the hyacinth girl

Persona (1966)

2012-01-25T01:53:00.002-05:00

The Doctor: I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert.

(The lighting in this scene is just perfection.)

Sylvia Plath

2011-11-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

The Eye-Mote

Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week:
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.

pockets full of stones

2011-11-04T01:32:00.003-04:00

Of course, my favorite songs from the new Florence album are about drowning. (The poem in my ms. that's been giving me the most trouble is about drowning.)

(this one is clearly Woolf-inspired...)

She keeps coming to LA, and I keep missing her because the show sells out before I know about it, and then everyone sells "extra" tickets on craigslist for double the face value. I can't let this happen next time she's coming to town.

best cake ever

2011-10-06T20:34:00.001-04:00

I don't know if I could bring myself to stick a knife in a cake this awesome.

I meant to post this before

2011-08-31T00:15:00.003-04:00

I reviewed Nick Flynn's The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands for the current issue of Pebble Lake Review. Click here to read it.

The End

2011-07-18T23:02:00.008-04:00

Hard to believe we've gone from this:

To this:

Tree of Life

2011-07-12T19:18:00.019-04:00

I finally went to see Tree of Life this morning, all by my lonesome. There were four of us total in the theater. At the end, there were two of us left (myself & an older man, also by himself). I went into the theater skeptical, after hearing about how unbearably "pre-ten-shussss" & slow it all was. But, dear cynics, it is not nearly so pretentious. I loved every single moment of it. As the movie started, I just let my mind go into it & get lost in it without second guessing things, without coming up for air, & I was rewarded with a remarkable cinematic experience.

I have not been so captivated by a film in a very long time. It was genuinely emotional, beautiful & remarkably simple in its approach to human complexity, as well as extremely well acted. So much tenderness, conveyed sincerely, & darkness too. Even though it could (perhaps should) have been boring & slow, nearly every moment held my interest & propelled me forward. It was true, all of it felt true to me. I cried for a good deal of it, which made me glad that a stranger wasn't sitting next to me. It is the kind of film that alters you, & that changes your perspective, however temporarily, on your life & your place in the universe. It's the kind of film you feel grateful for having watched. It felt like the film equivalent of a long, lyric poem. Of course, some people utterly despised it & spit on its grave, so maybe I'm just manipulable, but I deeply felt this film & will be thinking about it for awhile yet.

I do think "lyric" (or even just "poetic") is a good adjective for Malick's direction, as it felt to me like a near perfect attempt at a non-narrative structure in film, a gold standard for future attempts by other directors. Roger Ebert said "The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling," & I think that's apt. For as much as I love 2001 (& believe me, I love that film), it is emotionally cold & relentlessly cerebral; it is a "thinking" film with long stretches of quiet infinitude rendered frigid & unwelcoming. But this film is always more than just thought, always sincerely invested in people. The imagery always seemed to have a purpose not within a "plot," but in the emotional trajectory of the non-story--of a single man's memory, stretching at times beyond itself.

I thought this article was a good one.

summer camp

2011-05-23T14:00:00.004-04:00

I'm going to be a poetry waiter at Bread Loaf this summer! Pray to the gods that I don't trip and spill coffee into some esteemed faculty member's lap.

lost & found

2011-05-15T03:49:00.011-04:00

An 1845 illustration from the Illustrated London News of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror

Franklin's Lost Expedition: ". . .Originally built as “bomb vessels” that could absorb the recoil from mortar firing, their stout, wide shape made them good candidates for trafficking in ice, and they had been further modified—with triple-thick sailing canvas, double-thick decks, double-planked hulls, and oak beams fore and aft below—for polar conditions. For Franklin's trip, each had been fitted with a 20-hp steam engine and propeller, to help navigate ice in difficult wind and windless conditions—an innovation for an Arctic vessel.

In early July, in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland, the ships took on their last supplies from a transport ship, giving them three years' worth of provisions. Richard Cyriax, historian of the Franklin expedition, has extensively detailed the specifics of these; in his estimate, each ship carried roughly 30 tons of flour, eight tons of beef (in eight-lb. sections), 2500 gallons of concentrated soup, two tons of chocolate, two tons of lemon juice, and more than a ton of tobacco, among many other stores. With the supply ship, some letters were sent home, as well as five men deemed “unfit.” Two English whalers, the Enterprise and Prince of Wales, encountered the expedition on July 28th in Baffin Bay near Lancaster Sound: all was well. From there, the two ships and their crews (a total of 129 men) disappeared from sight.

