Thomas + Anne 4ever

Whoso list to hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, alas, I may no more;

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of them that furthest come behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,

Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I, may spend his time in vain.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about,

"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

--Sir Thomas Wyatt

Letter to a Mute

If I could reach you now, in any way

At all, I would say this to you:

This afternoon I walked into a thicket

Of gold flowers that had no idea

What they were after. They couldn't hear a thing.

I walked among a million small, deaf ears

Breaking their gold into the afternoon.

I think they were like you, golden, golden,

Unable to express a single thing.

I walked among them, thinking of you,

Thinking of what it would be like

To be completely solitary. Once I was alone like that.

All the field was humming, brimming

With some brazen kind of song, and I

Thought that somehow I could disappear

Into the empty hall of your right ear,

Wandering through the slender bones of you.

But I knew that I could never let you know

That it is lame summer here, that I

Can hear the crickets every evening

Hollowing out the darkness at my window,

That you have vanished into a dark tunnel

Where I have tried to reach you with my mouth

Till my mouth ran gold, spilling over everything.

Tonight I looked into your face, tenderly,

Tenderly, but I can never find you there.

I can only touch your quiet lips.

If I could stick my pen into your tongue,

Making it run with gold, making

it speak entirely to me, letting the truth

Slide out of it, I could not be alone.

I wouldn't even touch you, for I know

How you are locked away from me forever.

Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere

As the moon slips out, a slender petal

Offering all its gold to me for nothing.

--Thomas James

(Nautilus, Edward Weston, 1927)

Shell

In front of the mirror in my parents' bedroom there lay a pink shell. I stole up to it on tiptoe and in a swift motion, raised it to my ear. I wanted to catch it when it wasn't pining with its monotonous sound. Though I was little, I knew that even if you love someone very much, it sometimes happens that you forget all about it.

--Zbigniew Herbert

Plath, writing on her typewriter, Yorkshire, 1956

But at least I wrote today--my first new poem since leaving Provincetown. And I have a brand new typewriter! Well, actually, it's quite old (appears to be from the forties or so); my Polish grandfather handed it down to me as a gift, since he never uses it anymore. In celebration, some of my favorite quotes from Crazyhorse's Top 100 Quotes About Writing (my list is poetry-oriented, obviously):

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith

"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo

"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen

“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury

"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor

“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton

A random assortment

Five Things You Didn't Know About the Romantics

1. At age 22 Shelley insisted on a diet of bread, butter and "a sort of spurious lemonade" until a friend, Thomas Love Peacock, convinced him to start eating meat again. Shelley's complexion improved.

2. The writer John William Polidori developed a serious crush on 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and "jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process." A few days later she told him that she thought of him mostly as a little brother.

3. Lord Byron enjoyed singing Albanian songs consisting of "strange, wild howls" while boating with Shelley in order to exacerbate their "contest with the elements."

4. Upon his release from Surrey Gaol for libel charges, Leigh Hunt, a critic and writer, created for himself a new study "which bore a startling resemblance to his prison bower." His books, busts, flowers and piano were all carefully transported from his prison cell. "His new room was lily- rather than rose-themed, but in all other respects it was similar to his prison accommodation."

5. Leigh Hunt gave John Keats the nickname of "Junkets", which Keats hated. "What has become of Junkets," Hunt wondered to Charles Cowden Clarke in the summer of 1817. "I suppose Queen Mab has eaten him."

(The last one is my favorite. Dear me, what has become of Junkets?)

********

Oh honey, don't let me walk away from this. If I'm trying to fuck up my own life, then until I figure out why, I think it's best you keep your distance lest I fall in love.

********

No one is with me, going fearlessly--that’s the way I live in the dream I saw. I must put my loneliness away, and protect myself, and I’ll learn to be strong. Country road, it’ll take me back to my home. I can feel it now, if I just keep to this far-off country road. It won’t matter how lonely the times get; you’ll never see me cry, I’ll keep my tears at bay. I know I must take heart, and that hurrying is all I can do. Only that way can I forget.

