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:

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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

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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)