Anxiety replaced anticipation after the winter of 1846-1847 passed without word from or about the expedition. Urged on by Franklin's indefatigable wife, Lady Jane Franklin, the Admiralty ultimately instigated a three-pronged search effort: by land, down the Mackenzie or Coppermine River to the coast; from the Pacific, via Bering Strait; and from the east, through Lancaster Sound. Lady Franklin also used her personal resources to fund additional efforts, and she persuaded the United States to enter the hunt as well. In all, from 1848 to 1859, thirty-two search expeditions sought the fate of the Franklin expedition. What was found?

Found is a relative term here, for all of the evidence was (and remains) circumstantial. What is known is that Franklin commanded the best-equipped British Navy expedition ever sent into the Arctic, and its disappearance occasioned “a series of relief and search expeditions, both public and private, English and American, which has no parallel in maritime annals, and which, while prosecuting the main object of the voyages, turned the map of the Arctic regions north of America from a blank void into a grim but distinct representation of islands, straits, and seas.”

recovered medicine chest

newspaper report for found artifacts

“The Lost Arctic Voyagers.”
Dr. Rae may be considered to have established, by the mute but solemn testimony of the relics he has brought home, that Sir John Franklin and his party are no more. But, there is one passage in his melancholy report, some examination into the probabilities and improbabilities of which, we hope will tend to the consolation of those who take the nearest and dearest interest in the fate of that unfortunate expedition, by leading to the conclusion that there is no reason whatever to believe, that any of its members prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions. [Charles Dickens, Household Words, no. 245, 2 December 1854]

1894, Lat. 81 degrees 40' N.; long. 2 degrees E.

2011-05-11T00:13:00.003-04:00

A glorious sunset, which made the great fields of ice look like a  lake of blood. . .The night was very dark--so dark that, standing under the quarter-boat, I was unable to see the officer upon the bridge. I think I have already mentioned the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas. In other parts of the world, be they ever so barren, there is some slight vibration of the air--some faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of the trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground. One may not actively perceive the sound, and yet if it were withdrawn it would be missed. It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you in all its gruesome reality. You find your tympanum straining to catch some little murmur, and dwelling eagerly upon every accidental sound within the vessel. . .At first it was only a vague darkness against the white ice, but as we raced along together it took the shape of a man, and eventually of the man of whom we were in search. He was lying face downwards upon a frozen bank. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman's jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the sea. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but many of my companions averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe. I have learned never to ridicule any man's opinion, however strange it may seem. --from "The Captain of the Pole-Star" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

beautiful, extinct

2011-05-08T22:12:00.000-04:00

things that are adorable, part 1

2011-04-19T04:12:00.004-04:00

This was a moment of lightness on Tax Day:

Penguins are ticklish, apparently.

2011-04-15T01:53:00.012-04:00

Today was a terrible day. And so I bring you writers...& their kitties!

Observe:

It's Mark Twain & an adorable kitten!

It's William Carlos Williams & three adorable kittens!

Hemingway literally writing & petting his cat at the same time!

Many more here.

process

2011-04-07T15:50:00.004-04:00

James Salter's outline for Light Years:

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

2011-04-02T19:34:00.008-04:00

Leonardo Da Vinci on perspective:

Every body in light and shade fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself; and these, by infinite pyramids diffused in the air, represent this body throughout space and on every side. Each pyramid that is composed of a long assemblage of rays includes within itself an infinite number of pyramids and each has the same power as all, and all as each. A circle of equidistant pyramids of vision will give to their object angles of equal size; and an eye at each point will see the object of the same size. The body of the atmosphere is full of infinite pyramids composed of radiating straight lines, which are produced from the surface of the bodies in light and shade, existing in the air; and the farther they are from the object which produces them the more acute they become and although in their distribution they intersect and cross they never mingle together, but pass through all the surrounding air, independently converging, spreading, and diffused. And they are all of equal power [and value]; all equal to each, and each equal to all. By these the images of objects are transmitted through all space and in every direction, and each pyramid, in itself, includes, in each minutest part, the whole form of the body causing it. . .Just as the stone thrown into the water becomes the center and cause of various circles, and the sound made in the air spreads out in circles, so every body placed within the luminous air diffuses itself in circles and fills the surroundings with an infinite number of images of itself.