********

Ate oscypek (raw sheep cheese handmade in the Tatra mountains) with breakfast this morning. Yesterday evening, we walked around the Old Town, where the buildings still have bullet holes. This afternoon I went to my grandfather's apartment to eat pierogi and borscht and my ninety-five year old uncle told us a story about jumping from a train to flee Communists.

PERFECTION

the end

*

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

--Sarah Manguso

*

Sigh, a million times. That poem is it. That poem is how I feel.

Quarry

This is the time of year the missing ones

come back to us--no longer weighted down

by debris, curled into fetal positions,

rising naked through the murky water--

as if they can hear our yelling shouts

as we dive from the ledges above,

pretending they are not there.

Life piles onto life. "Come," says

the onyx water, "come into my deep,"

and I run across the grass into the fizzy air--

insane, undignified--but even there,

falling through the lavender haze, I extend

my arms to you, my secret comrade,

who made me love you.

--Henri Cole

anthem

Jeanne d'Arc, Eugene Thirion, 1876

Now, the flames they followed Joan of Arc as she came riding through the dark. No moon to keep her armor bright, no man to get her through this very smoky night. She said, "I'm tired of the war, I want the kind of work I had before, a wedding dress or something white to wear upon my swollen appetite." "Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way, you know I've watched you riding every day, and something in me yearns to win such a cold and lonesome heroine." "And who are you?" she sternly spoke to the one beneath the smoke."Why, I'm fire," he replied, "And I love your solitude, I love your pride." "Then fire, make your body cold, I'm going to give you mine to hold." Saying this she climbed inside to be his one, to be his only bride. And deep into his fiery heart he took the dust of Joan of Arc, and high above the wedding guests he hung the ashes of her wedding dress. It was deep into his fiery heart he took the dust of Joan of Arc, and then she clearly understood if he was fire, oh, then she must be wood. I saw her wince, I saw her cry, I saw the glory in her eye. Myself I long for love and light, but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?

--L. Cohen

The state of things

Anna Karina is so beautiful. Watch in moving pictures:

*

Ex libris

beauty beauty beauty I want to wrap my legs around you

On Hedonism

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care anymore I just want

to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap

my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a

heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires

as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather

what falls.

--Anne Carson, from Plainwater

good morning

two lovely things I would like archived

François Auguste Biard

View of the Icy Ocean, Greenlanders fishing Walrus 1841

*

*

Well, okay, maybe two more. Because Joanna Newsom finally released a song from her new album, and I think it's quite pretty, and also applicable to my current state of mind:

And, of course, because someone has compiled photos to accompany the song, the third beautiful thing here is Joanna Newsom. She is so unbelievably gorgeous!

Once again, I am contemplating the lyric essay.

I have always wanted to write one, you see. A good one!

But we can't always have what we want & I am increasingly frustrated by my inability to write any brand of personal essay that is not overwrought & overdone.

I have attempted such a feat before & returned to the draft & vomited a little in my mouth at the sight of it. I don't suppose I have a cool head when it comes to this sort of thing.

I guess I feel as if I'm overdramatizing my life. I think this is common in creative nonfiction. When I worked at a journal, most personal essays I read from the slush pile were boring & narcissistic & melodramatic, even if the writing itself was skillful.

Oh, & also, one tends to write about stuff that sucked. Emotionally-draining events that I'm not always willing to revisit & analyze to death.

So, maybe no straight-laced personal essays for me. Not yet, anyway. But the so-called lyric essay seems a good place for a charged poet like me to begin (with its fragmented or non-linear narrative, poeticism, playful attention to form, etc).

I tell myself: Remember the beauty in simplicity.
I tell myself: You have much to say that has nothing to do with yourself.

But then I sit down to write & my brain falls apart & I think, You have a poetry manuscript that needs revision, you bloody fool. Why waste your time with this? What's the point?

I suppose the point lies in the difference in perceiving the world that such a format requires of me. And the value in that. I rarely think in stories. I tend to think and remember in images. There is nothing more difficult for me than writing dialogue in a nonfiction essay because I rarely remember what was actually said, only what was seen & heard & smelled, as well as the emotional aura surrounding the conversation--what was felt.

