A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: holding space, the private self, light and darkness, dog sutras, writing poetry for children, and much more.
I’d like to dedicate this week’s post to the memory of Miguel Algarín, Puerto Rican poet, writer, and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café who died earlier this week. Algarín was the embodiment of being a poetic presence on and off the page. His poetry set precedents by holding space for political struggles and literary insights that represented the various communities he worked and taught in. His work through the Nuyorican Poets Café as well as in his teaching showed him as a model for holding space for poets from all backgrounds.
The more I teach, the more I feel that the classroom is a space of confluence, a space where the experiences of my students and those of my own all meet, eddy, and converge, a presence. A stage can be a classroom as can the page. Across these three spaces, Algarín touched a great number of lives, influencing directly through community-minded efforts as well as through a singular understanding of languages.
The poet Rich Villar in a recent set of tweets shared the following sentiments:
I think it’s good to celebrate the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. It’s good to celebrate and mourn Miguel Algarín. It’s also good and important to celebrate Miguel’s IDEA of the cafe, the “poetics” of community, which is genius particularly because anyone can replicate it.
So many spaces and places defined what became known as the Nuyorican movement. None of it required official sanction or 501c3 status. It required two things: need, and audience. Even the old squat on 3rd Street wasn’t necessary at first. Any old space would do.
Villar goes on to share the example of Elisabet Velasquez who, among other things, is conducting a series of stories on Instagram highlighting poets who answer questions asked by her followers. I agree with Villar when he compares Velasquez’s use of social media to hold space in the spirit of Algarín. That when one looks outside the capitalist-driven and prejudice-strained world of literary publishing and awards, one sees that giving and honoring each other is easy. That answering a question on social media or mentoring someone through email correspondence is easy, is community. One of the great joys of running this blog is being able to connect with y’all and create community.
José Angel Araguz, in memory: Miguel Algarín
Poetry blogs have taken on special significance in 2020. As mentioned in my previous post on Rogue Strands, time might well have speeded up this year in many respects, but many people have also had that very same time weighing on their hands as a consequence of isolation, both in mental and physical terms.
In other words, poetry blogs have provided their readers with longer reads than social media posts, all alongside more substantial content. They offer us the chance to remember we’re not alone in the midst of this pandemic, together with the reassurance that there are other people whose experiences mirror ours.
Matthew Stewart, The Best U.K. Poetry Blogs of 2020
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The main questions I’ve been exploring in for the last few years (especially in Death Industrial Complex and MONARCH) all deal with identity formation in the context of a consumer culture. How does the messaging we’re exposed to dictate or even generate our desires? How do we know for certain we want what we want and we are who we are when we’re persuaded and manipulated so insistently to buy X, look like Y, aspire to Z. Are there any forces that exist outside consumerism? I’d like to think that magic, spirituality, and the occult all still retain pockets of freedom but it’s also apparent that large portions of even that which traditionally exists only on the interior, and therefore comprised our “true self” or “identity” no longer does.
The current question, for me, is about who we are in private. Do we have a private self any more? Do some of us have more of it than others? Do we value our interior lives less than ever before? Why? Shoshanna Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2018) thinks about this within the context of social media and surveillance policies and all the quick click “opting in” we do. She says, “When the fact is if you have nothing to hide, then you are nothing. Because everything that you are, the place inside you, your inner resources from which you draw your sense of identity, your sense of voice, your sense of autonomy and moral judgment, your ability to think critically, to resist, even to revolt—these are the capabilities that can only be grown within. Jean Paul Sartre calls it the will to will. And that will to will grows from within and you should hide it. And you should cherish it. And it should be private. And it should be yours.”
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Candice Wuehle
I’ve lost everybody
everything is a problem
there’s writing everywherea museum of smells
making scents/making sense
of light and waterI’m a butterfly
walking through smells
in the Blue Cityplant a hawthorn circle
Ama Bolton, ABCD December 2020
in your heart
maybe the singing bird
Enraged alarm clocks and five-alarm insomnia.