Leonardo Da Vinci explains how to represent a tempest:

If you wish to represent a tempest consider and arrange well its effects as seen, when the wind, blowing over the face of the sea and earth, removes and carries with it such things as are not fixed to the general mass. And to represent the storm accurately you must first show the clouds scattered and torn, and flying with the wind, accompanied by clouds of sand blown up from the sea shore, and boughs and leaves swept along by the strength and fury of the blast and scattered with other light objects through the air. Trees and plants must be bent to the ground, almost as if they would follow the course of the gale, with their branches twisted out of their natural growth and their leaves tossed and turned about. Of the men who are there some must have fallen to the ground and be entangled in their garments, and hardly to be recognized for the dust, while those who remain standing may be behind some tree, with their arms round it that the wind may not tear them away; others with their hands over their eyes for the dust, bending to the ground with their clothes and hair streaming in the wind. Let the sea be rough and tempestuous and full of foam whirled among the lofty waves, while the wind flings the lighter spray through the stormy air, till it resembles a dense and swathing mist. Of the ships that are therein some should be shown with rent sails and the tatters fluttering through the air, with ropes broken and masts split and fallen. And the ship itself lying in the trough of the sea and wrecked by the fury of the waves with the men shrieking and clinging to the fragments of the vessel. Make the clouds driven by the impetuosity of the wind and flung against the lofty mountain tops, and wreathed and torn like waves beating upon rocks; the air itself terrible from the deep darkness caused by the dust and fog and heavy clouds.

2011-03-20T00:42:00.000-04:00

Nightfishing

The kitchen's old-fashioned planter's clock portrays
A smiling moon as it dips down below
Two hemispheres, stars numberless as days,
And peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow
Under that happy sky; but though the sands
Of time put on this vegetable disguise,
The clock covers its face with long, thin hands.
Another smiling moon begins to rise.

We drift in the small rowboat an hour before
Morning begins, the lake weeds grown so long
They touch the surface, tangling in an oar.
You've brought coffee, cigars, and me along.
You sit still, like a monument in a hall,
Watching for trout. A bat slices the air
Near us, I shriek, you look at me, that's all,
One long sobering look, a smile everywhere
But on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.
You turn back to the hake, chuckle, and clamp
Your teeth on your cigar. We watch the black
Water together. Our tennis shoes are damp.
Something moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.
Here, for the first time ever, I see how,
Just as a fish lurks deep in water weeds,
A thought of death will lurk deep down, will show
One eye, then quietly disappear in you.
It's time to go. Above the hills I see
The faint moon slowly dipping out of view,
Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Serenity,
Ocean of Storms... You start to row, the boat
Skimming the lake where light begins to spread.
You stop the oars, midair. We twirl and float.

I'm in the kitchen. You are three days dead.
A smiling moon rises on fertile ground,
White stars and vegetables. The sky is blue.
Clock hands sweep by it all, they twirl around,
Pushing me, oarless, from the shore of you.

--Gjertrud Schnackenberg

2011-03-08T17:36:00.009-05:00

An archived Elizabeth Bishop interview from the Paris Review here.

~

Her first memory: I remember my mother taking me for a ride on the swan boats here in Boston. I think I was three then. It was before we went back to Canada. Mother was dressed all in black—widows were in those days. She had a box of mixed peanuts and raisins. There were real swans floating around. I don’t think they have them anymore. A swan came up and she fed it and it bit her finger. Maybe she just told me this, but I believed it because she showed me her black kid glove and said, “See.” The finger was split. Well, I was thrilled to death! Robert Lowell put those swan boats in two or three of the Lord Weary’s Castle poems.

~

The Joseph Cornell boxes she loved:

& then her translation of the poem by Octavio Paz, which she also mentions:

Objects and Apparitions

Hexagons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoe box,
with room in them for night and all it's lights.

Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity.

Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,
pins, stamps, and glass beads:
tales of time.

Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes:
in the four corners of the box
shadowless ladies play at hide and seek.

Fire buried in the mirror,
water sleeping in the agate:
solos of Jenny Colonne and Jenny Lind.

"One has to commit a painting," said Degas,
"the way one commits a crime." But you contructed
boxes where things hurry away from their names.

Slot machine of visions,
condensation flask for conversations,
hotel of crickets and constellations.

Minimal, incoherent fragments:
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.

Theater of the spirits:
objects putting the laws
of identity through hoops.

The "Grand Hotel de la Couronne": in a vial,
the three of clubs and, very surprised,
Thumbelina in gardens of reflections.

A comb is a harp strummed by the glance
of a little girl
born dumb.

The reflector of the inner eye
scatters the spectacle:
God all alone above an extinct world.

The apparitions are manifest,
their bodies weigh less than light,
lasting as this phrase lasts.

Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes
my words became visible for a moment.

this is unreal

2011-03-05T14:57:00.004-05:00

A mid-winter glow, Weddell Sea, showing Endurance, 1915.

These are Frank Hurley’s famous early colour photographs of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ‘Endurance’ voyage, as part of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1917. Hurley was the official photographer on the expedition.

Early in 1915, their ship ‘Endurance’ became inexorably trapped in the Antarctic ice. Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915.

—State Library of New South Wales

More amazingness here.

