I dropped down and down / And hit a World at every plunge / And finished knowing then (I wrote these lines from “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” from memory so the punctuation and capitalization aren’t quite right).

Low levels of temporal saturation are evidenced by malaise, an involuntary refusal on the part of the individual to knit themselves to the place they occupy. Home-sickness—the corporeal and spiritual longing for a physical and temporal point of greatest belonging—is the best diagnosis to describe these ebbs of existence.

No moments = a lack of connection, an untethering, no home

The measurement of temporal saturation then can be used to quantify both the abscesses and the vividities, these gestures floating in great swathes of meaningless automation. Just as the atoms composing a human body can condense smaller than the head of a pin, the self can, like a black hole collapse, like a poem reduce. And the proof of the emptiness that oceans those bright livings is how they sparkle and call to each other despite the expanse of the interims, be they seconds, decades, lifetimes. Inlaid in space, they form the constellation of the soul.

water images: floating, condensation, oceans, sparkle — like waves hit by light
the sparkle reminds me of swimming across the lake and seeing the sparkling water, realizing that each cluster of sparkles was another swimmers’ hand piercing the water

seconds, decades, lifetimes: Aren’t we all just masses of energy and light in a jumbled future or past, stopping to embrace one another for a moment or decades before passing too far for sight? (Halos/ Ed Bok Lee)

The dew point is the temperature when air condenses on the skin and turns into sweat.

Lorine Niedecker and the poet’s work: condensing. “A condensary is where condensed milk is made. In order to make condensed milk, you evaporate a significant amount of water from milk and what you’re left with is
something delicious and much more concentrated and powerful” (Close Reading).