2.25 miles edmund, north/32nd st, west/47th ave, south/edmund, south/37th st, west/around Howe School/44th ave, north 59 degrees humidity: 93%
Running Route, 12 Sept
I love the picture this route makes.
A slighter shorter run this morning with headphones on. Didn’t think about much, just enjoyed listening to music and getting lost in the sounds and motion. So humid it felt like it was still drizzling. Was it? Not sure. Didn’t encounter that many people. Hardly any bikers or runners. No roller skiers. As I listened to Lizzo, I decided that I should make a playlist for my hill sprint workout. A fun, fast song for each sprint.
2.5 miles river road, south/edmund, south/edmund, north/the hill 62 degrees
Another nice morning for a run. Started on the trail but it was too crowded. Had a moment when there were 2 runners and 2 bikers approaching me at the same time. I had to fit through the small sliver in-between them. Ugh. I’m tired of having to focus so much attention on avoiding people. It would be nice if I could figure out the best time to run when no one else was. Does that exist? Oh well, it’s still not too bad and I am happy to get out for a run almost every day. I have a streak of almost a month straight going–my last day off was August 8th. I might try to keep going until I reach a month. I think I’m able to do it because I’m not running too much–only about 4-5K a day (2.5-3.1 miles).
I listened to a playlist so I don’t remember much of the run. Anything? Can’t remember if I could see the river. Don’t think I saw any roller skiers. Was it sunny or cloudy? I can’t remember that either. I know it was cool-ish and that I had to run into the wind for a bit. That’s all.
Blighted light at the tip Of a branch, why so early Do you turn?—leaf Dipped in vermillion, Close to the end, you point To a sidewalk wet Once with names Signed in cement to seal, For all time, a vow Uttered by two Standing under the crown Of a tree you cleave to still, For now: solitary witness Standing alone, limbs Crisscrossing in shadows Beginning to scrawl Lines to a world hell- Bent (with or without intent) On obscuring Whatever they meant. Blighted light At the topmost bough, Little flag hailing Another day, do not go So early to ruin, green, Do not turn so soon.
Found this wonderful poem on my instagram feed this morning. Unlike the poet, I am not lamenting the turning of the leaves. Begone gluttonous green! I’m ready for my views of the river and the other side again. I’m thinking that I should memorize another series of poems to recite while running about changing leaves, early fall, and the end of green?
2 miles 43rd ave, north/32nd st, east/edmund, north/the hill 79 degrees dew point: 66
Very hot today. 77 degrees at 7 in the morning. I decided to do a shorter run. Not too bad. Listened to a running playlist so didn’t notice any other sounds. No chirping birds or backing up beeps or roaring lawn mowers or plink-plonking acorns or zapping cicadas. Ran in a lot of shade, which was nice. Felt strong running up the hill on Edmund. Checked out my form a few times by looking at a shadow running beside me, then ahead. Encountered many more walkers than runners.
Didn’t get close enough to see the river. Forgot to check out the aspen eyes. I did notice how the tree on the corner of Edmund and 32nd, the one that usually glows a glorious yellow in the fall, was almost all goldish-brown. Is it dying? I hope not.
Had another pandemic dream last night–my second, I think, which isn’t too bad considering how long we’ve been in this mess. Same scenario, different setting. In a crowded place (first time it was a Justin Bieber?! concert, this time in a restaurant). Suddenly, I realize I’m around too many people, none of us socially distancing or wearing masks. What am I doing here? Why am I being so reckless? I freak out, then wake up. It’s unusual for me to have such literal dreams–of course, a bunch of other weird shit happened in the midst of this that I can’t remember now too, but the basic anxiety is my actual, literal anxiety. Usually, anxiety dreams are like the one I mentioned a week ago when I was late for a band concert and couldn’t find a black shirt. Or, it’s the last week of the semester and I haven’t shown up to class at all–either as the teacher or the student. Being late for a concert, forgetting to attend class are not things I have to worry about right now–and I’m not. What is it about this pandemic and my fears/worries about it that is making my dreams so boringly literal?
