Musette

Emily

I'm back to Emily Dickinson. I remember reading her in college, my own lexicon in hand, and watching universes open out from those lines. Flipping through the Complete Poems today I'm struck by the experimental feel of the poems, many of them new to me. I'm looking at #547, which begins:

 

    My first well Day--since many ill--
    I asked to go abroad,
    And take the Sunshine in my hands,
    And see the things in Pod--

    A'blossom just when I went in
    To take my Chance with pain--
    Uncertain if myself, or He,
    Should prove the strongest One

The leap in time between the pod and blossom, the sense of the cost of those  days of illness, and the  "take my chance with pain"  are rolling around my brain.

It happens that Agha Shahid Ali makes Dickinson's 1463 an epigram for a section of "A Nostalgist's Map of America." That poem begins: "A Route of Evanescence/With a revolving Wheel--"...

I'm not far into "Nostalgist's Map," but paging through, I'm thinking, quite pragmatically, that some of his first lines, or bits of them, are wonderful writing prompts. Which means that just one line or phrase in, they've turned on my imagination.

      When the desert refused my history...
      Students of mist..
      It was a year of brilliant water...
      Listen to my account as the world vanishes...

I'm saving string this month, may not write a lot. But my couple of poem-a-day experiments reinforced how much I need to stop to look around. Look around every day, of course, but also spend a *bit* more time processing, and gathering. I like that expression "wool gathering" --which reminds me of Psyche's second task, gathering wool from the dangerous rams, which she accomplished by waiting.

Notes on the day: The fish tanks are sparkling. One is much more about plants than fish.

In praise of...

Agha Shahid Ali. I wasn't carrying a notebook today, so I asked David to pick one from the shelf and bring it to me. I'd written on a few pages in 2002, and stuffed a couple of printed out poems in to mark my place. One was Ali's "Farewell," which I still find absolutely stunning. It's here, if you scroll down, below a couple of other beautiful pieces. A reminder of the power of art to address the real, the ruinous, the worst--and transcend it, look through it and see the possible.

Here's a bit of "Farewell":

   

"At a certain point I lost track of you.
    You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
    In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
    Your history gets in the way of my memory.
    I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
    I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
    Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

    I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
    Exquisite ghost, it is night.

    The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.

    It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.

    I am rowed — as it withers — toward the breeze which is soft as
    if it had pity on me.

    If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
    have happened in the world?"

Ali died young at the end of 2001. Seeing this poem again makes me want to look at his ghazals.

In praise of...

Ann Hamilton. I continue to look through "Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects," which collects the objects created for various performances and installations. For instance: Awaken, a blanket "Embroidered with the words of Susan Stewart's poem 'Awaken.'" (It's apparently for sale, I see, as I scroll around. Many details about the piece are here.

I happened on conceptual art for the first time as a high school kid in Colorado, hanging out with a slight, outcast boy who was a Yoko Ono fan. He gave me a book showing--or maybe just describing--her work. Lights went on. Soon after I found Charles Simic in the library. They're related in my mind, and at the heart of what I love about poetry (and art). The familiar world made strange, and thus brought closer.

And I am very excited to have just found this: an inventory list from the Medical History Museum. There's an incredible world here. For instance:

                                                      

MHM00083

Compass                                      Marked on lid "POCKET COMPASS; MADE IN ENGLAND", "ESL"

Brief Description Compass with yellow face and brass rim, housed in black bakelite circular container with relief printing on surface. Has screw top lid. History of Object Included in contents of Dr. James Jamieson's medical bag (registration number 74), who practiced in Warnambool and Melbourne, later lecturing in Obstetrics at Melbourne University. He died in 1916. Materials and Finishes Brass, metal (painted), paper (printed) and bakelite.

After

I really love Dennis Nurkse's work, and at City Lights last year, I picked up "The Fall," which I keep reading. This, from a poem called "Darkness" strikes me tonight. It's a walk home after a home run and a kiss, and it ends the poem.

        "The world was composed
         of leftover trees
         and fireflies from before.

         I was less than the breeze.

         Still the massive door
         swung open at my touch."

"Leftover trees and fireflies from before...." I used to go to an informal poetry workshop of Dennis' in Manhattan. He once said he thought my pieces sounded like poetry translated from another language, which I took as a great compliment. Because somehow, I'd had the same thought about his....  Now I have to figure out just what that quality is, or was.

Poem o' the day

Still looking at Luis Cernuda's prose poems. In a piece called "The Poet," he describes a child happening on poetry, how the boy was --
     "infected with something different and mysterious, which later, on rereading the poet again and again, awakened in him something like the memory of an earlier life, vague and insistent, drowned in neglect and nostalgia."
     I can't get enough of the mood of these Latin writers and their longing, which seems to pull them through the world, into its beauty.

Another sijo today. I know questions are not part of their structure, but they seem to be an inescapable part of mine....

#20

An ending, or infinity

White paper boats carry lit candles onto black water.
Pushed by a breeze or a breath, that most intimate of elements.
When they dissolve into night, do stars fall to replace them?

What the infant sees

I'm slowly reading "Greater Vision," a book on the eyes and seeing. I was interested in this:

"Up until the second month of the child's life, his eyes can focus to the distance of eight to ten inches, or about the arm's length that separates the child's eyes from his mother's when he is being held. Research has shown that a child's attention is usually focused on his mother's mouth until he is three months of age. At that time, development in the cerebral cortex steers that focus to his mother's eyes."

Just letting that stew awhile...

birds

These lines from Terry Wolverton's prose poem "In praise of singing"--it's in her new book "Shadow and Praise"--keep rolling around in my head:

             "...Each bird has its own song,
        and we understand none of them. A whole sky borne
        universe eludes our ill-tuned ears. What if God speaks
        in the language of birdsong? What instructions have we
        missed?..."

   

Tenuous edges

A stack of poetry books. I'm flipping through them. Sometimes I stand at the poetry shelves and just read titles on spines and tables of contents, dreaming up a whole other street where the names on the boxes read "Radical Field" and "Gray Shadings," "Notes from the Mesa" and "Legend." Those are all from Emily Wilson's book "The Keep." Here's the first line from Radical Field: "We have tenuous edges." (There are also "cortical/adumbrations" and other windows onto new landscapes.) Tenuous edges. Mostly, though, I find myself thinking about how my watch just stopped.