flat, drab, mechanical, anachronistic, archaistic,
the language of business
platitudes
hunting for poetry in strange places
the learning of how to do something really well (Gary Snyder)
and preferably something domesticated like cooking or cleaning or embroidery
or not
or the body and the brain of the body (Robert Bly)
or is it the soul of the body
or the body's emotions or redness or mechanisms, remote access
or political the passion the drive Marjorie coming to read or
Adrienne quoted or
Mary Oliver
I walked away so far away and now heading back oh yes
I worked on a spreadsheet all day. I was a thousand ants. Meanwhile, there's nothing to figure out.
I want the Dark Mother. The expression of negativity and destruction, the extreme expression. Why do I love her so much?
I'm not giving You up
No matter how You glare at me.
What's all this teasing and tricks, Mother,
When I go to get what's mine?
I pulled out Ramprasad Sen - "Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair." I feel distant from the fervency, found it a little funny, outrageous, devotional, used-to-be familiar. But I was not really all that touched, not ready to go get what's mine.
Maybe I'm due for a fast from reading. Or a fast from the many thousand things.
She was throwing her jewelry around tonight. Smile-moon and beauty-mark Venus (?) in the early night sky.
Prasad says: Your games, Mother,
Are mysteries. You make and break.
You've broken me in this life.
Struggling. I don't want to write down anything discursive, narrative, obvious, patented, simple, negative, positive, emotional, hopeful, peaceful ... I have so many ways I don't want to write.
I wrote some interesting sentences in my journal last night. The reason I like them is that they go backwards:
"The lovers part marry meet."
"Goodbye" used instead of "Hello."
"Arrivederci" followed by "I bring you peace."
Backwards. I didn't know I was doing it, but saw these three examples in the piece later. This happened after reading Friday about Ashbery's "January March February" and "Taurus Leo Gemini."
I like the idea of messing with time and order. I'm surprised that I grasped it deeply enough to come out in free writing. I unearth constant treasure in free writing. I don't trust it.
I wanted to write about the clouds early this morning and the long walk and the spaniels with short haircuts and the big black dog, but the day ran past me and I could never catch up to it.
I was interested to read Paula Vogel's "Playwright's Note" about The Long Christmas Ride Home. She wrote about the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, the "two volitions that underlie all artistic creation."
I am happy to find out about the urge to abstraction. I feel at home there. The majority of writing around me is from the urge to empathy.
Abstraction:
Primitive
Egyptian
Eastern
Ashbery
"the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired ...by the phenomena of the outside world...an immense spiritual dread of space"
"the refuge from the natural through the crystalline, the mathematical, the geometrical, the patterned"
distance - "to feel emotion, one must have distance"
Abstraction, a new window, a new place to go.
Concepts quoted from Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy.
Repotted the poinsettia which had dropped all its green leaves, leaving only its red, quite considerate for Valentine's Day.
Bought red and white candles, fat ones and tall ones, and a cherry strudel.
Roses for the blooming of our relationship,
Seeds for the smiles of the future,
Sweets for how I feel about you,
and
The key to my heart.
The key is on a shiny shocking pink metal ring and has cascading red currrly ribbon falling all around it.
***
I was looking at fake hair in the drugstore. There was a lot of it on display. Some of it looked just like my hair, a long rather limp hank of brown. There were also elastic bands sprouting tufts of black and blue hairy fur that I found oddly attractive.
***
The beautiful lining is ripping out of my coat. I'm in a quandary over it. I want to repair it, but if I just sew it back together, won't it just rip again. There should be some kind of stretchy inset put into place. Maybe a tailor could give me some advice. I love the lining, it is heavy sillky black with subtle flowers woven into it.
Exercises in deletion, fragmentation, hiding, compulsion. I'd like to make word theory, poem theory, not by thinking, but by doing. I was there before. I've been there. I know the route. I feel eager, but uncommitted. Timing?
This will never be a weblog. I'm not logging. No logging. I'm not trying to do anything. I'm not even trying to show up. Nor trying to reach closure, nor trying to be pretty, nor trying to express myself.