I think (I hope) I’ve discovered my new project. It’s a companion project to the Snellen charts. I’m tracing the blind spot in my central vision and then superimposing it on text about vision to create erasure poems. I’m still not sure how this will all work or how many of them I will do or whether or not I will only do erasures with found text or include my own text. Last night, while experimenting with this, I tried it out. This is not the actual erasure, just an experiment taking text about blind spots from Sight Unseen, staring at it until I can see my blind spot, then tracing that blind spot on top of the text.
Blind Spot Experiment
Not sure how to make this work yet. In the above experiment, I focused my eyes on the center of the page–the W I think–and then traced the blind spot I saw. I could try focusing on different spots. Should I create the blind spot tracing with every new experiment or create a template of my blind spot that I can easily place on different texts? Should the text be blacked out or just not there–an absence in white?
Scott suggested creating two poems out of it, one with the blind spot words removed–so a ring of white, and one with only the blind spot words. This makes me think of the amazing poems of Diana Khoi Nguyen in Of Ghost, especially Triptych.
3 miles running wherever there’s an uncluttered path* 69 degrees humidity: 89% dew point: 66
*Ran towards the river, was almost hit by 2 bikes (one was their fault, the other mine). The path was so crowded that I couldn’t avoid people so I crossed over to the grassy stretch between edmund and the river road. Too crowded. Ran on Edmund. Too crowded. Finally turned right on 42nd and ran through the neighborhood, west on 42nd st, north on 43rd ave, around Howe school, east on 37th st, north on 45th ave, west on 35th st.
Hot and too crowded. Oh well, still good to get out there. Woke up this morning from an anxiety dream: I needed to perform in a concert in a town an hour away. I couldn’t find a black shirt. Most of the dream consisted of me frantically searching through all my clothes, which had been carefully folded by my dead mom until I threw them all around the room. No black shirt. A messy mountain of clothes.
Listened to a playlist as I ran. It helped a little. Could still hear the crickets buzzing. It’s LOUD bug season. When I reached Howe, someone was racing a remote control car on the street. I’m glad I was running on the sidewalk! I never saw who was doing it. I imagined a young boy, but it could have been a man or a young girl, I guess.
Listening to Teenage Kicks on the Current radio station this morning as I write this entry. I like this line from Prince’s “Pop Life”: everybody needs a thrill/we all got a space to fill.
Found this bit of wisdom on twitter from Dana Levin the other day. I love the poetry people on twitter.
Hot tip: It’s great to mull the context that gives birth to a poem, but if you start revising based on this context rather than on the gifts (often unexpected) of the material—language, image, tone, etc—your poems will simply be recordings rather than revelations.
So one can lose a good idea by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides it knows nothing of
This makes me think of same great advice Danez Smith gave in a poetry workshop I attended. They talked about the original idea for a poem as the bay leaf that seasons the poem but that you take out before serving.
I’m also thinking about something Mary Oliver said in her interview with Krista Tippet for On Being. Just as Dana Levin ends with “your poems will simply be recordings rather than revelations,” Oliver suggests that without empathy/feeling your poem is only reporting, a field guide. Too much context/explanation distracts (or detracts?) from feeling and experiencing the poem.
Just updated to the latest version of WordPress (5.5) and they have changed the interface again. Initial reaction: why do we need this change? I’ll give it some time.
Writing this, an hour after my run, the sky is dark, foreboding. Looked at the radar on the weather app and bright yellow and orange and red are approaching. A heavy storm. Hopefully not too heavy.
Took a walk with Scott and Delia the dog first, then went for a shorter run. Listened to a playlist and don’t remember much. Noticed the house on 43rd that used to have the best Halloween decorations–a light/sound show with Toccata and Fugue, a coffin opening up to reveal a skeleton, a graveyard with bloody heads–until the cool people moved away. The new owners have a large cross hanging on their front door and have lined their path with cutesy flowers. Yes, I guess I am bitter.
