Tag: headphones

june 3/RUN

4.5 miles
the monument and back
65 degrees

Warm and windy. So windy that I had to take my cap off as I crossed the lake street bridge. The river looked low. I think I saw a long sandbar near the east shore. My feet were still a little sore, but mostly felt okay. Chanted in triple berries for the first 2 miles. Listened to my bunnies and rabbits playlist for the last mile.

11 Things

  1. no rowing shells on the water, but the big white motor boat that follows alongside the rowers was out there, near the dock at the rowing club
  2. workers on the other side of the lake street bridge, fixing something and making a lot of noise doing it
  3. glittering waves close to the easi bank
  4. shadow falls was falling vigorously
  5. running up from the under the bridge on the st. paul side, looking below at the water, envious of my shadow in the water
  6. on the ledge of the overlook at the monument: a insulated coffee mug, white
  7. below the overlook, a person with a dog
  8. tea kettle tea kettle or cheeseburger cheeseburger — a carolina wren somewhere
  9. a person wearing something bright orange, sitting with their bike near the upper entrance to shadow falls
  10. kids being dropped off at the daycare at the church, some by car, one by bike
  11. a handmade wood sign declaring ICE OUT in a neighbor’s front yard on the next block

holes

Time to wrap up this hole project for a few months. I have 4 visual poems that I think are . . . not finished but . . . ready to be considered done. Hole 1, Hole 3, Hole 5a, and Hole 5c. I can imagine returning to them in the fall and trying new (more advanced?) techniques with thread and grids and layers — not just 2D, but 3D.

Well, I would have finished all of the hole poems if a HUGE limb hadn’t fallen right outside my window. We (Scott, FWA, and I) had to drop everything and remove the tree, which took almost 2 hours. Scott happened to be working on a YouTube video as it happened and got a recording of it falling. Yikes!

may 30/RUN

3.7 miles
bottom of locks and dam
71 degrees

Warm, sunny. Not too bad in the shade. Ran down to the entrance of the locks and dam no. 1, turned around, stopped to walk for a few minutes, put in my “Moment” playlist, then started running again, When I got to “Lose Yourself,” I did a few strides. Felt a few brief flashes of a runner’s high.

10 Things

  1. bawk bawk cockadoodle doo! heard from far away, slowly approaching — what is that? A bike with an open bike trailer passed by, 2 kids in the back pretending to be a chicken and a rooster
  2. no cars on the way down to the locks and dam, only one car parked at the bottom
  3. some voices above me, on the trail going up to Wabun or on the ford bridge
  4. an orange water cooler with a sing, “Mill City Running” near the bench above the edge of the world
  5. empty benches — maybe one or two occupied
  6. a biker passing, blasting techno music — even if there had been a doppler effect on the music how would you be able to tell?
  7. swallowed a bug — forgot about it until an hour later when I had a few coughing bouts — Bug! I called out, to no one
  8. the rush of leaves through the trees sounding like falling water
  9. stopping at a water fountain near the end of my run, waiting for another runner to finish, soaking my hat — I have no memory of what it felt like to put the wet hat on. Did it drip down my face? Did it feel cool? I have no idea
  10. Walking back, noticing a grid on the lattice of a neighbor’s fence — at first I thought, squares, then lines

I started thinking about grids and lines and my interest in them, which led to thinking about how open swim involves some lines, or maybe not lines but trajectories — from buoy to buoy to buoy, and it also has an imaginary grid and points on that grid. But, open swim also has no lane lines. You are tethered/connected to the world and others in a different logic. I’ve already written about this in a few different ways, including in this poem, from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:

My geometry

of open swimming:
an eye, lake water.
Both of us now grids
with one dot in our
centers — a cone cell
that works, a buoy
that beacons. A line
drawn between passes
through vacant lots and
murky seas as it
tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight and
to rarely see.

may 28/RUN

4.25 miles
falls and back
61 degrees

Cooler this morning, earlier too. My goal was to run at 7. My watch says I started the run at 7:07, which means I left the house around 7. Nice. Wore my old (2021, I think) Sauconys that I stopped wearing because they made by big left toe hurt. At mile 4, my toe started hurting again. Bummer. Back to Brooks again or buying a new pair of cheaper Sauconys.