Sweet morning kisses and to-do lists gone stale.
Coffee brewing, babies burbling.
The final vespers of a pale moon and ghost-souled airwaves of pain playing across ravaged cityscapes.
Oraclegush of fortune’s fire hydrant and the Tiffany-slippered footfalls of first light.
Cars and bicycles stripped and stolen, birds singing like they got a degree from the University of Bliss.
Mildewed wash hanging out to dry on a cat’s ninth life.
The exquisite corpse of dreams remembered growing more vibrant by the moment—
all the lights and darks on the keys of early morning’s piano.
Rich Ferguson, Play Morning for Me
Advent is upon us, and with the season, the problematic language that talks about light overcoming darkness. Those of us who grew up with this language might not understand why it’s problematic. Those of us who have worked with language know that language matters, and this language has an impact on how we treat people with darker skin colors. Even those of us who have worked with language can be in a bit of denial.
We might be in denial about the impact of theological language on modern race relations, but language shapes us, and the theological language of light and darkness is hard to escape during the holiday season, even if we swear we’re secular creatures […]
Those of us who use Advent wreaths to help us be more mindful during the season before Christmas may wonder how to avoid these pitfalls. One of my Create in Me pastor friends, Naomi Sease Carriker, has created a wonderful idea. It’s a reverse Advent wreath, where all the candles are lit week 1, and each week, one fewer candle stays lit from the week before.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Advent and the Issue of Light and Dark
It’s your birthday,
my darling, you don’t know that
I wrote you a poem.I will whisper it
in your sleep, in languages
for newborns and gods.Many years have passed
and we’re becoming now less,
less of everything,but there’s more to learn.
Magda Kapa, November 2020
dog sutra 3
the two of us
you running
quicksilver
into your future
me as slow
as one step forward
and then the nextdog sutra 4
between the sloe
Dick Jones, DOG SUTRAS
and the oyster
a tree singing
Some people lead such quietly unassuming and self-contained lives that there can sometimes be quite a delay between their death and the knowledge of their death filtering out into the wider world. The poet, translator and independent researcher in the field of Scottish literature John Manson is a prime example of this. His is brilliantly profiled in this short film by John Hudson. He died in August this year, but it was only yesterday that I found out about his passing, and then only by happenstance.
This, however, seems fitting – I met John only once and again this was by chance. In 2012 I was a writer-in-residence for a month at Brownsbank Cottage in Biggar, the last home of Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) and his wife Valda. For anyone interested in MacDiarmid’s life and work one of the key scholars is John Manson, from his vital work in unearthing MacDiarmid’s WW2 poems to John’s huge academic magnum-opus Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid (Kennedy and Boyd, 2011).
One day I was in Edinburgh getting my messages in to take back to the cottage on the little bus to Biggar. At some point on Lothian Road, a face familiar from a photograph got onboard. I was pretty sure it was John Manson, and he was wearing the trademark black suit with tie. After a few minutes I moved to the seat behind him and introduced myself. Luckily it was John, and he was pleased to meet me – we’d corresponded when I was preparing to apply to do a PhD back in 2010 and one of the first expensive books I bought with my Carnegie scholarship money was a copy of Dear Grieve (now much thumbed).
I explained that I thought it was very apt that we’d meet on a bus heading for Biggar, after all so much of John’s intellectual energies had been focussed on a sympathetic rehabilitation and revelation of MacDiarmid’s vast body of work. John himself was just coming back from St Andrews where he had spent the afternoon with the poet Lillias Scott Forbes (then in a care-home and in her 90s – she died aged 94 in 2014). It struck me then as a magnanimous move – to spend all day in transit to pay someone a visit (he lived in Kirkpatrick-Durham), but John was extremely generous with his time and knowledge, not to mention patient with Scot-lit neophytes like myself.