2011-03-02T03:00:00.006-05:00

This is a picture I took one summer in Oregon. I had been riding my bike alongside some flowered bushes & a bee stung my foot. Feivel kept me company while I lay on the couch & complained about it.

tear this whole town apart!

2011-02-28T20:44:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I really wish I could have a beer with Bruce Springsteen.

2011-02-28T19:16:00.002-05:00

The Promise of Nostos

The sea is not bent on circularity: it says Here is an island,
anchor here.
_________But because love waits, the broken hull
is soon patched, a torn sail sewn to hold the wind,
and then once again they set course. The uncalled for jubilance
of departure, feigned tears, the make-believe dream
where so-and-so appeared to say fly away home.
They do not leave for home. They do not leave to return,
despite their promises. They leave to leave, and if I love them
it's because they come hungry as a dream, and like a dream
their stay distills a life, or what a life could be--

--Jessica Fisher

2011-02-22T21:13:00.006-05:00

Reading list:

The Voyage of Saint Brendan
The First Voyage Around the World 1519-1522, Pigafetta (w/ Magellan)
Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World 1772-1775, John Reinold Forster (w/ Captain Cook)
The Arctic Whaling Journals of Wiliam Scoresby the Younger 1814-1816
Journal of a Voyage Around the World 1841-1842, Thomas Worthington King

*

An entry from the Pigafetta:

[44] The Antarctic Pole is not so starry as the Arctic. Many small stars clustered together are seen, which have the appearance of two clouds with little distance between them, and they are somewhat dim; in the midst of them are two large and not very luminous stars, which move only slightly: those two stars are the Antarctic Pole. Our loadstone, although it moved here and there, always pointed toward its own Arctic Pole, although it did not have so much strength as on its own side, and on that account when we were in that open expanse, the captain-general asked all the pilots: 'Are you still sailing forward in the course that we laid down on the maps?' All replied: 'By your course exactly as laid down.' He answered them that they were pointing wrongly, which was a fact, and that it would be fitting to adjust the compass, for it was receiving so much force from its side. When we were in the midst of that open expanse, we saw a cross with five extremely bright stars straight toward the west, those stars being exactly placed in relation to one another.

my horse my hound

2011-02-15T21:52:00.002-05:00

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

--May Swenson

E.D.

2011-02-14T23:50:00.001-05:00

CXXXIX.

TO pile like Thunder to its close,
Then crumble grand away,
While everything created hid–
This would be Poetry:
Or Love,–the two coeval came–
We both and neither prove,
Experience either, and consume–
For none see God and live.

from This Lamentable City, one of the many books purchased at AWP

2011-02-08T20:07:00.004-05:00

Conjunction And

We met on a Sunday, no not exactly,
we met before, but it wasn’t that either:
you drank coffee through a straw but it was more like
a poor bird stopping in to see a horse in a coat
and you took me by the took me by the took me by the hand
and a tree with red berries and mountains and mountains
and we laughed and listened and Lord everything was bullshit
and the tree with its red berries and its bark and its bark
and we had each other like beasts without pausing
and if everything after the fact is sad we are not things
and we came from garbage and we played with garbage
and you caressed my skin with the seeds of pearls. Now it’s January
already and over us, pardon me, pink magnolias with their dog tongues
on the grey background of old snow have bloomed, and every time I pass
among these miracles I remember the smell of your hand
torn from me, and torn from you.

— Polina Barskova, translated by Ilya Kaminsky with Matthew Zapruder

2011-01-20T18:52:00.001-05:00

"It seems to me to be a process of looking for something in there, rather than having something and revising it. I don't consider that I really have anything yet--except inchoate mess. As I work on it, I'm always trying to hear the sound of the words, and trying to take out everything that doesn't feel alive. That's my goal: to take out everything that doesn't feel alive."

--Jean Valentine, on writing & revising

The Virgin Spring (1960)

2011-01-11T17:32:00.003-05:00

+

"You see how the smoke trembles up near the hole in the roof? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they don’t know. You shall cross a narrow plank, so narrow you can't find your footing. Below you roars a great river. It's black and wants to swallow you, but you pass over it unharmed. Before you lies a chasm, so deep you can't see the bottom. Hands grope for you, but they can't reach you. At last you stand before a mountain of terror. It spews fire like a furnace, and a vast abyss opens at its feet. A thousand colors blaze there: copper and iron, blue vitriol and yellow sulfur. Flames dazzle and flash and lash at the rocks. And all about, men leap and writhe, small as ants, for this is the furnace that swallows murderers and evildoers. But at the very moment you think you're doomed, a hand shall grasp you and an arm circle around you, and you'll be taken far away, where evil no longer has power over you."

heard it on the radio

2010-12-14T19:34:00.000-05:00

Thomas + Anne 4ever

2010-11-06T18:43:00.000-04:00

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

2010-08-17T02:07:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-31T16:53:00.002-04:00

(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

2010-05-15T00:02:00.004-04:00

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

2010-05-13T18:33:00.014-04:00

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.

