Tag: walk

jan 11/WALKYOGA

walk – 30 minutes
neighborhood
26 degrees

Winter white. White sky, white grass, white sidewalks — at least some of the sidewalks are still white. Warmer. Still, quiet, calm. Deep breaths — ahhh! cold air! A happy dog. Walked past 7 Oaks and thought about how it’s a sinkhole. then wondered how long it’s been this way. “Thousands of years” was as specific as I could get. While looking for its age, I also found a Sinkhole Study from a few years ago. I’ll have to look through it when I have more time.

yoga – 30 minutes

Two days ago, I promised to try out a low vision yoga video. Loved it!

The slow and careful way that the instructor described the movements was very helpful. Similar to audio descriptions on shows and movies, I didn’t realize how much I needed a description of the moves until I had one and could feel the difference — easier, less stressful.

grass

This morning, during my “On This Day” practice, I re-encountered these lines from Victoria Chang in her poem, “Left Behind”:

We are carriers
of grass yet to be grown. We
aren’t made of cells, but of fields.

Then, while reading JJJJJerome Ellis’ “Benediction” in Asters of Ceremony, I encountered these beautiful lines,

The more I live with my stutter, with the Stutter that I steard in my body, the more I feel and know, or unknown, that this stutter is no less a part of the earth than the rest of my body. This stutter has come from the land and the water. It knows the Plant Elders, and there is much I can learn, and have learned, about my stutter by spending time with these Elders. Names run through the Grasses, and when I stutter on my name, I am brought into the field.

Benediction from Asters of Ceremony/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Both Chang and Ellis, but especially Chang, reminded me of Mary Oliver’s mention of grass in The Leaf and the Cloud:

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly,
Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass.

jan 9/YOGAWALK

hip/lower back yoga – 20 minutes

I tried out a new yoga routine this morning for hips and lower back release. I liked it (mostly), but it was difficult to follow; I couldn’t see the movements she was making very easily. I’m sure some of it was because I wasn’t familiar with the movements, but I also think it was her (visually) busy set-up. Of, maybe it’s the dark floor? Yes, there’s not enough contrast with the floor and I couldn’t see what her body is doing.

yoga / difficult to see

The yoga routine I usually do has a light/white floor so I can the yoga instructor’s arms and legs more easily — at least where her arms and back are bare:

yoga / easier to see

It’s possible that I could see the second yoga instructor more easily because I’ve watched this video hundred of times and I started watching ir when my vision was better than it is now.

I decided to look up “low vision accessible yoga” on YouTube. I found, Yoga For People with Low Vision, which I think I’ll try tomorrow. There’s not enough contrast (for me) between the instructor and the mat, but I imagine the emphasis on describing the movements might help. Thinking more about why it was more difficult for me to follow in the first video, I’m remembering how chatty the instructor was about random stuff. Some moments she offered great descriptions of the movements, but other moments she went too fast or spent more time talking about something else. In my favorite yoga video, there’s no chatting. Just a clear, straight-forward, rehearsed voice-over.

I found a video with advice on how to instruct blind or low vision yoga students, and I found this part about intentionality particularly important:

Yes! Intentionality, mind-body connections, listening — and not just for the students with low vision.

walk with Delia – 20 minutes
neighborhood
20 degrees

Scott and I took Delia on a walk around 2 blocks. Brrr!! It felt colder than 20 degrees. Was it sunny? Now I can’t remember. Wait, it was, I wore my sunglasses. The thing I remember most about the walk were the talkative birds in a neighbor’s bush. I think they were sparrows? I didn’t see them, but I sure heard them! Another thing I remembered were the bare branches of the trees — gnarled and sprawled and looking straight out of a dark fairy tale.

Memory and Forgetting

I came across a Radiolab episode from last spring on memory and forgetting. The first section was particularly great.

SCIENTIST: On a literal level it’s an act of creation.

SCIENTIST: Yeah, exactly.

SCIENTIST: We’re reconstructing those memories.