Richie McCaffery, John Manson (1932-2020)
I know your work from your two chapbooks of poems for adults, Love Bites (Dancing Girl Press, USA, 2019) and Blueprints for a Minefield (Fair Acre Press, 2016). Can you tell us something about your decision to write for children?
I’ve loved children’s books for as long as I can remember. The best ones have a magical quality that I’ve never grown out of. I’m often found loitering in the kids’ section of bookshops pouring over poetry and picture books, so I guess it was inevitable that I’d get a hankering to try to write some. Once I started I couldn’t stop, I have several more book projects on the go already!
Who is your imagined reader for Saturdays at the Imaginarium? Do you have an age of reader in mind? Who do you think will enjoy reading it?
I don’t tend to define readership by age. I guess I write what I write and then once a book goes out into the world, it sort of has a life of its own and whoever connects with it, connects with it. I’ve always loved children’s books that are multi-layered, the ones you keep coming back to at various times in your life and each time you do, you grasp something different in them; I’d like to think (hope!) my writing offers that to some extent. I get such a buzz when I hear about kids enjoying it, and when schools and libraries post online that they’re using it in teaching and creative events. I’ve been getting some lovely feedback and it makes me grin widely!
[…]
What advice do you have for poets writing for children?
Go for it! And never be tempted ‘talk down’ to children, kids are pin-sharp and capable of far more complex thinking and nuanced emotion than many adults imagine. Read lots of contemporary adult poetry. Hone your poetry skills with the same rigour you’d apply when writing for adults.
Who are some of your favourite poets for children?
I have so many favourite children’s poets. It’s tricky to name just a couple as I’d hate to accidentally leave any friends out! I can safely name a few late favourites though: Shel Silverstein, Spike Milligan, Roald Dahl, Mervyn Peake. Also, it took me a while to discover that Carol Ann Duffy writes for children; her poems sparkle with intelligence, humour and affection. And they absolutely don’t talk down to anyone.
Josephine Corcoran, Interview with Children’s Poet Shauna Darling Robertson
A new episode of the New Books in Poetry podcast is up. I had a riveting conversation with Roy G. Guzmán about their new book Catrachos (Graywolf Press).
Guzmán’s Catrachos is a stunning debut collection of poetry that immerses the reader in rich, vibrant language. Described as being “part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story,” this powerful collection blends pop culture, humor, with Guzmán’s cultural experience to explore life, death, and borders both real and imaginary.
“This isn’t supposed to be a history book, and yet it is,” says Guzmán in discussing Catrachos, explaining that the book is not supposed to be anthropology, sociology, or a testimonial either, and yet it is. “Those are the contradictions, especially when you’re a marginalized writer, your words are always operating on so many different frequencies at once.”
Andrea Blythe, New Books in Poetry: Catrachos by Roy G. Guzmán
This important, painful, excellent, necessary essay came around again in a huge group of women writers I’m part of, and I found myself recalling that at the time it was published and I first shared it, it was probably right about the first time I (carefully, rationally, gently, but seriously because the abusive behaviors were starting to escalate) noted that my liberal, well-educated, etc. partner’s current tactics were actually point for point identical to Trump’s and of course he didn’t want to be that person, that would be horrifying, so could we reframe how we were discussing… – and he nearly flipped the table before shoving me and my still pretty freshly reconstructed spine out of his way and storming out. I was punished for weeks for making such an “unfair” and odious comparison, even though the words he’d used were literally straight off Trump’s teleprompter, verbatim, used to justify actual harm of me, and to blame-shift that harm onto me.