And so writing creative nonfiction requires me to engage in a mode of transforming the world via language that is somewhat foreign to me. I wonder if the problem here is that poetry for me is an intuitive art, whereas writing creative nonfiction requires me to swim against an established creative current in my brain. Even considering the liberties the lyric essay allows, I still have to write in a mode with which I do not have an intuitive relationship, which can be difficult. But additionally: I have to keep that poetic intuition on a leash, or else my lyric essay will become a prose poem.

Still, as a hybrid form, the lyric essay is forgiving, & I think I can manage it. I would like to draft one before I leave this residency, taking inspiration from poet-essayists like Thalia Field and Jenny Boully, i.e., those who create a kind lyrical whirling around a topic of interest with little if any regard for narrative trajectory at all (depending on the individual essay, of course).

(Thalia Field's "Crossroads" here: http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=3&si=12&s=17)

(Jenny Boully's "the future imagined, the past imagined" here: http://www.mipoesias.com/2006Volume20Issue1/boullyessay.html

and "Between Cassiopeia and Perseus" here: http://www.newmichiganpress.com/6_1/boully.html)

Elgar

*

Jacqueline du Pré is just the best. Watching her play is like watching sun and shadow and wind move across water.

Without this sort of thing, I might go insane.

Andre Breton

Vigilance

À Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante
Pareille à un tournesol
Du front vient quelquefois heurter la Seine et son ombre glisse imperceptiblement parmi les remorqueurs
À ce moment sur la pointe des pieds dans mon sommeil
Je me dirige vers la chambre où je suis étendu
Et j'y mets le feu
Pour que rien ne subsiste de ce consentement qu'on m'a arraché
Les meubles font alors place à des animaux de même taille qui me regardent fraternellement
Lions dans les crinières desquels achèvent de se consumer les chaises
Squales dont le ventre blanc s'incorpore le dernier frisson des draps
À l'heure de l'amour et des paupières bleues
Je me vois brûler à mon tour je vois cette cachette solennelle de riens
Qui fut mon corps
Fouillée par les becs patients des ibis du feu
Lorsque tout est fini j'entre invisible dans l'arche
Sans prendre garde aux passants de la vie qui font sonner très loin leurs pas traînants
Je vois les arêtes du soleil
À travers l'aubépine de la pluie
J'entends se déchirer le linge humain comme une grande feuille
Sous l'ongle de l'absence et de la présence qui sont de connivence
Tous les métiers se fanent il ne reste d'eux qu'une dentelle parfumée
Une coquille de dentelle qui a la forme parfaite d'un sein
Je ne touche plus que le coeur des choses je tiens le fil

*

I want to touch the heart of things, too.

"Insomnia" by Elizabeth Bishop

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

*

This poem really applies to my current state of mind, which is a-roaming.

Time for bed. Wish me luck.

Mare and Newborn Foal

When you die
there are bales of hay
heaped high in space
mean while
with my tongue
I draw the black straw
out of you
mean while
with your tongue
you draw the black straw out of me

--Jean Valentine

*

The last seven lines of this poem are incredible.

*

Let me explain, I guess: The last seven lines are incredibly, strangely impossible without seeming so. What does it mean to draw black straw out of a body with one's tongue? What does that look like, and what does that signify? Yet the speaker's voice and the action expressed seem wholly natural. I can imagine it; there is no difficulty (and if there is a little, it is a pleasant difficulty). This is in part because it is clear that the inspiration for such an image is, simply, the familiar scene of a mare licking her foal (and the tenderness of that), so there is an accessible frame of reference. Yet not one other reader will imagine "draw the black straw out of you" the same way as another; it opens the poem up to a range of imagistic and metaphorical interpretations, which makes the poem feel alive and complex (at least for me, the kind of reader who prefers that a poem not place boundaries upon my understanding of it). To use a silly metaphor, I really do think a poem needs a significant amount of dark matter to succeed as more than just a passing thought or heap of language. There needs to be something dark and impenetrable and mysterious between the words that holds them together, some unquantifiable substance that prevents the poem from being completely understood and explained away, thus allowing the poem to be a realm of infinite discovery. The image of a mare and a foal "drawing" the "black straw" out of one another with their tongues is one (for me) that gains a certain amount of weight in its darkness and mystery. It is one to which I could return again and again, with different eyes, and find something new. One might argue that the image has no point, that it is a reluctant one, that ending on enigma stunts rather than opens up the poem. I suppose it depends on the kind of reader you are or would like to be.