The run was nice. Noticed lots of cars at Minnehaha Academy–looked it up, student are returning to campus on August 27th. Wow. Also looked up tuition for high schoolers: $23, 980 a year! Forgot to notice the Aspen eyes. Ran on the sidewalk past the trees that, in less than two months will be glowing yellow, and my favorite trio of some of the biggest cottonwood trees I’ve ever seen. Ran past the house that seemed abandoned for almost a year until suddenly it wasn’t and now they’ve been doing minor renovations all spring and summer. Switched over to other side of Edmund and ran right above where they’re working on the sewers. When I reached 36th I turned left onto the river road and ran down the hill until I reached the bottom. Turned around and ran back up it. Saw some bikers, runners, walker. Any roller skier? Don’t think so.
Before I run I noticed the quiet buzz of bugs. The buzz didn’t sound electric. Was it crickets? Speaking of electric buzz, I found another useful site about cicadas with this harsh and haunting description:
When you walk over the earth, it asserts itself: “Here. Here.
Here,” it says to your feet. You must reckon with the earth, though it enters
you less. The sky always has its hand in you, as if you were a puppet,
through your ears down your throat into your lungs—and with the tips
of its fingers there, it caresses every capillary, every blood cell, until they blush.
After initially posting this entry, I sat at my desk and listened to the gentle rain falling and decided I needed to add something more here. “A Short Story of Falling” by Alice Oswald is a favorite poem of mine–I should memorize it. A few years ago, I turned it into an homage poem about crunching snow.
A Short Story of Falling/ ALICE OSWALD
It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower
and every flower a tiny tributary that from the ground flows green and momentary
is one of water’s wishes and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail
if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass
to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip
then I might know like water how to balance the weight of hope against the light of patience
water which is so raw so earthy-strong and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along
drawn under gravity towards my tongue to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song
which is the story of the falling rain that rises to the light and falls again
And here is a recording of the rain, just outside my window in the front room:
Since they’re opening the road back up to cars any day now, I thought I would do 2 loops. Back when they closed the road in early May, I had visions of running loops all summer. I even created a loops page. But it didn’t take me long to realize that I don’t like running loops, or at least multiple loops at once. Halfway through the first loop, I start thinking about how I’m going to have to run another loop and then I think, “How am I going to do another loop?” and I usually stop early. I am often willing to stop something early when I don’t think it’s working. Sometimes this is a good thing–why torture yourself doing something you hate just because you said you’d do it? Sometimes it’s a bad thing–why is it so easy for me to stop when I don’t like it? Mostly I’m fine with my tendency to stop–probably because I usually find something to like about what I have to do so I get the things done I need to and because my willingness to stop early doesn’t reflect a lack of passion or commitment. I’m very committed to my writing and running and family and thinking/living/acting with critical awareness and care.
So–back to the point of this digression–I accept that I don’t like running loops and I don’t run them. But today, I thought I’d try something different. I ran one loop with no headphones, then one loop with a playlist.
loop one
The first loop was about a minute slower. I focused on birds (heard a black capped chickadee) and trees (especially the trees on the boulevard that lean in towards the river road offering more shade, listening in to check how heavily I was breathing) and the big boulders in the grass. I tried to stay relaxed and avoid thinking about how I was still just on the first loop and that I was planning to do another one. I checked out my shadow a few times. She was on my right side, slightly behind me. I decided the best shade was between 38th and 36th.
loop two
Before starting the second loop, I stopped to find a playlist–an older one titled, “august run.” First song: “Misery Business” by Paramore. I remember listening to this my first year of running, nine years ago. To match my foot strikes to the beat, I picked up my cadence. Didn’t think about anything or notice where I was as I ran. What a wonderful thing to get lost in the effort of moving! Lifting my knees, focusing more on driving my left leg. Swinging my arms evenly. Also listened to “Hurt Feelings” by Flight of the Concords and laughed at the lyrics, “I’m Still Standing” by Elton John and thought about how much I loved this song when I was kid.