SCIENTIST: Construction.

JAD: Maybe it’s more like painting or sculpture.

SCIENTIST: Everyone’s constantly their own artist.

SCIENTIST: We take bits and pieces of experience.

SCIENTIST: Some things get sharpened, other things leveled.

SCIENTIST: And infused with imagination and …

SCIENTIST: Out of that construct …

SCIENTIST: Construct. Construct.

*

A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another.

Associations! Another thing that creates connections and associations: metaphor

JONAH LEHRER: That the act of remembering on a literal level, it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.

jan 7/YOGARUN

yoga, 30 minutes
walk, 20 minutes
neighborhood
18 degrees

The same 30 minute yoga for flexibility routine I’ve been doing for 5 years. I like it, but I should try something else this month. Later, a short walk outside with Delia the dog. Brisk.

10 Things

  1. faint shadows, mine, tall, beside Delia’s, short
  2. the metallic buzz of a table saw
  3. a ridge of snow, refusing to melt on a neighbor’s narrow boulevard
  4. the fast flash of Delia’s tail when she’s excited or relieved or happy to be heading back
  5. cold air seeping through my hood and hat, into my ears
  6. bare grass
  7. the 6 inch gap under the gate of a yard a block away
  8. the smooth asphalt of a nearby driveway
  9. the sculpture of a turtle — bigger than an ancient tortoise — in a front yard — it looks heavy, is it made out of bronze?
  10. the buzz of workers all around the neighborhood — brrr!

forgetting/remembering

1 — the body

On jan 7, 2019, I wrote this about forgetting and remembering my body as I ran:

I found myself worrying constantly about my back or my IT band or my knee. At one point I wondered, what would it feel like to not notice my body? To simply run? Of course, this did happen many times during the run, but I remember more the times when I was too aware of my body. 

running log, 7 jan 2019

2 — never forget

Scrolling through facebook this morning, I encountered several “never forget” posts about the pro-Trump terrorist attack on congress on Jan 6, 2021. Then I read my On this Day post from jan 7, 2021 which begins with a brief description of the attack. I thought about how I use this log and my “on this day” practice to not forget things (typing this, I started wondering about the differences between not forgetting and remembering). Not forgetting is an important act of resistance.

I also read my jan 7, 2020 entry about the dogs in our neighborhood. Most of those dogs are gone now. Or, if they’re not gone, I don’t ever see them anymore. But, I remember them often as we walk past their houses. Delia does too. Not forgetting is an important ritual of staying connected to a place.

Simply looking. A car goes over a rise and there are birches snow
Twisted into cabalistic shapes: The Devil’s Notch; or Smuggler’s
Gap. At the time you could not have imagined the time when you
Would forget the name, as apparent and there as your own.
(from Hymn to Life/James Schuyler)

As I travel around my neighborhood, by foot or car, I speak about things that are no longer there — the tree with teeth, the big branch that sprawled above the road, the mustache on the mustache bridge, Bridgemans restaurant — and reflect on how easy it is to forget things that are no longer there. Without memories, it’s as if it was always like it is now, like the gone things never existed. Speaking of the mustache bridge, FWA mentioned it the other day. He referred to it (the bridge that crosses Hiawatha on the parkway) as the mustache bridge even though it only had a spray-painted mustache on it for a few months 10 years ago. I thought it was fascinating that this name has stuck. Will there be a time when we forget why we call it that?

3 — losing

I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how fast the young are
& how old they become, floating, floating,
forgetting the weight of years
(Romance/Susan Browne)

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
(One Art/Elizabeth Bishop)

jan 4/WALK

20 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
7 degrees / feels like 4

Winter! Heading north, an arctic wind, but otherwise, not bad. Warm sun, no snow. I love being outside and moving. A thought: I should commit to doing one or two long-ish walks each week to somewhere. The library? A coffee place?