Ran to the falls without headphones, listening to the cars and the geese returning north. Ran back listening to my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist. Bad Bunny’s “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and The Jazz Crusader’s “Young Rabbits” helped me to pick up the pace. I need to create a playlist for pace — maybe mix it in with my beat/metronome experiment: 1 mile with no music or beat / 1 mile with metronome at 172-180 / 1 mile with music.

10 Things

  1. honk honk honk honk geese returning
  2. sparkling water
  3. soft shadows
  4. a runner behind, breathing heavily, closing in, then disappearing — where did they go?
  5. white foam (the falls)
  6. a roller skier — or was it a roller blader?
  7. tufts of symmetrically place ornamental grass mixed with purple blooms near “The Song of Hiawatha”
  8. a woman in a bright yellow windbreaker passing me on a bike, calling out morning!
  9. Mr. Morning! — morning! / good morning!
  10. ending at the big rock that looks like a chair, stepping on it to look down at the oak savanna: green green green

a return

This winter, I replaced many of my regular habits with new ones: (almost) no alcohol; waiting an hour to drink coffee in the morning; more protein, fiber, and iron; instead of sitting at the dining room table for 1+ hours when I woke up reading poems-of-the-day, I watched a brief video then started work on my Holes project; a consistent bedtime routine — ready at 10, asleep by 10:30. I also transformed my workspace. I added a huge cork board to one wall. It’s been fun to mix it up and try new things. I’d like to continue with many of these new things, and I also want to return to a few I’ve shifted away from, especially reading / studying / memorizing other people’s poetry.

In writing this log entry, I decided to visit my favorite poetry sites — poets.org; poetryfoundation, poets.com. On Poetry Foundation I discovered a wonderful podcast series, Wake, Butterfly:

Matsuo Bashō wrote:

Wake, butterfly— 
it’s late, we’ve miles 
to go together.

Poetry magazine presents Wake, Butterfly, a series of intimate portraits that invite listeners to keep creating. 

The final installment, which is the first I’ve encountered and will listen to, is with Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets! I think I’ll listen to it on the deck.

an hour or so later: I listened to it as I mowed the back yard. Usually I listen to the Bob’s Burgers Soundtrack (and I did today, too, after the 15 minute podcast ended). I’ve also listened to podcasts with Joy Harjo and Vs. with Danez Smith and Franny Choi, and several Agatha Christie books.

I love Marie Howe’s voice. Two times I recall hearing it before: when she was interviewed for On Being 6 or 7 years ago (at least) and in her brief discussion and recitation of her poem-in-progress, “Singularity.” In this podcast, she describes living with a big Irish Catholic family and the stories they would tell. She talks about war (WWII and Vietnam) and how she found poetry. Then she offers this:

I think the poem uses our stuff, you know, like it uses the details of my life, but the details are not important. The details are the cup … That hold something you can’t quite see, but you can feel, I hope. Because when it works, I feel something I can’t see. When I was writing a book called What the Living Do, it wasn’t done yet and I didn’t know how it wasn’t done. It had enough pages, it had an arc, I guess. But I was thinking about when I was in high school and. I was living up in the attic of our house with my brother. My brother lived in one room and I lived in another, and my dad would come up there when he was drunk and, um, pester me for hours—the way a drunk person does, wanting attention, wanting something, and it was very difficult. That’s one of the stories in my heart about my younger life, and I thought, “OK, what else is also true about that story?” And I remember actually standing up from my desk in New York here, and turning around, turning my body around 180 degrees and saying, “What else is true?” And I saw my brother Tom, who would come into the room and try to get my dad out, or would come into the room after my dad had left, and I wanted to praise him. So I want to offer you this invitation. Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.

Marie Howe in Wake, Butterfly

Consider one of the stories of your life that feels fixed, and allow yourself to gaze around that story—quite physically—around the room of it or the time of it and to find something else in that story, even if the story is a painful one, to find something else in that story that’s praisable.

I love this idea of taking a fixed story and finding something else in that story to praise. I think I need to sit with this one for a few hours.

Before then, this:

The Maples/ Marie Howe

I ask the stand of maples behind the house,

How should I live my life?

They said, shh shh shh . . .

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,

And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.

A squirrel scrambled up a trunk

then along the length of a branch.

Stand still, I thought,

See how long you can bear that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,

drinking light breathing.

—

This standing still — seeing how long I can bear it — seems like a great thing to do everyday. As part of this: explore different ways to be still. What is it to be still?