I like this idea of running one loop listening to the gorge and one loop listening to music. It might be fun to try doing one loop reciting one poem and then another loop reciting a different poem. I think I’ve tried something like this already–have I (no, but after looking through old entries, I discovered I had proposed this very idea of may 22nd). I’m glad I found this entry because in it I posted a poem I’d like to memorize: Push the button, hear the sound I think I’d like to do a series of 4 or 5 poems on listening.
2.5 miles river road, south/north 72 degrees humidity: 78%/ dew point: 67
Hot again this morning. So crowded on the river road! So many runners going so fast that I wondered if there was some event going on. Listened to a playlist and didn’t think about any poetry or pay attention to much around me except all the runners and bikers I needed to avoid. Ran faster than I wanted on the second mile because a runner who I was passing decided to speed up just as I approached. Finished the run by listening to Demi Lovato’s “Sorry, Not Sorry” as I ran up the hill near the Welcoming Oaks. Running back through the neighborhood, the next song that came on Spotify was Hailee Steinfeld’s “Hell nos and Headphones.” Wow.
Finished watching the 1981 “Clash of the Titans” with Scott. I remember seeing it in a theater in North Carolina when it first came out. I was 7. The special effects are very bad, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie this time–loved seeing Maggie Smith as a vengeful Thetis. I started thinking about Medusa and how her gaze turns anyone/thing that looks into her eyes to stone. And then I started thinking about how my gaze does that to people too–because my central vision is almost gone and I have an increasingly bigger blind spot in the middle of my field of vision, when I look at people’s faces or into their eyes they often look like unmoving objects–I can’t see facial gestures–no smiles or frowns or eyebrows raised, and I can’t make eye contact. In a way, they turn to stone. I’d like to explore the Medusa myth some more and see if I can do something with it.
Thinking about vision and eyes a lot this week. Here’s a poem from 1925 I first encountered on twitter, then found online at Poetry Foundation:
Imagine two clouds shot together by the sunset, One river-blue, One like a white cloth passed through a purple wine, Dripping and faintly dyed, Whirling centrifugally away toward the night And later halved and rounded by the moon; Rolled like blue butter-balls In the palms of the moon’s hands And rimmed elliptically with almost-white moon-stuff, The moon’s particular godmother gift. Some nearly impossible vision like this Is necessary for the mood of my eyes.
Formally announced by my eyebrows, Sad squires of my eyes, Preciously fitted into two fine skin purses— Two rose petals might fashion them— So firmly, gently guarded, Yet so free to roll a little In each socket, In each pocket, Attended by the drawn regiments of my lashes, These my head’s hair’s farthest fallen, Wayward strayed for the love of my eyes, With only a runaway’s last inheritance of curl Lifting the final rite of this ceremony of presentation: Sight is there soul of charity. when the feet are tired, When joy is caught in the full throat, Sight is the good Samaritan, Wandering to the last horizon Or staying at home to laugh in joy’s place. Though the trouble be none of its won, When grief comes like a beggar to my eyelids, Sight throws it pennies, Sight throws it tears, Though for the minute it rob itself, Though for the minute it blind itself.
Exegetes of the tongue— Love’s best inquirers And courteous heads of hate, Yet meanwhile not deposing The immediate service of seeing Or the darling self-denial of sleep— My eyes, my eyes, Patrons of light and dark!
Busy, ever busy, If I have no other errands for it, Yet sight keeps turning the looking-machine, Always sitting quietly aside—- The self-appointed and voluntary philosophy of me, My ironic interpreter of things, Smiling behind the bodily ruse Of my amused, amused eyes. Or, if the eyes fail, If the optical bodies of sight die, Sight still lives while I live, Sight is immortal in me, Free of the bond of outward vision—- The inner sense of life, The living-looking. Death is the only blindness.