********

2010-05-06T05:23:00.008-04:00

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

2010-05-01T21:44:00.000-04:00

2010-05-01T12:28:00.012-04:00

At least Marky Mark knows what's up:

I don't understand the photos of Africa, but okay

2010-04-25T20:33:00.003-04:00

by any other name

a jay is still blue

with the loneliness

of you mighty men,

with your mighty kiss

that might never end,

while, so far away,

in the seat of the west,

burns the fount

of the heat

of that loneliness.

There's a man

who only will speak in code,

backing slowly, slowly down the road.

May he master everything

that such men may know

about loving, and then letting go.

the end

2010-04-25T16:36:00.003-04:00

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.

the song of the week

2010-03-20T21:33:00.002-04:00

Never been much into Eisley, but this song has been beautiful fuel for creative work this week.

2010-02-27T19:21:00.004-05:00

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

2010-02-23T19:46:00.003-05:00

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

2010-02-14T10:37:00.010-05:00

Anna Karina is so beautiful. Watch in moving pictures:

Ex libris

beauty beauty beauty I want to wrap my legs around you

2010-02-09T20:23:00.009-05:00

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

2010-02-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

These visions of Jo(h)anna just conquer my mind.

2010-02-08T01:14:00.008-05:00

Another song from Joanna's new album. I really, really love this one, even though it is so different from anything she has ever done, especially compositionally. It gets pretty beautiful around 3:25, where the jauntiness segues into her characteristically sad warbling (and no amount of talking is going to soften the fall/ but like after the rain, step out of the overhang, that's all).

And the end, so good:

Lord,

you know it's a shame

when I only want for you to pull over and hold me

until I can't remember my own name

Oh wait, I just found another! A live version of a new song someone uploaded to YouTube:

Beautiful!

two lovely things I would like archived

2010-02-01T14:43:00.009-05:00

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!

2010-01-28T13:28:00.005-05:00

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

2010-01-25T11:41:00.000-05:00

*

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.

2010-01-25T11:10:00.000-05:00

Andre Breton

2010-01-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-24T07:04:00.000-05:00

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.

By the way, I do believe I have a celebrity crush.

2010-01-20T03:02:00.000-05:00

Oh Robert Downey, Jr., so charming in your period clothing! You charm the pants off me.

Oh dear.

2010-01-19T18:25:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-01-13T10:23:00.000-05:00

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.

2009-12-27T01:05:00.000-05:00

"What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin--not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget--because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past."

--Nabokov, Pnin

2009-12-24T10:54:00.001-05:00

"In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired."

--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

*

the only rendition of this book worth watching!

2009-12-21T11:27:00.000-05:00

For many reasons, Christmas seems a bit pointless at this juncture in my life. But at least it gives me an excuse to watch this movie:

Can you forgive a pigheaded old fool for having no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, all these years?

Gerard Manley Hopkins!

2009-12-21T10:50:00.000-05:00

(Carrion Comfort)

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

the lovely, lovely opening to LIGHT YEARS by James Salter

2009-12-16T16:31:00.000-05:00

One

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

The day is white as paper. The windows are chilled. The quarries lie empty, the silver mine drowned. The Hudson is vast here, vast and unmoving. A dark country, a country of sturgeon and carp. In the fall it was silver with shad. The geese flew overhead in their long, shifting V's. The tide flows in from the sea.

The Indians sought, they say, a river that "ran both ways." Here they found it. The salt wedge penetrates as far in as fifty miles; sometimes it reaches Poughkeepsie. There were huge beds of oysters here, seals in the harbor, in the woods inexhaustible game. This great glacial cut with its nuptial bays, the coves of wild celery and rice, this majestic river. The birds, like punctuation, are crossing in level flight. They seem to approach slowly, accelerate, pass overhead like arrows. The sky has no color. A feeling of rain.

All this was Dutch. Then, like so much else, it was English. The river is a reflection. It bears only silence, a glittering cold. The trees are naked. The eels sleep. The channel is deep enough for ocean liners; they could, if they wished, astonish the inner towns. There are turtles and crabsin the marshes, herons, Bonaparte gulls. The sewage pours from the cities further up. The river is filthy, but cleanses itself. The fish are numbed; they drift with the tide.