And I reflect, this morning, on how little a difference there is between that period’s “tired of this whole subject because I’m having to actively appease this kind of abuse every day in my own ostensible home even with a man with whom it should have been, by all available evidence, impossible” and the present’s “tired of this whole subject because I’m so aware there is no self-reflection possible on the parts of the men abusing power and 90% of the people I know will simply pathologize me rather than hear something about our structural situation and/or themselves and decide to change it” and “tired of this whole subject because of how like most of the other hardworking/brilliant/dedicated/fierce women I know my own position in the literary and academic world has been shaped and severely limited by standing in any way against this kind of abuse, which is endemic in our field as well as outside of it” and “tired of this whole subject because frankly, the older I get the more aware I am that this stuff is the default position of both most our structures and most individual men, the position to which they will revert when pressed (‘one calling-out away from the red pill’/onset of MRA rabies, as Rhodes writes in her essay), and the ones who spout ‘feminism’ are generally the worst of the lot because they have prioritized both access to women and a self-image as a ‘good guy’ that inures them to self-examination” — and other forms of tired, which amount to a kind of psychic shrug at this point, a deep, repetitive, and un-affordable shrug and wow my traps are tight from all this shrugging: it was 1997 that I started studying the public health epidemiology of violence against women and really wrapping my head around the institutions (family, churches, media, schools, judicial systems, etc.) that create the structural supports for it, and really understanding that in every individual, personal relationship there are both exceptions and not, and so on.
JJS, Speaking of praxes: essays we’re tired of writing
1. It’s gusty and cold; my son, home from college, is doing virtual math classes in plaid pajamas at the dining room table; and I suspect I’m not going anywhere for a long time now, beyond sepia-toned trails through the woods. Reading time. I just finished the new poetry collection by Heid E. Erdrich, Little Big Bully–she’s “visiting” virtually this winter as a writer in residence and a group of faculty are having a book-club-style discussion of her book, which won last year’s National Poetry Series. It’s a powerful study of colonialism, sexual assault, racism, contemporary U.S. politics, and how to live against and through it with love for people and the land. Heid is an Ojibwe poet enrolled at Turtle Mountain and she lives in Minnesota, so it’s a wintry book. Strongly recommended.
2. The apparition of poets’ faces on a Zoom/ petals in a wet dark month: in a weird parallel to Heid’s visit, I’m going to be the virtual Pearl S. Buck Poet in Residence at Randolph College this February! (When I proposed our writer in residence series, I actually modeled it partly on what Randolph was already doing. Here’s something on what Fran Wilde did last semester–she sounds wonderful.) This means a reading, class visits, and teaching a 1-credit master class in four sessions to a small group of advanced undergrads. Apparently some of these poets are also into sf, so I’m developing a syllabus called “Haunted and Weird.” I was offered the honor out of the blue last month, a saving spar in the usual late-fall surge of rejections.
Lesley Wheeler, December cadralor
Like a fledgling,
you’d stumble-fly
day and nightover the blind
and ticking fields,
intent on that tendrilof scent calling from beyond.
Most of the time, you are fickle;
perhaps, others think, evenunfaithful. But if you believe
the name carried on the breeze
addresses you and no other,you will follow the snow-
Luisa A. Igloria, How to answer what you can’t refuse
dusted tracks, cross
bridges of fog.
What I’m Looking For (Penguin, 2019) is a ‘selected’ by US poet Maureen McLane gathered from five collections 2005 – 2017. I first came across her work in a York Uni seminar, and enjoyed the sample poems enough to buy the book. Actually just a poem entitled ‘OK Fern’ is enough to make we want to buy the book. The power of titles!
Jackie Wills is a Brighton-based poet I’ve known for some time, and I’ve been to her creative writing workshops. I loved her collection Woman’s Head as Jug and her newest book is A Friable Earth (Arc, 2019) – by the way, Arc have a sale on at the moment so now’s a good time to browse their excellent list.
For some reason recently I picked up the Complete Poems of R F Langley (Carcanet, 2015) (which had been on my bookshelf for a while, but I’d not dipped into it) and found a trove of poetry I really connected with. I think I may have thought he was going to be hard work of the J H Prynne variety but that’s not the case at all.
My Telltale pal and co-host of Planet Poetry Peter Kenny recommended I read Poor (Penguin, 2020) by Caleb Femi, which arrived on my mat yesterday, and I couldn’t resist a little flick through (there are photos!) The blurbs are mighty impressive, the book is hot off the press (published last month) and I can’t wait to read it.