I feel a little frantic, then relaxed. Want to draw a circle in the dirt around this spot. Want to. But there's an awful lot of scuffling feet, and wind, and the footprints of deer and rabbits, falling wind, and rain, frozen rinds of snow. Not to mention magnetisms and othe polar influences, and bears and heavy asphalt paving.
No predictions. No promises. No probabilities. I'd like to make some things of words. I learn to write by writing.
I am swooning my way through Ashbery, swanning, swimming. Shapiro is fantastically subtle, describing the most elusive effects simply perfectly. I identify with this very much:
For Ashbery, the poem remains, it is true, as very much a parody of sentiment, but this wistful mannered replica of feeling is something which the poet finally affirms. While it is importnat to see that the poet is not utterly committed to a psychological narration, a three-dimensional Thou, it is equally important to sense the only slightly veiled desire to somhow get 'out' of the literary framework and address a 'you' more or less 'naturally.' But this is impossible, and Ashbery knows it more richly than anyone. ... the playful desire for the archaic form of a 'love sonnet' reproduces, no matter how percussively decorated with clumsy effects, something of the feeling-tone of a positive mode.
--from John Ashbery, An Introduction to the Poetry, by David Shapiro
Safety in parody, as safety in numbers. Safety in the weather, in electronics, in July, safety in sentiment, the road, the paycheck.
The scorching air of freedom whistles past my ears. The air, the voiceless place of A sans parody.
At the meeting Monday night, I felt Spirit lurking like a big round friendly beast. An almost physical sensation of a large area of power off to the side of the room just beyond my peripheral vision. So firmly placed in space, so definitely round, also large and almost sucking with attraction like a revolving door to Another Way.
Afterwards, A waiting for me out in the cold cold parking lot to tell me about her dreams.
*****
The largest snowflakes fell. A shower of asterisks, marking references to cold thoughts long gone.
*****
B has selected his courses for next year. Including Honors English, Latin 3, Human Physiology, Drawing and Painting, and Physics.
*****
Visited the "For the Birds" exhibit at Artspace in New Haven this afternoon. Enjoyed the large purple painting with landscape, figures, birds and flowers. Enjoyed a lot of the artwork, especially Rebecca D's cartoony like drawings. Wanted to buy the catalog, but didn't.
*****
Cappuccino with S at Koffee. Prelude, a serenade from Dr. Margaret Holloway, The Shakespeare Lady, world class busker. Then served coffee by a woman with two tiny lip rings and a nose ring, a quote about dreams and death tattooed on her backside. Sitting in the crowded room, surrounded by black windows, laptops, and the buzz of God, talking for an hour, mesmerized by your smile, feeling like a girl.
*****
ANTIDOTES
I'm still reading John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason, A Guide to English Verse.
It was tough going through the accentual, syllabic, and accentual-syllabic section. Something about counting units, either accented or syllabic, and memorizing and applying terms for meters and structures does not mesh easily with my poetic inclinations. He does explain it well enough, and I have a feeling I should own this book as a good reference.
But today, I broke into the free verse section. He talks about different kinds of free verse, the whole discussion itself in free verse. Some lines:
"each line a grammatical unit"
"line length/ can provide a visual 'music' of its own"
"can direct our attention... to what our language is made up of"
"graphic patterns... that suggest / the barely-seen but silent ghost of a /
classical verse form"
"contain more / Measured kinds of line, hidden"
"can build up various / stanzalike units"
And more.
A quote: "A Renaissance version of an ancient adage characterized poetry as speaking picture, and art as mute poesy."
Nice. Liked it very much. I also liked this example of a witty line break:
"(like someone talking in winter of a whole hiber-
nation of bears)"
And his Concrete Poem," "too heavy for these light pages."
When I saw Hollander speaking at Yale during the Bollingen Award celebration, I thought he seemed a little overly excitable about the idea of free verse actually having structure and form. Now I'm beginning to see what he meant.
I'm only on page 32. This book has 52 pages, but it's slow going.