The beginning of this poem reminds me of a Mary Oliver poem that I’ve posted on this log several years ago (2 july 2020):

I Go Down To The Shore/ Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out, 
and I say, oh, I am miserable, 
what shall–
what should I do? And the seas says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

may 21/HIKERUN

hike: 55 minutes
minnehaha off-leash dog park
60 degrees

note: I’m writing this the next morning. I was so busy working on pasting words for Hole 3 that I forgot to work on it.

Cool, overcast, humid. Some birds, but not as many as on Monday. An unfortunate encounter with a dog and their human who was not giving any attention to the dog and how they were being too aggressive with Delia the dog. At one point, FWA and I had to surround Delia and I called out to the dog, in my don’t-fuck-with-me-mom-voice: good-bye! go away! Finally the human noticed, (sort of) apologized and called to their dog, who ran off. But, as soon as we started moving again, the dog was back. FWA called out, would you please control your dog? And, finally, she did.

Wow, that made us mad. I’m glad that the human didn’t try to engage with us anymore because it might have escalated. A few minutes later, as we kept walking, I thought about the incident with the woman who had felt threatened by a guy she had confronted a few weeks ago in a new way.

FWA and I stewed about the encounter for a few more minutes until we encountered a sweet and HUGE black dog and their human. What breed is your dog? / A Great Russian Terrier. / What’s their name? / George. George! As George approached me, his head at my hip (he is that tall), she warned, George has a wet face. What a sweet face and disposition! FWA agreed, adding that George had the energy of an old soul. Walking away, I wondered about the origins of the Great Russian Terrier, imagining them in Peter the Great’s entourage.

a few minutes later: I was wrong. They were bred by the Soviet Army and served as guard dogs at the Siberian Steppes. Yikes!

Watching this video, I was reminded of George. What a sweet dog, and a sweet human who has cared for him so well!

water level watch: for the past month or so, I’ve been taking note of the rising and falling water level at the beach at the tip of the park. One time, the water had consumed most of the beach, another time it was so low that we could walk far enough to reach a biggish log. Today that log was underwater by about 40 feet (in distance, not depth).

run: 4.5 miles
reverse veterans home
64 degrees

Since my blue running shoes seem to be bothering me, I decided to try out my bright yellow shoes again. It felt so strange to run in them for the first 5 minutes, like everything was discombobulated. Awkward, wrong. Slowly I got used to them, but they didn’t feel okay until mile 4. And they never felt great. Sigh. Am I going to need to invest in different shoes?

10 Things

  1. so many cars on the road, zooming past, fast!
  2. the falls were gushing white foam
  3. a line of surreys waiting to take over the paths and annoy Scott
  4. 2 people sitting on a bench, another next to them in a wheelchair, all of them laughing about something, having fun
  5. passing a couple, overhearing the guy saying something cliched — I wish I could remember the expression — I think he was being ironic
  6. 2 dozen middle-schoolers (I think?) running along the trail — spread out, some fast, some much slower — a track team?
  7. stopping at the huge boulder that looks like a chair, a person emerged out of the oak savanna
  8. a biker’s bright headlight cutting through the trees
  9. big groups of people all around the falls
  10. the faint chiming of the light rail’s recorded bells

A good run — not the best, but definitely not the worst. Other than my feet burning near the end of mile 3 (thanks, warts), I felt strong and fit. For the entire run, I listened to an audiobook that is due in 3 days: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter / Stephen Graham Jones. Such a great book, and difficult/painful to read as it forces me to confront the violence against indigenous peoples that is the inheritance of all settler colonists. The violence in the book (it is a horror book about a vampire) is not gratuitous but reflective of the horrific violence done to American Indians in order to take their land.

holes 3

Today I cut out the words of the poem and pasted them on the essay. Realized after I did it that I should have numbered them — one of my main ways of guiding the reader in what direction to go when reading the words. Oh well, this is only a preliminary version. I played around with how to thread it — from the upper right hand corner to mimic my blooms poem, or in the center and all around. I like the center better. I told RJP that I liked to try using a bigger needle for the center — the eye — and have the thread go through that. RJP told me I need a tapestry needle. Time to go shopping again!

threads over essay

Next up: play around with light to create shadows. As I worked on this thread technique, I wondered if it might not work better for another of my poems about the strings unravelling? Instead of thread for this one, maybe I should focus on playing around with shadows a lot more? Fun!

may 20/RUN

3.75 miles
top of wabun hill, bottom of locks and dam
55 degrees

Goodbye gloom, hello sun! Shadows, the promise of summer returning! I was a little nervous about running this morning because my feet have been hurting ever since my 8 mile run on Monday. But, I was fine. I felt strong and happy to be outside in the sun before bugs and heat join us in a few weeks.