And in case that’s not enough, I also couldn’t resist Inua Ellams The Actual (Penned in the Margins, 2020) I heard Inua read at The Troubadour in London a couple of years ago I think, and I’ve also enjoyed reading some of the poems from The Actual in The Poetry Review and elsewhere this year. It’s got a brilliantly witty cover with spot gold foil detail. And you can always judge a book by its cover as we know :)
So, swimming in lovely poetry. I’m also swimming in the pool again after the enforced month off and that feels fantastic too.
Robin Houghton, Swimming again… in poetry
I am pulling Annie Dillard off the shelf again. I’m looking for writers who are asking questions instead of offering conclusions. I want to see the workings of other people’s minds at the point of their mushiness, their unbaked, reptile-fetal promise exposed.
I want to see moments of negative capability. More poetry please.
And I’m open to suggestions.
*I saw a tweet this morning by a person looking for “more intellect, less wisdom” in their poetry. I’m curious what they mean by that, but seriously doubt that a fruitful conversation can be had about the subtleties of those words in soundbites and “threads”.
Just thinking about attempting it in that form makes me anxious. I want a cup of coffee, a deep chair and a long, well-formulated exploration of ideas.
I want to fall in love with the world again.
Ren Powell, A Desire to Slow Down and Fall in Love
Since most of us can’t do the usual celebratory things right now due to covid, I made up a photo project this week to see the beauty in the everyday. To the left is a photo of a Greek Strawberry Tree that we saw in a parking lot. Now I want one to plant myself. So, having a week of smaller disasters and the continuing sadness of losing my grandmother to covid, I wanted to find the grace, the things to be thankful for, in a time that feels totally barren, usually. We did get several days of sunshine (even if the sun goes down on my street at 3:30 PM – it matters, in Seattle, how far up you are in how much light you get in a day) which felt like a nice respite. Several mornings I went out on my back porch and just stood in the freezing cold (36 yesterday morning) just to get a few moments of sunshine. It is supposed to help your mood. Here are a few more everyday things I thought were beautiful: a robin, back-to-back woodpeckers, apples at the Tonnemaker farm stand in Woodinville, Mt Baker at sunset.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Rejections and Small Disasters, A Pushcart Nom, and Looking for the Beauty of the Everyday in December
Thank you to everyone who not only tolerated but embraced my Gloom Train post of last week. I’m still riding the rails, but I’m managing to continue on anyway. I’m still going to work and brushing my teeth regularly and slogging along with the infernal home workouts. I even managed to do a 5:00 a.m. session last week. 5:00 a.m. people. The sense of virtuousness that clung to me like sweet cologne for most of the day made it almost worth it. Almost. I don’t think I’ll be doing those very often. 5:00 a.m. is not “my” time and by 8:00 p.m. that night, I was practically comatose. But I would like it to be added to the official record, that I–notoriously Not A Morning Person–did a complete, one-hour 5:00 a.m. strength training workout. On a weekday. Please mail my halo to my home address.
Kristen McHenry, Ridin’ the Rails, Cyberpunk Master, Bikini Savages
Yesterday I had plans, a to-do list, et cetera. Nope. And also, yes. I did change the sheets. I did get 75 letters to my precinct printed out, stamped, signed, and addressed! It was a letter thanking my precinct neighbors for voting, reminding them that we have an election April 6, 2021, wishing them Happy Holidays, and reporting that we were the best precinct!–with 87.26% voter turnout! Wow, right?! I had planned to send the letter in time to say Happy Thanksgiving, but the individual precinct results weren’t posted yet, so I waited. I had planned to walk into town in the sunshine yesterday to mail these letters at the post office, but the day got away from me, and dark was falling as I signed the last of the letters in red and green, drawing holly exclamation points.