Along the banks there are houses of stone, no longer fashionable, and wooden houses, drafty and bare. There are still estates that exist, remnants of the great land parcels of the past. Near the water, a large Victorian, the brick painted white, trees high above it, a walled garden, a decaying greenhouse with ironwork along the roof. A house by the river, too low for the afternoon sun. It was flooded instead with the light of morning, with the eastern light. It was in glory at noon. There are spots where the paint has turned dark, bare spots. The gravel paths are dissolving; birds nest in the sheds.

We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.

A car comes up the driveway, back from the city. The driver goes inside, only for a moment until he's heard the news: the pony has gotten loose.

He is furious. "Where is she? Who left the door unlatched?"

"Oh God, Viri. I don't know."

In a room with many plants, a kind of solarium, there is a lizard, a brown snake, a box turtle asleep. The entry step is deep, the turtle cannot leave. He sleeps on the gravel, his feet drawn up close. His nails are the color of ivory, they curl, they are long. The snake sleeps, the lizard sleeps.

Viri has his coat collar up and is trudging uphill. "Ursula!" he calls. He whistles.

The light has gone. The grass is dry; it creaks underfoot. There was no sun all day. Calling the pony's name, he advances toward the far corners, the road, the adjoining fields. A stillness everywhere. It begins to rain. He sees the one-eyed dog that belongs to a neighbor, a kind of husky, his muzzle gray. The eye is closed completely, sealed, covered with fur so long ago was it lost, as if it never existed.

"Ursula!" he cries.

"She's here," his wife says when he returns.

The pony is near the kitchen door, tranquil, dark, eating an apple. He touches her lips. She bites him absent-mindedly on the wrist. Her eyes are black, lustrous, with the long, crazy lashes of a drunken woman. Her coat is thick, her breath very sweet.

"Ursula," he says. Her ears turn slightly, then forget. "Where have you been? Who unlocked your stall?"

She has no interest in him.

"Have you learned to do that?" He touches an ear; it is warm, strong as a shoe. He leads her to the shed, whose door is ajar. Outside the kitchen he stamps dirt from his shoes.

The lights are on everywhere: a vast, illuminated house. Dead flies the size of beans lie behind the velvet curtains, the wallpaper has corner bulges, the window glass distorts. It is an aviary they live in, a honeycomb. The roofs are thick slate, the rooms are like shops. It gives off no sound, this house; in the darkness it is like a ship. Within, if one listens, there is everything: water, faint voices, the slow, measured rending of grain.

In the principal bath, with its stains, sponges, soaps the color of tea, books, water-curled copies of Vogue, he steams in peace. The water is above his knees; it penetrates to the bone. There is carpeting on the floor, a basket of smooth stones, an empty glass of the deepest blue.

"Papa," they call through the door.

"Yes." He is reading the Times.

"Where was Ursula?"

"Ursula?"

"Where was she?"

"I don't know," he says. "She went out for a walk."

They wait for something further. He is a storyteller, a man of wonders. They listen for sounds, expecting the door to open.

"But where was she?"

"Her legs were wet," he announces.

"Her legs?"

"I think she was swimming."

"No, Daddy, really."

"She was trying to get the onions on the bottom."

"There are no onions there."

"Oh, yes."

"There are?"

"That's where they grow."

They explain it to each other outside the door. It's true, they decide. They wait for him, two little girls squatting like beggars.

"Papa, come out," they say. "We want to talk to you."

He puts aside the paper and sinks one last time into the embrace of the bath.

"Papa?"

"Yes."

"Are you coming out?"

The pony fascinates them. It frightens them. They are ready to run if it makes an unexpected sound. Patient, silent, it stands in its stall; a grazing animal, it eats for hours. Its muzzle has a nimbus of fine hair, its teeth are browned.

"Their teeth never stop growing," the man who sold her to them said. He was a drunkard, his clothes were torn. "They keep growing out and getting wore down."

"What would happen if she didn't eat?"

"If she didn't eat?"

"What would happen to her teeth?"

"Make sure she eats," he said.

They often watch her; they listen to her jaws. This mythical beast, fragrant in the darkness, is greater than they are, stronger, more clever. They long to approach her, to win her love.

2009-12-07T19:07:00.000-05:00

“If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.”

--Camus, from "The Myth of Sisyphus"

2009-11-26T18:53:00.001-05:00

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

2009-11-26T18:46:00.000-05:00

"From a distance or close at hand, the damp beauty of prisons was not recognized. The best refuges are stations because the travelers never know which way to go. You could read in the lines of the palm that the most fragrant vows of fidelity have no future. What can we do with muscle-bound children? The warm blood of bees is preserved in bottles of mineral water. We have have seen sincerities exposed. Famous men lose their lives in the carelessness of those beautiful houses that make the heart flutter. How small they seem, these rescued tides! Earthly happinesses run in floods. Each object is Paradise."