10 Things

  1. green everywhere — nothing more specific, just green and green and green
  2. a voice on a speaker at Dowling Elementary telling kids to stay in the classroom until they were told they were free to move around — was this a safety drill? an active shooter? field day?
  3. cracks and ruts and holes on the paved trail everywhere — more now than in the fall
  4. voices below — rowers? no, walkers on the winchell trail — deep in conversation
  5. 4 or 5 cars parked on the way down to the locks and dam — at least 2 were running with radios on
  6. a bright silver flash — sun reflecting off a car hood
  7. empty benches
  8. the water under the ford bridge was mostly a calm blue with a few waves and a faint reflection of the bridge’s arch
  9. nearing the top of the wabun hill, hearing a chainlink fence rattling: someone playing on the frisbee golf course
  10. my face, slick with sweat and the new sunscreen I just bought at Costco yesterday

I listened to feet striking the ground as I ran south, my “slappin’ shaddow” playlist on the way north. Song I remember the most: White Room / Cream

Low Vision

Yesterday I had my first low vision therapy appointment. It was an assessment. She asked me what I’d like help with — she worded it differently, but I can’t remember how. First I said that I’d like help with interacting with people when I can’t see their faces, and then something more useful: I’d like some strategies for dealing with that uncomfortable moment when I enter an unfamiliar place and can’t make sense of my surrounding. She recommended 2 apps to try (more on that later) and the basic technique of grounding myself by standing with my back against a wall and taking a minute to get my bearings. I like the idea of stopping and standing against a wall. Two of my big problems are feeling pressured by others, or having them try to help me when I want to figure it out myself. Standing back should help with those problems.

back to hole 3

Woke up yesterday to a realization: I really like the idea of my specimen board, but the execution of it feels forced and not very interesting. Time to set that one aside for now (or forever?). I decided to finally begin my summary of April’s monthly challenge, partly because I don’t want to get too far behind on my summaries, and partly to shift my attention back to grids and holes and lines. I only needed to read a few days into April to find some (re)direction. Here’s what I wrote on 6 April:

I’m thinking about grids and the lines and why it matters to me….how reading is so important to that locating and how being located is to be held, to be connected, to be seen or recognized or have others aware (of you).

6 april

This morning, before my run, I decided to rework hole 3. A new plan:

  • my standard 4 panels — 3 panels of page 1 of the book review of Helen Oyeyemi’s new book, A New New Me, 1 panel of page 2
  • 4 short verses — the first 3 mostly “found” on one of the 3 page 1s, the 4th made out of the words from verses “1-3 that are “found” on page 2
  • a grid + hole in the top right corner with many strands of thread emerging from it to cover the words of the poem

The words of the poem:

verse 1: swap out the dead-eyed liturgy of doomed vision
for (with?) looks of shadowed magic

verse 2: Fall through the hole your eyes don’t see, land in a logic of blur and almost

verse 3: read sentences sliced in half, each one glitching just enough to scramble what is real and imagined

verse 4: in a scramble looks logic, eyes read blur as what is

one tiny cheat: even though I don’t use as in the first 3 verses, I added it to verse 4 because I needed to — can I keep playing around with this to make it fully work?

I would like to have this on my cork board before the sun begins streaming in the front windows. How will the shadows fall on the panels? What might the thread-shadows say? If this looks cool, I’d like that to be part of the poem.

I have the panels up on the cork board. I didn’t have time to do anything but mark where the found words go, but I was able to create some thread lines. Now I wait. And wait. And wait. It wasn’t until 7pm that the shadows began to appear. The ones from the threads weren’t as interesting as I wanted, so I started experimenting with other ways to make shadows. A flash of a thought: tape my blind spot on the window where the light is streaming in so it can cast a shadow on the paper. Yes! I had three templates, so I taped them all up. I want to play with this some more tomorrow — hopefully it will be sunny again!

3 holes taped on window, casting shadow on essay, close-up
3 holes taped on window, long view

may 13/RUN

5.6 miles
ford loop
60 degrees

Warm again this morning. I wasn’t planning to do the ford loop, but I wanted to run a 5k before walking so I just kept going south on the east river road and by the time I reached 3.1 miles it seemed too far to turn around. So I kept going and did the ford loop. My legs felt sore again (again = my 7 mile run with Scott last Saturday). Why so sore?