A friend of mine shared this brief discussion of Lolita, written by Natalia Anotonova, a survivor of pedophiliac sexual abuse. A choice excerpt:

Here, Nabokov does more than write about a self-contained world of horror in a beautiful way. He also presents a curious way in which the human mind can experience that world of horror. One of the things that always bothered me most was how my awful recollections could come back to me in exquisite wrapping: how I could recall overripe apples thumping to the ground in the night, a shooting star, or Bach being played on the piano in an adjacent room. In attempting to make sense of what happened to me, I seized on those moments as “evidence” of the fact that I “liked” what had occurred. If I could focus on the loveliness of Prelude No. 1 in C Major as something disgusting and illegal was going on, wasn’t I just reveling in that which was disgusting and illegal? I punished myself for a way of thinking that, reading Lolita, was revealed to me as a survival tactic. I realized, for the first time, that there was nothing wrong or strange with how I had been coping, by stepping out of the horror and into the beauty that was running parallel to it.

One problem of telling a story, any story, real or imagined, is the problem of angles. Is there a correct one? And does anyone have the right to marvel at the one that shows the glistening, freshly raped Lolita with her vacant eyes? Before Nabokov, I never really noticed how the world doesn’t bend to the horror of our individual experiences, it just carries on being the world. I would chew away at myself, because I couldn’t divorce something sickening from something that was still very much life, into which light shone occasionally, even when it was only neon. Lolita is a reminder that beauty neither de-claws nor lulls evil, it just exists, and might as well be accepted since it isn’t going anywhere.

Humbert’s terrifying, self-justifying brilliance is a relief in its own right, because it’s hard to admit that you tried to save yourself and failed. But it helps to realize what you were up against. How could have Lolita, no matter how smart-mouthed and full of bravado, outwitted Humbert? How could I have outwitted He Who Spectacularly Betrayed? The illusion that I could have done a thing to save myself — and hence was guilty, since I obviously hadn’t tried hard enough — was impossible to maintain after contemplating the merciless talent of a person like Humbert, how easily he got the girl where he wanted her to be, how effortlessly he rationalized his actions, how magnificently he described his odyssey and tied it up with a pretty bow.

*

I think something we all admire about Lolita is how terrifyingly beautiful (or beautifully terrifying?) the book is. I haven't read it in a few years but I do remember a sort of rosy glow draped over the whole thing, infusing every word, even as so many horrific events transpired (I think the newer film captured this atmosphere well by using a light, softening filter and choosing actors with subtle but lovely features). But the idea of beauty running parallel to horror is compelling, as if beauty does not infuse horror but exists somewhere at its edge: something into which you can step and bask in spite of the horror. In that case I might use the word "peripheral," or even "orbiting" (the image conceived is of a bright, crisp apple with a dark spot near the center: you may consume the surrounding beauty despite the rot, which can be isolated but not ignored? Something like that?). Or maybe even "centripetal": as if the beauty of the world is in motion, surrounds the core of the horrible event and attempts to penetrate it. But "parallel"? I'm imagining a stretch of treacherously gnarled woodland and a moonlit stream running through it: step from the dangerous dark into the stream, wade your mind in the water. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that word choice. Of course this has more to do with the way an individual mind regards and conceptualizes abstractions such as beauty (and horror) than anything, and how the individual mind attempts to render them palpable; it's incredibly personal. Regardless I think it's illuminating to hear an abuse survivor talk about Lolita as a book that saved her -- that helped her handle the complexity of her unique situation -- because one would typically expect such a book to further traumatize, given that in many ways it asks readers to empathize with a child rapist. Still: in the end, empathy does not negate what's happened; Nabokov never asks us to forgive or excuse Humbert's actions, nor does he implicate Lolita as the "little whore," and those are important distinctions to make. It is culture that has turned the terms "Lolita" and "nymphet" into condemnatory ones that appeal to rape apologists and misogynists.

Anyway. Here is a quote from a 1964 interview with Nabokov from Playboy I particularly love, as it explains the generation of the various names given to our heroine:

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny -- 1 mean, a small German hare.