--Andre Breton and Phillipe Soupault, Magnetic Fields

2009-11-26T18:43:00.000-05:00

"All the beauty I thought lost in the world is in you and around you. When I am near you I no longer feel my being contracting and shriveling. This terrible fatigue which consumes me is lifted. This fatigue I feel when I am not with you is so enormous that it is like what God must have felt at the beginning of the world, seeing all the world uncreated, formless, and calling to be created. I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at the feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fervor of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid."

--Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell, "Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"

2009-11-26T18:37:00.000-05:00

"He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, beginning to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn't seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn't need to know a man's feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he'd press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He'd get out of bed and look at her and she'd stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall."

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

2009-11-26T18:36:00.000-05:00

"Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

--Don DeLillo, White Noise

2009-11-26T18:33:00.000-05:00

" Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remember that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was.There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long."

--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

I think this is my favorite part of Housekeeping, along with the first couple pages of Chapter 10:

2009-10-26T09:04:00.000-04:00

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally and in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is its taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Sylvie was gone. She had left without a word, or a sound. I thought she must be teasing, perhaps watching me from the woods. I pretended not to know I was alone. I could see why Sylvie thought children might come here. Any child who saw once how gleaming water spilled to the tips of branches, and rounded and dropped and pocked the softening shadows of frost at the foot of each tree, would come to see it again.

If there had been snow I would have made a statue, a woman to stand along the path, among the trees. The children would have come close, to look at her. Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty, and to laugh at her extravagant adornments, as if they had set the flowers in her hair and thrown down all the flowers at her feet, and they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven. Though her hands were ice and did not touch them, she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things.

quotes from favorite books #3

2009-10-19T08:51:00.000-04:00

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

+

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

+

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

--The Road, McCarthy

(When I finished this book at 3am, I couldn't fall asleep because I was devastated and couldn't breathe from crying.)

favorite quotes from favorite books #2

2009-10-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

What is the meaning of life?... a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

+

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

+

She looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across her bed, stroking the floor), but for all that, she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

+

Beauty had this penalty -- it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after.

+

It partook . . . of eternity . . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

+

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

+

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

--To The Lighthouse, Woolf

(This is my favorite book in the world; I could easily quote the entire thing. I think I might use that last one as a section break in my ms.)

favorite quotes from favorite books #1

2009-10-19T08:25:00.000-04:00

Don't cry, what else could she say, what meaning do tears have when the world has lost all meaning, In the girl's room on the chest of drawers stood the glass vase with the withered flowers, the water had evaporated, it was there that her blind hands directed themselves, her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned.

--Blindness, Saramago

2009-10-14T17:30:00.000-04:00

Desperate for more horror after reading The Haunting of Hill House, I impulsively checked out The Exorcist when my eye spied it on the shelf. My advice to you is. . .don't. I mean, I wasn't expecting much. I was curious. But this amount of writing failure is impossible to rationalize (much as the case with Dan Brown, who has somehow brainwashed America into loving his books). The problem is that The Haunting of Hill House is the epitome of horror-done-well, and it's awakened in me a serious craving for horror, which unfortunately is rarely done well. I need horror and need to be scared, even disturbed, shaken by something; the horror film or novel fulfills some kind of basic need in me that I cannot place. And Shirley Jackson is such a wonderful writer and storyteller; she's just full of lovely sentences and passages. Like this one, which hardly seems as if it belongs in a "horror" novel:

On the afternoon of the day that Mrs. Montague was expected, Eleanor went alone into the hills above Hill House, not really intending to arrive at any place in particular, not even caring where or how she went, wanting only to be secret and out from under the heavy dark wood of the house. She found a small spot where the grass was soft and dry and lay down, wondering how many years it had been since she had lain on soft grass to be alone to think. Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile. Idly Eleanor picked a wild daisy, which died in her fingers, and, lying on the grass, looked up into its dead face. There was nothing in her mind beyond an overwhelming wild happiness. She pulled at the daisy, and wondered, smiling at herself, What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

A quiet, sinister beauty permeates the book, and Jackon's sentences are perfectly constructed to deal with that tension between beauty and horror. As a whole, the book isn't unbearably scary, but it is highly atmospheric, and there are a few tense, terrifying passages that are so effective mainly because of the writing itself (a less able writer, like King and many other contemporary horror writers, could not take such simplicity and make it work as well as she does; in other words, the story is simple but Jackson treats it with complexity, and her language is reflective of that complexity). The book is less about scares and ghosts and backstory, and more about Eleanor and her psychology and vulnerability; you see her becoming more and more detached from the mainstream reality she already felt excluded her. Eleanor's madness propels the book forward in a fascinating way.