I think I heard the rowers on the river, but when I looked down at the water it was empty. Saw one roller skier. Admired the glittering waves below me as I crossed the lake street bridge. Ran near St. Thomas but never heard the bells. Bad timing, I guess. The wind was so strong on the ford bridge as I headed east that I had to take off my cap. I also had to walk with purpose so that I wasn’t blown over. Yikes.

holes

A few months ago, when I started working on my visual poems about how I read (holes), I decided to let myself be obsessed with it, to fall down the rabbit hole and follow it where it led me. I don’t normally do this because I like to be in control and I’m always afraid of being too much and of following a wrong path too far. I’m enjoying this experience — it’s so much fun! Even so, I do find myself missing reading more poetry by other people and writing non-visual poetry. Part of me is worried that I won’t/can’t find my way back there, but most of me is deciding to trust my urge to create what I’m creating.

This morning before my run, I made a few more flowers, then printed out the text of the poem to glue onto the essay. After the run, I glued the words and pinned the flowers. Here’s what it looks like so far. I’m thinking I need more flowers, but how many? They’re fun to make.

hole 5a with flower blooms

And here’s a close-up of the flowers:

flower bloom, close-up

may 12/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
67 degrees

Woke up this morning and couldn’t believe how warm it felt. Is spring over, and summer here? I’d like the lake water to warm up, but I don’t want it to be this warm yet. Wore my summer (lack of) layers: shorts, tank top, baseball cap. Encountered lots of bikes whizzing by, at least 2 pelotons, too.

best biking moment: a biker passing another biker hauling a trailer with at least one kid who I heard laughing and yelling out in delight as they approached from behind.
kid in trailer calling out, Fun! as the biker passed.
passing biker: on your left then FUN!

I felt relaxed and unhitched from the world, floating. It was partly from the effort of moving this much under the warm sun, partly from my vision, and partly from the dreamy, surreal way the shadows of leaves-in-wind danced on the asphalt.

10 Things

  1. bright yellow vests on many of the bikers, a few walkers
  2. kids laughing on the school playground
  3. the white foam of the falls falling
  4. more bursting/blooming shadows
  5. the parking lots at the falls were blocked off — were they planning to repaint the lines, or trim trees, or what?
  6. a rushing creek
  7. the siren from an ambulance near the falls, uttering a half-scream every few seconds — warning cars to get out of the way?
  8. the smell of fertilizer on the ornamental grass near the wall with “Song of hiawatha”
  9. a dozen bikers stopped near the hill up to the ford bridge — as I passed them, I heard one say, is everyone ready?
  10. empty benches

I listened to the wind as I ran south, my “It’s Windy” playlist heading north. Favorite song today: “Summer Breeze” / Seals & Crofts

holes — blooms

Woke up thinking about flowers and blooms and decided to watch the singing flower scene from Alice in Wonderland for inspiration. Less than a minute in, I found this flower, which I love. It’s orange and messy and more about texture than any fine detail. Can I replicate it on a page? Will it work? Can I put the text of the found poem in the center of it?

a shaggy flower -- a ball of orange in the center of the screen with a few petals looking sticking out like hair
an orange flower singing to Alice

And here’s that flower flanked by two others, just starting to sing. Instead of the mouths, the word of the poem?

an orange ball of a flower flnaked by 2 pink flowers
pink / orange / pink flowers singing

Okay, and here’s a different flower with the same general form (or is it the same flower?)

2 orange flowers, one with the face of a lion, the other a tiger
2 orange flowers / dandelion and tiger lily

note: it was only when looking at the similar thumbnail image that I was able to see the lion. I was struck by this image because of the spiky petals and the messy, but easily identifiable shape. I might be able to replicate this.

nonsense blooming

a few hours later: The bloom has gone through a number of iterations today. Where I’ve landed now is this:

  1. Noticed that an old notepad I have — from way back when I was teaching at the U, around 2010 — is bright orange and decided to use it in my blooms, so I cut out a circle of it to use as the base
  2. took a page of the essay and colored it in with orange colored pencil
  3. used my template for my blind spot and drew, then cut out, petals from it
  4. glued the petals on, then the word from the poem
big picture
closer-up