10 Things

  1. dead, brown leaves on top of a pile of crusty snow
  2. a high-pitched, quiet whine from a truck on the next block
  3. the bare, gnarled, tall branches of the oak tree on the corner
  4. 2 green dumpsters on the sidewalk outside of Turtle Bread
  5. almost stumbling as I stepped on a small rock or hard chunk of snow
  6. a neighbor on the next block having an animated conversation with the mailman
  7. bark! — Delia the dog unexpectedly barking at them from across the street
  8. bark! bark! bark! — a dog in a backyard calling out to Delia
  9. the tree on the corner across from the Blue Door — dead, most of it trimmed away, more than a stump with a few dead branches still remaining
  10. the sun! heading south, warming my face and making it difficult to see if anyone was approaching

While tagging old entries with “remember/forget,” I came across Emily Dickinson’s poem about forget-me-nots on 2 march 2021, which helped me to remember that I was thinking about it — vaguely — as I ran yesterday!

There are spaces for living
and spaces for forgetting.
Sometimes they’re the same.
(Voiceover/ Rita Dove)

dec 30/WALK

1.5 mile walk with Delia
the gorge, from 36th to 34th
32 degrees / fog

Good job, Sara. You resisted the urge to run. A walk with Delia was wonderful. So quiet and calm and relaxed! Moist, too. I loved breathing in the cool air and almost floating through the fog. All of it, a soft dream. Occasionally I encountered others — some walkers and runners — but mostly it was just us. At one point, descending through the tunnel of trees, which isn’t really a tunnel anymore because they cut it back at some point, the only thing I could hear was a hammer pounding across the road. No cars or voices or striking feet. Wow! Several times, I felt a warm buzz.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. open water
  3. wet asphalt
  4. grass covered in brown leaves
  5. a dark form descending into the ravine — silent, featureless
  6. a brown view of the floodplain forest — all slender trunks and bare branches, no river or sky poking through
  7. a runner in the neighborhood emerging from an alley in a sprint, then returning to the alley, then appearing again, then disappearing around the corner
  8. thump thump thump the striking feet of a runner across the street — the same one? I’m not sure
  9. the silvery sparkle of the sign at the 35th street overlook — is this sign new?
  10. overheard: a woman running alongside a kid on a bike, talking to the kid — you had your pink backpack and your droopy dog stuffed animal — did she say droopy, or some other word?

I wanted to think about my Ars Poetica poem as I walked, and I did, but I’m still stuck. Something about letting things breathe and be exposed to the air to see what happens and erosion and ruins. I’ll give it until the end of the year, and if I’m still stuck, I’ll put it away for a bit.

forget what you are

While reading poet’s Cynthia Cruz’s explanation of how her poem, “Dark Register” is shaped by Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, I encountered these lines about habit:

“Habit,” in the third stanza refers to Hegel’s concept of habit: the act of repeating an action that, through this repetition, becomes second nature. For Hegel, habit implies forgetting: we forget what we are doing once the action becomes habit.

Cynthia Cruz on “Dark Register”

we forget what we are . . . . I immediately thought of Marie Howe’s beautiful poem, “The Meadow” and her lines about her dying brother:

I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are.

This forgetting also reminds me of Mary Rueffle’s reference to Levi-Strauss’ “unhitching, which I wrote about on may 31, 2023. First, my rough paraphrasing:

unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity.

Second, a quote from Levi-Strauss in Mary Ruefle:

The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52

Wow, all of this is making me think of something I wrote, referencing Mary Oliver, about the gorge. Initially I added it on the end of my geologic time poem, and maybe it should stay there and be extended, or maybe it should be another poem? Here are the lines:

Every day this place
erodes the belief
that rock will stand still,
is here forever,
unmoved, unmoving. 
And yet, with its slow 
slight shifts on a scale 
almost beyond her 
comprehension, these 
rocks might be as close 
as the girl can get
to eternity.