2.5 miles river road, south/north 75 degrees humidity: 77%
Warmer this morning. Sunny. Decided to listen to a playlist this morning–Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” and Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”. A relaxed first mile, a much faster second mile mostly because I was behind a roller skier at the start of the second mile that was going about the same pace that I was. I imagined staying in her COVID slipstream for the rest of the run–no thanks! So I sped up a lot to pass her and then kept the pace so she wouldn’t pass me again. First mile: 9:26; Second mile: 8:11.
Because I was listening to music, I didn’t recite the poem I memorized yesterday afternoon, Marie Howe’s “The Gate.” I’ve decided to memorize 5 different poems by her:
The Meadow from The Good Thief (1988)
The Gate from What the Living Do (1999)
What the Living Do from What the Living Do (1999)
Magdalene: Seven Devils from Magdalene: Poems (2017)
I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man,
but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.
This is what you’ve been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I’d say, What?
This, he’d say, sort of looking around.
The first line of this poem, about the space her brother’s body made as the gate she would step through to finally enter this world, was confusing to me at first but it has something to do with grief and how his death helped her to remember and value living — but I think there’s more to it than that. I love the way she describes that he’s dead, “done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.” And I love the use of “This” here — the this, encompassing everything and not one thing in particular.
Spending a little more time googling Howe and thinking about her work, I found a very helpful essay from 2008 on oprah.com: Not to Look Away. In it, she talks about her friend Jason who’s funeral she was attending and the gate:
I’m looking for the gate, Jason used to say when he was in pain. I can’t find the gate, but I’m looking. What was this gate my friend Jason was looking for? Maybe he wanted to find the door in the room of suffering, so that he might walk through it into another story.
and here’s how she describes what story can do:
Is this what a story can do? Emerge from the most painful event and transform it into something else, too? So sad. So funny. Both. And life is there, for a moment, almost adequately represented.
the story as window?
The days and nights of my life walk by, arm in arm with time, and the gate to the new story stands just outside the circle of my attention. Sometimes I lie here, Jason said, and walk through the old house of my childhood, through all the rooms, and look out all the windows.
This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.
To be present, not to look away, and to transform suffering into something else also–still suffering but more too. Wow, this makes me think so much about Ross Gay and his idea of joy and suffering in the Book of Delights (I checked it out of the library a year ago, and just ordered my own copy arriving today)!
Another beautiful morning! Not much wind, not too hot, some shade. Ran past the aspen eyes and towards downtown, up the hill from under the lake street bridge, then turned around. I think I saw the river, or the idea of the river hiding behind the green. Recited “The Meadow” a few times during the first two miles of my run, then stopped to put on some music and sprinted up a hill while blasting Demi Levato’s “Sorry, not Sorry” — a great song to run to. I got it in my head yesterday after I responded to Scott about something jokingly rude I had just said with, “sorry, not sorry.”
At some point, as I was reciting it, I thought about the line, “The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence everyday.” I wondered, isn’t small, as in “small white pony” redundant? Aren’t ponies always small? Would it flow as well without the extra syllable of small? Now, sitting here at my desk in the front room, listening to a young child right outside vacillate between cute, calling out “I Love You!” to his mom, and annoying, babbling in a high-pitched voice, I am also struck by Howe’s use of white. Nothing else in the poem has a color–no green meadow or dappled gray horses or golden hay or anything. Why is the pony singled out–given a color and a redundant size? With its mysterious escape, is it a ghost? Still thinking about this line: I like how she uses “design” in this sentence. And I love the self important, clueless horses and the next line’s follow-up: “This is a miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp.”
I’m trying to make sense of the meaning of this whole poem (admittedly, I feel like I’m often dense when it comes to understanding poetry) and I’m wondering if these three lines are the most important:
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them…
My love, this might be all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you forget what you are.