Anyway, I just don't think I can finish The Exorcist, which features a writing style completely opposite the one above. Blatty litters the prose with annoying fragments, as if he's actually too lazy to construct all the sentences necessary to the writing of his own book. And he keeps awkwardly injecting italicized thoughts that don't add anything to the story or character development. And he lingers unbearably long on boring, non-essential scenes, such as the filming of the mother's movie (no one cares!). The whole thing is just stagnant and that's disappointing, because the movie was so good. It looks as if I've finally found a film I like more than the book that preceded it. It is such a shame, too, that poor writing in the horror genre is the rule rather than the exception.

So I've abandoned The Exorcist in favor of Housekeeping, which is thus far breathtaking.

P-town

2009-10-05T14:05:00.001-04:00

Lately I'm realizing that I need a novel in my life to be truly happy. To be reading one, that is. The longer I go without reading a novel, the more depressed I become about everything: the uncertainty of adulthood, money, the health care crisis, the war, politics, etc. It's as if the beauty starts fading, or maybe drifting further away from me, the way an object tossed into the waves starts moving further and further into the ocean until you can't see it anymore. And then I start reading again and come across a passage like this one:

18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being only the known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

And then I'm like, Oh yeah, right, you just needed a book. Don't forget again.

So anyway, I finished History of Love, which was sweet. Then I read Everything is Illuminated, which was so-so, difficult to finish. Now I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale, which is frightening and discomforting, and definitely the most terrifying dystopian novel I have read (much worse than 1984). I think any woman conscious of gender oppression has visualized and feared such a scenario; Atwood has simply given it breath and life and context and a whole lot of sadness.

At the used bookstore in P-town -- a cute little thing, tiny wooden shack -- I bought a Hopkins book, but also Housekeeping and Ada (Nabokov). The latter is a vintage paperback with a strangely over-the-top description on the back. The first sentence:

Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principle part is staged in dream-bright America -- for are not American childhood memories comparable to Vineland-bron caravellas, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?

Hmm, I suppose so?

Anyway, I've written one poem since I've gotten here. I'm going to try to do some revising today. Mostly I've just been exploring the little town, checking out the library and the beach and the stores, and "meeting" people. The weather is gorgeous; I really missed autumn in New England. I also really missed Cabot cheese, which is much better than Tillamook.

2009-08-20T21:42:00.000-04:00

LIST #1

Things I am afraid of: my train derailing, earthquakes, wasps and yellow-jackets. (When yellow-jackets hover by me as I read in a field I stand up to read, just in case I need to run away; my boyfriend says this is one of my "peccadilloes.") I am afraid of cancer. I am afraid of never seeing my father again. I am afraid when driving past trucks or walking late at night. Afraid of poisonous spiders under the covers (and necrosis of the flesh). That the horse will bite my hand when I feed it an apple, that a stray dog will attack me when I walk down a street alone. I am afraid of tsunamis (that moment when the sea draws itself back. . .). Afraid of being lost at sea, of drowning, of sharks. That a meteor will crash into the sea and send all the water up. I am afraid that people think I'm ugly when I walk past them. That I'm an awful poet. Afraid because even talented writers fail. Because no one cares about writers or artists, really. Because it's so easy to feel stupid. To be slothful. To forget to brush your teeth or miss a payment or make the wrong choice or say the wrong thing or hesitate. I am afraid of going blind or deaf. I am afraid to become any older than this. To become complacent, to live within the bubble of cynicism until I cannot see the beauty in things (I know too many people like this). Afraid of losing love (I never have), of mediocrity in love and goodbyes that are inevitable. I am afraid of nuclear war and loneliness and F-5 tornadoes (sometimes they're miles wide). When a plane creaks or makes a strange sound I grip my boyfriend's hand tight and look around at others' faces to see if they're alarmed, too (they never are). I am afraid to drive in the city, to take left turns during rush hour. I am afraid I will hit a deer in the country at night. Or hit a cat in the suburbs. I am afraid of paralysis, to break even one bone. I am afraid I will die tomorrow and never say the things I should have said to the people who needed to hear them. I am afraid that we really are the only sentient beings in the universe. What I think is interesting about fears and dreams is that many of us would list the same concepts but the images in our minds are all different and infinitely private: even if we wanted to describe them to someone we'd fail; there's just no way to let someone else in your head. I am afraid of that kind of aloneness, that my isolation will always feel palpable. That I don't even know who I am, really, even after twenty-five years of living in this body. And even more afraid that I've failed to really know and understand the people I love, what has made them who they are. I am afraid that I will remember it all wrong, that I will forget everything, that these days have no weight, no genuineness. That decomposing will still hurt, somehow.