So many more connections I could make with forgiveness and forgetting and remembering and now and now and now!

dec 24/WALK

1 mile
neighborhood
28 degrees

It seemed colder than 28 degrees as Scott and I took Delia on a walk this morning. Damp. It looks like snow, but hours later as I write this, it still hasn’t started. The sky is a heavy white. There was some ice on the sidewalk — thin, almost invisible patches. Conscious of my vision, Scott pointed them out. It’s strange how my vision works; I was able to see all of them. I think it’s because of the texture — the icy patches make the concrete just a little bit shinier.

10 Things

  1. good morning! greeted a neighbor on the next block — the one with the cat (matt) who rules the sidewalk and the very cool poetry station. I thought about asking his about it, but didn’t — next time!
  2. most of the ice was in the usual spots — the places where ice always forms because of the slope of the ground or the way a drain pipe is positioned
  3. a dog’s sudden appearance on the other side of a fence startled, then delighted me
  4. the soft tinkling of a collar, almost sounding like a bell
  5. Dave the Daily Walker in the distance
  6. the decorations in the trees of a house on the corner of 28th — over-sized ornaments in soft colors
  7. noticing the contrast colors of a house, wondering to Scott, didn’t that house used to be all one dark color? He couldn’t remember, but I do, now. I’ve written about this house before and its once purple door
  8. I’m not sure what we were talking about but I have no memory of what I saw or smelled or heard for the next couple blocks
  9. oh! one thing I remember now: the beautiful frosty pattern of icy leaves etched on the sidewalk — the leaves were gone, but had let their prints
  10. Delia’s wagging tail as we neared our garage — are we almost home? (wag wag wag)

A few hours ago, before our walk, I did my standard 30 minutes for flexibility yoga. Wow! It felt so good and made me very relaxed. As I stretched, I had a thought about my series of Haunts poems: break up the long 5 syllable sections with some short lines from other writers (mostly poets) that I fit into my 3/2 patter. I call them for fitters. I’m thinking of these kind of like Jane Hirshfield’s pebbles or Mary Oliver’s sand dabs or Victoria Chang’s tankas in Obit. I’m also thinking of them because of the poet Sparrow, who I just learned about in Lydia Davis’ essay on form. Sparrow wrote an entire series of “translated” New Yorker poems.

I thought I had written about the sand dabs and pebbles on here before, but I can’t find anything:

A Year with Mary Oliver posted all 9 of MO’s sand dabs on instagram! Here’s an explanation of the form:

(Sand Dabs 1/9) Over the next nine days, we’ll be sharing each of Mary’s nine “Sand Dabs.”

As Mary wrote in the footnote of Long Life: “The sand dab is a small, bony, not very significant but well-put-together fish.” 

The incomparable @mariapopovadescribed “Sand Dabs, One” as “just a few lines, largehearted and limber, each saturated with meaning and illustrating the principle it espouses in a clever meta-manifestation of that principle embedded in the language itself.”

The remaining eight also fit that description.

They read like many of the excerpts from Mary’s notebook (which she shared in the essay “Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air,” found in Blue Pastures)—free form noticing and thoughts, in list form. 

All nine Sand Dabs are scattered throughout four of Mary’s less frequently visited books: Blue Pastures, West Wind, Winter Hours, and Long Life. She wrote them over the span of nine years. Just adding more as she went along. 

We weren’t able to find any place where all nine lived together. It was fun to collect them from their disparate pages, put them together, and read them all in a row.

Mary Oliver’s Sand Dabs

And here’s a Pebble from Hirshfield:

Retrospective/ Jane Hirshfield

No photograph or painting can hold it—
the stillness of water 
just before it starts being ice.

The mention of ice reminded me of a wonderful description I found in the novel I just started reading, A Little Stranger/ Sarah Waters:

I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They make it look blurred and slightly uncertain–like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun.