Before that, I had planned to meet a friend for a hike in the woods. But first I had to check my email…
Yesterday’s email contained a poem acceptance. So first I attended to the contractual details there. Then I updated all the files (physical and digital) related to that, because, these days, if I don’t do it in the moment I might not do it. The poem was part of a 4-poem submission, and I wondered where the other 3 might go next. Again, I have to do this in the moment, or the moment gets away. For example, I had been thinking of a particular place to send these poems if they came back, but that deadline had just passed 6 days before. I looked at another journal I’ve wanted to send to–and, yay, they look at only 3 poems at a time. Perfect! But was it perfect? Was this the right place to send these 3 poems? Now I’m following two roads that are diverging in the woods I was supposed to be hiking–one road has poems I might send, and the other has places I might send them to. While I’m on the one road, I keep going down little unfamiliar side paths that turn out to be poems I wrote in April, or, when did I write that? Finally, I give up and fold the sheets fresh and warm from the dryer.
Kathleen Kirk, The Day Got Away
I know we have several weeks of autumn left on the calendar, but winter arrived here this week. Wild winds tore the last leaves from the trees and sharp air bit our cheeks (when we stepped outside, which we did as little as possible).
I’ve largely made my peace with winter, with this winter, particularly, and what it promises to be. I don’t mind the dark. There’s something about it I crave, actually–the way it reveals so much by stripping life down to its essentials: heat, food, drink, touch, sleep. […]
Other than cleaning the floor and grocery shopping, I didn’t do any of the productive things on my list. I only did being things. I did not sew or decorate or clean or bake. After dinner I just sat on the sofa for a bit, listening to music and appreciating the warmth and soft lights of the living room. Just being felt strange, as unusual things do, but also good.
It was a very winterish kind of day, and it restored me. It broke my usual migraine pattern; I woke up Friday with no sign of illness and had a productive day. I moved slowly and steadily through it. No spinning, pumping grind. Did I accomplish everything I “needed” to? No. Would I have if I’d pushed in the usual way–gutting through both Thursday and Friday, overdosing on meds and feeling sick and wrecking myself for the next two days? No. So what, really, was lost? Nothing of value, I think. What I gained was my health and my weekend.
In Wintering, [Katherine] May reminds me that humans sleep more in the winter, and that in earlier times, when artificial light (among other things) didn’t shape our days in the ways it does now, we commonly experienced periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night–a time for drinking water, peeing, contemplating, wakeful dreaming, lovemaking, quiet talking–before returning to more sleep.
I’m wondering now how life might be if we viewed the winter season as a metaphor for sleep, and our winter days as those periods of middle-of-the-night waking. How might we spend them, then, these hours of scant light, if we could view them this way?
Rita Ott Ramstad, Winter
How we wanted
to be so coldonly hot cocoa
could save us.We made caves
in the snowand waited
and waited,until the blue
light failed us,until darkness
Tom Montag, CHILDHOOD IN IOWA
pulled us home.
It was more than forty years ago. So cold.
James Lee Jobe, right there in the imperfection is perfect reality
The old rotten shed was fully engulfed in flame;
I had pulled off some old boards for a small fire
To keep from freezing. Sparks
From a stout north wind did the rest,
And me just standing there in the snow
As the sirens got louder and closer.
I first saw this poem in the days before I left Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for mental health reasons. I loved the slow movement of its grief in declarative sentences flowing across naturally paced lines.
I look back at that time: I had my own demons to wrestle with. I clocked it as a ‘poem for later’. Well, now ‘later’ has arrived, and I am in the thick of it, ‘immersed in the solitude of the moment’ and ‘pierce[d] … with nostalgia’ for a time that cannot be brought back.
I will her back, but she does not come. I see her most clearly when I do no willing at all. And there she is. The leaves collect on the lawn. The kettle boils. The hour-before-people-dark with the dog, just a few ‘twinkling stars’, as in her nursery rhymes.