The problem: it doesn’t look good. Also the problem: Gluing and arranging the petals in/on the orange circle requires good working central vision, which I don’t have. The orange circle is the location of my blind spot, so everything that enters it disappears. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Maybe I should ditch the petals in the shape of my working central vision and try something else. But what? No petals? Petals made from words? Petals made from shedded paper with the words of the essay (colored orange) on it?

an hour later: I took a page of the essay and shredded it, then shredded a few small pages of bright ORANGE paper. Then, after some trial and error, decided on a new approach. I pushed individual shreds of the essay and the orange paper through a pin to create a “3-D” flower. Tomorrow I’m thinking of switching out the words of the poem in circles for the words enlarged and cut-out like I did for Hole 1: in the shape of a rectangle and glued in the space where they exist in the essay. Here’s the first, quick version of my flower:

word flower, made from shredded text and orange paper

I like this and, more importantly, I can execute it with my terrible central vision. I’d like to try making one that has even more shredded paper to see how that works.

Wow, this took a LONG time. How fun to waste so much time in such a glorious way! Whatever the finished product looks like to others, the process of experimenting and not listening to the Censor who tries to shut me down (saying, you’re not an artist! or you don’t make things! or people who can’t see don’t do visual art!), is such an important thing to do, particularly for me as I try to reclaim my agency in the wake of vision loss. Plus, I feel connected to my mom when I’m doing these things. She was an amazing artist. I wish she was still alive; she would have some great ideas for me!

may 7/RUN

3.4 miles
2 trails
52 degrees

52 in the afternoon is not warm enough for spring, but it was fine for my run. Sunny, still, beautiful shadows. All over the sidewalk: little explosions of shadow buds on the tips of branches. While on the upper trail I listened to my “Sight Songs” playlist, when I went below I listened to voices floating above, rustling below, and the warning cries of black-capped chickadees.

I took the lower trail through the oak savanna, past the ravine, up the gravel trail to the ancient boulder, down to the tunnel of trees, then down the old stone steps to the river.

10 Things

  1. rustling below — an animal, maybe a turkey? No, a human in a bright red jacket
  2. ruts and cracks all over the few parts of the lower trail that are paved
  3. green exploding everywhere, new leafs on a tree, pushing through the slats of the wrought iron fence
  4. voices of kids, playing at the school playground
  5. blue water
  6. tree shadows, some sprawling, some exploding
  7. a new layer of gravel
  8. ran through a small cloud of gnats and trapped at least two in my eye juice — yuck!
  9. very soft and deep sand on the small trail winding through the floodplain forest
  10. loose gravel on the hill out of the ravine, making it more challenging to run

more holes

Still playing around with how to visualize the different hole poems and how to introduce/present the different elements: word, line/string/thread, hole. A wild idea last night that I can barely imagine executing. For a poem in which I have a double grid — one grid drawn directly over the poem, another created out of thread elevated above it — I would use needles instead of pins for stringing the thread. Yes, this is ridiculous — if I’m doing the math right, that would be 84 needles to thread, which I will never have enough spoons for. But wait — what if I put 2 needles on the center dot and used pins for the perimeter? How would this look? I’ve been thinking of the needle as eye ever since I used the phrase, threading the eye of a needle. Hmm, that idea needs to simmer some more.

This morning, I returned to Holes 1 and thought about how to find the words on the pages of the New Yorker essay. This poem was the start of this w/hole journey, so I imagine it as an introduction to the series and to the key elements — in particular: hole = blind spot and line/string = lines of amsler grid. Sara this second has decided on this plan: a grid with my blind spot on it for each panel, drawn over the words of the poem / the words printed out on other paper, then cut out and pasted on top of the grid, each numbered / an additional grid with blindspot/hole drawn at bottom as key/for explanation. Here’s the first stage:

text with 4 grids, each containing a dark blob (my blind spot) and the words: another name for barely not blind is a hole in your vision that makes for an uneasy fellowship with the word.
Holes 1 / phase 1 (7 may)

an hour or two later . . . Next, I drew on an Amsler Grid then glued on a caption and the title of the poem. I still need to draw the hole in my vision directly on the grid. This will require scaling the hole down. I’m thinking of trying out the Chuck Close grid method on another amsler then cutting it out and tracing it on the “real” one. That’s post-run Sara’s job.

holes 2 : phase 2, 7 may

I like it! I was able to (very) roughly approximate my hole to fit in the smaller grid, but I won’t post it here until it has been published somewhere.

may 6/RUN

4.7 miles
veterans home in reverse
42 degrees

Brr. Was glad I wore my winter tights this early afternoon. I almost wish I had had gloves near the beginning. Saw the parks crew out near the savanna, looking like they were getting ready for another controlled burn. Overcast, windy.