The Little Stranger/ Sarah Waters

dec 22/WALK

30 minutes, with Delia the dog
neighborhood
30 degrees

I’m surprised at how good I feel after running the most I ever have in a year, and running a marathon and not taking more than a few days break after it. But, even so, I think I should take a little break from running. At the end of my run yesterday, my left leg and hip felt sore and tight, and I don’t want it to get worse. Also, I think it would be nice to walk a little more for the end of the year. So, I’m hoping to take at least a week without running. Can I do it? I’m not sure.

Today’s walk was great. Warm sun! Half-dry sidewalks. Blue sky. Happy dog. Cold, refreshing air. Walking slowly outside in the cold makes me feel calm and a little euphoric, especially when I breathe in deeply through my nose, out through my mouth.

overheard, 3 things, at different times/places:

  1. (not seen, only heard) a man to someone else — that was an excellent church service
  2. (seen and heard) a man parking and getting out of the car in front of a house, someone from the house calling out jokingly — wrong house!
  3. (seen and third) a man running, wheezing or vigorously coughing, then stopping to walk then sounding like he might be heaving

I though briefly about the section of my poem I’m working on. I’ve tentatively titled it, “Ars Poetica,” which is a type of poem about writing poetry. Right now I’m thinking about entanglements and things growing in the aftermath of ruins and erosion and . . . just as I was typing this up, I had more thoughts — mushrooms as the fruit of fungi bursting through asphalt and cracks and as the words that erupt from my practice, but are only part of the making/writing/living of poetry. Below ground, nets/networks, not as firm as roots but creating deep connections just the same to a place. I’ve already written a little about this — I need to find it . . . Found it! 25 april 2022.

Maybe like mushrooms,
we rise. A brief burst
from below, a flare,
then a return to
swim in the dirt

Am I getting too lost with these ideas? I follow them a little further.

june 12/WALK

1 mile with Scott
neighborhood
82 degrees

Was planning to bike to the lake and swim today, but it rained. On and off all day. So I read about Lorine Niedecker and took notes. Then, a quick walk with Scott.

Here are some observations from my deck, the yard, the window at my desk, and the walk:

10+ Things

  1. deck: the sky heavy, gray, expectant — but it’s not supposed to rain today! — it did and then did again
  2. deck: under the lime green umbrella, hearing the first drops, soft and slight
  3. deck: the service-berry bush at the edge of the deck did a better job of keeping the deck dry than the umbrella!
  4. front yard: after rain today, and the wind the past few days, the yard was almost as much twig as grass. Our neighbor’s tall tree with the wandering limbs offers unwanted gifts all year
  5. desk/window: in the left window, a blob stretches above the other hydrangea leaves — dark, diseased — what is it?
  6. side yard: not sure what this blob is even up close — could it be army worms? or is it just a failed unfurling?
  7. side yard: near the gate, a rogue tree is growing outside of our neighbor’s window. Will they cut it down before it gets too big and becomes a problem for us?
  8. desk/window: rain, pouring down, missing the gutter and sliding straight off the roof in sheets — too much debris/dirt in the gutter?
  9. no lightening but far off thunder rumbles
  10. green green green green green green green green
  11. cabbage or lettuce or something else green growing in a neighbor’s planter
  12. the sweet snell of pine after the rain
  13. convinced I was seeing a giant fish sculpture until Scott told me it was wrapping over a tree
  14. workers re-roofing a sharply angled roof with no harnesses

Here ares some thoughts to remember from Niedecker:

1

LN’s life by/with/on water involves saturation not transcendence.

2

Thru birdstart
wingdrip
weed-drift
of the soft and serious
water
(from “My Life on Water”/ LN)

3

Reading is a bodily act — within the body, not transcending the body. The physical act of reading words with diseased eyes.

4

Time to challenge the myth that not being able to see “naturally” makes your hearing improve — That visual impairment improves hearing, taste, touch, smell, is mostly myth — Halos. Ed Bok Lee — LN used sound in remarkable ways, and also explored seeing differently.

5

One of the traditions LN draws from, Objectivism, believed in the clear, straight-seeing eye. In later work, like “Wintergreen Ridge,” she challenged the possibility of this straight-seeing.