Bedeviled, human, your plight, when waking is to chose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue and to know that among them, tangled and terribly new, is the sentence that could change your life.
In our dreams, we can forget what we are (the meadow forgets how to make wildflowers, the horses are weary of hay, the wasps are tiny prop planes, the knock of a woodpecker becomes a phone ringing). But, we always wake up (the meadow thinks suddenly, “water, root, blossom,” the horses lie down in daisies and clover, we/humans suffer–moaning, and know we will die). The task as human is to find the right (?) words to give meaning to/transform what we are? Does that work? And how does this line fit in: “I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone”?
All the old gray gods have fallen back to their static realms of myth cleared from the benches, thrones, dragged kicking to their strongest tombs, each one grizzled by their swift exile frayed, bedraggled, forced to kneel, give up their guns, armor, swords, hand over their passports, global security identification, and be stripped bare. Justice has relegated them to history, kept nothing but the long rancorous list of crimes (slaughterers all) molded them into dull cement statues not to worship. but as a warning most ominous. Here stood Greed and his brother Pride, note their glazed inhuman eyes, question their puny stature now, how rodent-like, how utterly overthrow-able. Still, remember how long they ruled? Tyrannical and blustering, claiming universal power, until the kinder masses voted the callous thin-lipped lizards out? What a day that was! The end of hatred, xenophobia, patriarchal authority–but yes, we waited too long, first we had to zero out, give up on becoming gods at all.
2.4 miles river road, south/north 77 degrees humidity: 80%/ dew point: 72
Hot today. No sun. Oppressively green. Decided to do a short run with headphones. Listened to Lorde and Beck and can’t remember who else. Saw some runners, walkers, bikers. No river views. No bird songs. No Daily Walker or the tall octogenarian in his running shorts, walking the trail. As I ran down the hill above the tunnel of trees glanced down–a thick blanket of dark green. It would probably be fine to run in that tunnel, even if I encountered someone; it seems like the real risk is being inside with other people. Still, I’m not planning to run it anytime soon.
Finished my third plague notebook–a black medium sized Field Notes notebook. These notebooks are a mix between my own notes/thoughts + quotations from books I’m reading + poems I’m liking. A commonplace book or M Foucault’s huponemata. I’d like to scan the notebooks and put them online but that seems pretty tedious and challenging for me, with my questionable vision.
Found this interesting one word image poem the other day by Aram Saroyan:
Very cool, although difficult for me to see, with my weak central vision. Makes me think of my Snellen Chart poems. I would still like to try and publish my chapbook–when I cannot see straight, I will see sideways.
update, 14 april 2024: Yesterday I mentioned this eyeye poem to Scott and when he asked what it meant, I had an answer, but not one that I was completely satisfied with. So I looked through my notes and found an article that I had archived about one-word poems and Saroyan. This bit seems helpful in understanding the poem:
Saroyan’s isolation of the single word had powerful effects: It denarrativized and decontextualized language, and it placed the word, typically a noun, in stark relief. In a letter which accompanied the poem, Saroyan wrote to artist Vito Acconci in September 1967 that
“I’ve discovered that the best work I can do now is to collect single words that happen to strike me and to type each one out in the center of a page. The one word isn’t “mine” but the one word in the center of the page is. Electric poems I call them (in case anyone starts throwing Concrete at me)—meaning that isolated of the reading process—or that process rendered by the isolation instant—each single word is structure as “instant, simultaneous, and multiple” as electricity and/or the Present. In effect the single word is a new reading process; like electricity—instant and continuous.”
Saroyan also did this poem, which I encountered on twitter about a year or two ago:
The eye word poem is also a play on a palindrome.
Palindromes
eye
eve
madam
tot
poop
refer
racecar
level
kayak
never odd or even
Madam, I’m Adam
Do geese see god?
Sara’s or Saras
In looking up palindromes (I was having trouble figuring out my own), I discovered this delightful variation: semordnilap. A word that spells another word backwards.
