two lovely things I would like archived

François Auguste Biard

View of the Icy Ocean, Greenlanders fishing Walrus 1841

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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The last seven lines of this poem are incredible.

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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.