Tell all the truth but tell it Slant — ED
Alice Oswald and the slow, oblique, slight squinting of the Old Women in the Illiad

6

Imagists (Ezra Pound, HD): to see the world as it is, the IS, the this, scrubbing away to the essence

Objectivists (Zukofsky, Williams Carlos Williams): to look with clear eyes, pay attention, as is in context

Oh my scouring eye/that scrubs clean the sky — “perhaps you tire of birds”/ Donika Kelly

7

I used to think I was goofing off unless I held only to the hard, clean image, the think you could put your hand on. But now I dare do this reflection.

LN

8

Video, My Life By Water

may 7/WALK

30 minute walk
neighborhood, with Delia
65 degrees

Walked around the neighborhood on a beautiful, windy morning. A few hours before, it had been raining. Puddles everywhere. Mud, too. Birds, laughing kids, yellow and orange and red tulips all around. Also: overgrown weeds, dandelions, unruly grass. Oh — and pollen! I know that it could be much worse, but I still felt it: scratchy throat, itchy eyes, fatigue.

This morning I renewed my driver’s license. For me, it was a big deal. I was diagnosed with cone dystrophy in 2016, two months after I had barely renewed my license because I couldn’t initially read the Snellen chart. The woman behind the counter was generous — I remember her looking at me strangely after I said the wrong letters and then asking, Do you want to try that again? Slowly? For years I had been nervous about the vision test without knowing why.

When the ophthalmologist first told me I would probably lose all of my central vision, I felt relief — I just renewed my license so I don’t have to worry about doing the vision test until 2020! — and worry — What’s will happen in four years? As 2020 approached, my anxiety increased. But, because of the pandemic, I was able to renew my license online. No vision test! Another reprieve for four years!

Next month I turn 50 and it’s time to renew my license again. I decided to do it early, partly to get it over with and partly because Scott and FWA had both renewed their license’s two months ago and the person behind the counter didn’t make them take a vision test. Could I be so lucky? I hoped so.

This morning I was anxious. I tried to convince myself that it would be fine if I had to take the test — I told Scott, it’s great material for a poem. But the same guy was there and I didn’t have to take the test and now I have another four year reprieve.

10 Small Things I Remember

  1. the woman at the front desk was wearing blue gloves
  2. before we entered, a group of teenagers were called in — Anyone planning to take the test should follow me!
  3. I heard those same teenagers giggling a few minutes later
  4. my number, ended with a 54
  5. when it was called, I was told to go to A14
  6. the guy who issued my license asked me to meet him around the corner at A17 for my picture
  7. he had two thick textbooks on the counter — did he ever have time to study? I couldn’t read the titles
  8. for the first time, I wore glasses for my picture — before he took it he said, look at the blue dot. I couldn’t see any blue dot, but the picture turned out fine
  9. earlier, nearing the entrance to the building, a man held a door for a woman as she walked out. She apologized when she almost ran into him and said, I’m sorry, I’m in my own head right now
  10. also nearing the building: birds! so much birdsong!

I am not planning to drive. I haven’t for five or six years. It’s too scary and dangerous. Still, it’s nice to have my license, just in case.

My anxiety over the vision test has some layers, I think. It’s not just about failing it, or even primarily about failing it. I think it’s time to do some digging.

the allegory of the cave, part 2

Yesterday Scott and talked about Plato’s Cave and what we remembered from when he first heard/read about it. Then I watched a few more videos about it, all of which connected the cave and the shadows to a hero’s quest and being enlightened by a Philosopher King. Thought about writing against that and decided I didn’t want to. Instead, I attempted to read Jack Collum’s hard-to-understand-poem, Arguing with Something Plato Said. Some of it, I think I understand and some of it, I don’t. Learned a new word: chiaroscuro

This is an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted.

Artists who are famed for the use of chiaroscuro include Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio. Leonardo employed it to give a vivid impression of the three-dimensionality of his figures, while Caravaggio used such contrasts for the sake of drama. Both artists were also aware of the emotional impact of these effects.