Anthony Wilson, The Sky Over My Mother’s House
At the beginning of the pandemic I started a relatively short-lived project wherein I stood on a chair in my kitchen and photographed what was on my kitchen table each morning, some flowers, my breakfast, maybe a book. The light was spring light, and it was effervescent. We knew and we didn’t know what might follow. The light was new and bright and hopeful even if filled with dread and panic. But it was a new dread and panic then.
This project grounded me, and helped me anchor my days, when everything was unmoored, the library was closed, and we were hard core self-isolating.
These days what grounds me is attending to the sunrise and sunset. Mainly, I’m photographing the sunrise from my back porch, but aspire to be somewhere to shoot the sunset. This rarely happens, but still, I observe it. If I’m home I can see it through the trees, peeking through various suburban houses. If I’m at work, there is usually a pretty spectacular view, even if I’m not able to photograph it. […]
I’ve blogged before about “the great work of sunrise” by Thomas Merton and it’s something I think about a lot. There’s also a line by Charles Wright about how we can count on the fact that the sun rise and the sun sets. “Most everything else is up for grabs.”
Shawna Lemay, Sunrise and Sunset
I am here present as we said in elementary school I am here but I am reading reading returned to me like a lightning bolt to the brain the day the power went out all over the island and I was alone in the pitch black dark call me if the power goes out my son told me so I called him and said the power is out are you going to come here now with coffees and oats and ropes and batteries or what but nope so I crawled under my covers and started reading Atwood’s The Testaments with a flashlight I read straight through the night then I read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials all three books and was into the second book before I realized it was a YA novel and I don’t care it was magic then Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower but only halfway through because it was too grim and scary then I read Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore which stunned me now I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend I will never take reading for granted not ever again I know it can go out like a flame
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report
I’m back where I was as a young woman when I left the commune inside of words and reluctant to turn on the television or look at a screen reluctant to surround myself in noise
I brought a tree into the house today from a Christmas tree farm ripe and green and pitchy I wrestled it into the stand and tightened the bolts with pliers I have done new things recently I replaced both the air filters on my car under the hood and on the passenger side so I had to figure out how to open the glove box by pressing in on the sides then sliding the connector tube up which involved me getting on my knees on wet leaves but I decided I didn’t want to pay $120 when I had YouTube to guide me like Jesus unfortunately there is no YouTube to tell you how to get a dead wood rat out from under your house but eventually the smell got to me and once again I knelt on the forest floor this time armed with my shop vac heavy gloves a long stick and a pair of barbecue tongs and managed to wrestle it out then fling the poor thing into its forestry grave
If this were any normal year, I’d be thinking about perfect gifts for family & friends. I’d be spending a lot of time watching bad holiday romance movies and eating cookie dough before it makes it to the oven, and I am doing these things, but they are less like things I enjoy, but more like shreds of normalcy I am clinging to with every fibre of my brain and it’s exhausting. Even on the days I don’t have to leave the house it’s harder to get out of bed. Early in the pandemic there was an infographic that designated a line between “thriving” and “surviving” and we are all feeling it right now.
So I light my little tree and put a wreath on my door and make chicken soup and try to conduct myself as if the world is not falling apart in every emergency room and hospital and in so many homes. I think of our softness in terms of living through major historical events. During the zine workshop I wanted to tell the students to pay attention and to document everything they can, because unlike most of the time I have been alive as a Gen X-er, “history” was something that happened significantly before I was born. But really maybe it was always happening and there are only certain really bad points where the future textbooks are watching and waiting.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 12/05/2020
the splinter under my nail
Jim Young, RS Thomas
clawing at this howling wind
paged as dry as fire ash
take your foot off my pen your wait
off my outlook on the rain’s blear
the unscalable north face of your verse
my ineptitude at finding just one handhold
on the crumbling scree of the people you
pain so elegantly in their inelegance
five poems in and i am sunk drunk
i wish you could have met me
and lent me your handkerchief
today it is all too late