10 Things

  1. the smell of freshly cut grass somewhere — was it near Wabun, or was that at my last run through Wabun
  2. the top of a wooden fence, missing
  3. another fence top, broken and slanted
  4. gushing water below, 1: on the bridge connecting the veterans home and the river road
  5. gushing water below, 2: above the falls, the creek below
  6. gushing water below, 3: the sewer pipe in the 42nd street ravine
  7. shshshsh of the soft suface on the dirt trail next to the paved path
  8. the very LOUD monthly severe weather siren that blasts the first Wednesday of every month
  9. a few school buses in the falls parking lot, at least one group of people clustered above the falls
  10. empty benches

grids and holes 1

A favorite journal, Unlost, is open for submissions. They feature found and visual poems. I’d like to submit a few of my found poems, so today I started fine-tuning holes 1. First I finished drawing grids and my blind spot/hole on the panels of the essay:

holes 1 / 5 grids

I could keep all the pages intact, then place some plastic over all them OR I could cut out the grids, put plastic over each, then place them beside each other to create the poem. I also like the idea of the double grid with pins and thread. Maybe I’ll try the pins tomorrow (and maybe I’ll leave the plastic for non-hole poems?).

april 26/RUN

4 miles
up wabun / down locks and dam
59 degrees
overcast

It is supposed to rain all day tomorrow, so I ran today. Warm — shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Spring! I ran south on the trail. Lots of bikers but no reckless biking. I almost wrote that I forgot to look at the river, or that I don’t remember what I saw when I looked at the river, but then I remembered that I noticed it at the bottom of the locks and dam hill. Blue-gray and choppy,

sight of the day: a little kid (2 or 3?) hanging over the edge of a part of the wooden fence on the edge of the hill leading down to the oak savanna, an adult holding onto them tightly. What can you tell from a scene while running of a little kid with their back to you? Not much, I guess, but it felt like the kid had a wonderful curiosity, and the adult with them was supporting/encouraging/safeguarding it.

running thoughts: I felt strong and more confident, having run the 10k race yesterday. I ran too fast — I need to slow down! After the run was finished my achilles felt a little strained or strange or both. One of my funning YouTubers has achilles problems and they keep them in check by doing calf raised after every run. Maybe I should try that?

10 Things

  1. smell: cannabis somewhere nearby
  2. a cardinal’s pew pew pew call
  3. a bike peloton (15-20 bikes) on the paved path
  4. someone on e-bike zooming by on the road
  5. more green buds
  6. some empty benches, some occupied
  7. someone on a bike biking alongside a runner — marathon training, maybe for Grandma’s Marathon?
  8. a white car speeding down the locks and dam hill, turning around, then speeding back up it
  9. gnats! one landing on my check near the edge of my eye — I could see a black spot in my peripheral vision
  10. the boot hanging off a stalk in a neighbor’s yard is still there, a month later

holes

Today I’m experimenting with different ways to visualize my Holes 4 poem:

you look at words. you don’t see the gaping hole. you see seltzer fizz and a nothing that is something not sharing its secrets.

First, I cut up a ziploc bag and made dots in it with a pencil. This looks like fizz or static or snow, which is cool. A problem: you can feel it, but you can’t really see it. How to make those marks show up? Then I cut the static ziploc into the shape of my blind spot — actually, I cut out 20 of them. It’s still not visible, but I like the texture and the idea of making the visual less visible. I think I’ll use these somewhere.

After spending some time with distressed ziploc bag and not getting anywhere, I tried a different approach. First, streamline the poem, get rid of the fizz, and get over the idea of trying to represent fizz or static. Here’s the new version of the poem:

you look at words, you don’t see the gaping hole, you see a nothing that is something not sharing its secrets.

When I shortened the poem, I was able to “find” it on four instead of six of the pages of the new yorker essay.

Next, instead of trying to make fizz, I decided to distress a new sheet of ziploc plastic with a criss-cross pattern. I really like it!

view 1
view 2

I really like this way of distressing the plastic. And, it’s easy to do and to replicate! When I put it directly over the text of the essay, it didn’t obscure the text enough. Soon I realized that it needs to be at a slight distance. I keep coming back to the idea that these poems need to be 3-D. How should I do that?