Nice! With my interest in ekphrastic poems, I plan to think about this concept some more.

april 23/WALK

walk 1: 30 minutes with Delia, neighborhood
walk 2: 75 minutes to the library

I haven’t walked to the library in a long time. 5 or 6 or 7 years? Why has it been so long? Partly the pandemic and the library almost being burned down and then closed for a long time are to blame, but it’s also all the running and having a dog. If I have any time or energy left to walk, I need to take Delia the dog along, and the library is too far for her. Also, she’s not allowed inside.

It’s more than a mile, but less than 2 one way. It was great. I listened to Taylor Swift’s new album on the way there, and Beyoncé’s on the way back (Cowboy Carter). Wow! The Tortured Poets Department was good but Cowboy Carter was amazing.

10 Things

  1. a big white dog sitting quietly and calmly in a dirt back yard next to a chain link fence
  2. a cedar fence that looked almost new, with shiny wood, bulging out towards the sidewalk — what happened?
  3. red tulips in full bloom right up against the foundation of a house
  4. a big tree with a full set of yellowish-green leaves
  5. a terraced yard, all dirt, looking neat and ready to be filled with flowers
  6. a little free library packed with books, its glass door wide open
  7. music blasting from an open door at the Trinity Church, playing “Shake It Off”
  8. 2 squirrels winding up a tree, one chasing the other, their nails scratching the rough bark
  9. my favorite stone lions in front of a house wearing purple flower headbands in honor of spring
  10. a big moving truck backed into a driveway blocking all of the sidewalk and half the street

earlier today

This past Saturday, I took a class on public art and ekphrastic poetry with the new poet laureate of Minneapolis, Heid E. Erdrich. A great class. When I signed up for it, I was just interested in taking a class with Erdrich and learning more about ekphrastic poetry; I didn’t realize that public art would also be a part of it. Very cool. Anyway, the class inspired me to think more deeply about public poetry projects. I have several ideas for my own, with very little understanding of how to make them happen. Perhaps studying other examples will help educate and inspire me. Plus, studying them is another way to learn more about the place I live. First up: Sidewalk Poetry St. Paul

Sidewalk Poetry, St. Paul

Sidewalk Poetry is a systems-based work that allows city residents to claim the sidewalks as their book pages. This project re-imagines Saint Paul’s annual sidewalk maintenance program with Public Works, as the department repairs 10 miles of sidewalk each year. We have stamped more than 1,200 poems from a collection that now includes 73 individual pieces all written by Saint Paul residents. Today, everyone in Saint Paul now lives within a 10-minute walk of a Sidewalk Poem. 

This art project began with previous Public Art Saint Paul City Artist Marcus Young in 2008 under the name “Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks,” and continues today with evolved stamping approaches, as well as poetry submission and review processes. Our 2023 Sidewalk Poetry accepts poetry submissions in Dakota, Hmong, Somali, Spanish, and English. The poetry on our streets celebrates the remarkable cultures that make our City home and that makes our City strong. With this as a beginning, other languages may be added in years to come.

Sidewalk Poetry St Paul

I think the first step for me in getting to know this project is to visit some of the poems. I’d like to start running to them! Here’s a map to help me out: Public Art Sidewalks

I think I’ll start (tomorrow) with a favorite poet of mine, Naomi Cohn. She has one on the Southeast corner of Juno and Finn. Very close to it is one by Pat Owen, on the southside of Juno between Finn and Cleveland.

Almost forgot to post this: the first song on Beyoncé’s album, “American Requiem” sings about the wind!

Can we stand for something?
Now is the time to face the wind (Ow)
Coming in peace and love, y’all
Oh, a lot of takin’ up space
Salty tears beyond my gaze
Can you stand me?

Can we stand for something?
Now is the time to face the wind
Now ain’t the time to pretend
Now is the time to let love in