On Piles

Piles of Books, Hercules Segers

How heartening it was to find this image by 17th century Flemish artist Hercules Segers.
Piles of books beside beds have been around for a long time.
My inventory includes: Grief Lessons By Anne Carson, translations of plays by Euripides; Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey; The Unfolding of Language (still!); Threads by Jill Magi; thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs:poems by Juliana Spahr; The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai; Caffeine for the Creative Mind; Concordance by Mei Mei Bressenberger and Kiki Smith; Museum of Words by James Heffernan and so on.
But these are books I must finish. And like other folks I'm sure, I read several at the same time: one before falling asleep, another in the car while waiting, a third at the gym. And I'm writing too -- my friend (a screenwriter) and I are emailing each other work daily -- no commenting, no editing. Just write and email. Revision can come later. I like to zig zag back and forth between the processes. Along with the reading and listening and looking. All to feed the night.

Setting Out

Falling Blue, 1963
Agnes Martin
Oil and graphite on canvas
SFMOMA

So as the year ends I launch this blog, which takes its title from a line in Wallace Stevens' poem, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction -- "perhaps/the truth depends on a walk around the lake."

My project will be to write about some of the stuff of my life: poetry, art, teaching, writing, family etc. I do think a blog with a more specific focus becomes more meaningful, at least for the writer. My narrower purpose will be to use the blog as a kind of study guide, with myself as both student and tutor. I guess also that anyone else who stumbles upon the blog will participate in my note-taking by adding to the discussion.

The work thus will be akin to some sort of homeschooling experience. I'll set a reading list and as I work through the books will try to write here about my thinking, questions, etc. I'd also like to post my reactions to other experiences that relate to my next book, which I have started to think about in a very loose way. That word "next" should be qualified by an explanation. My chapbook, The End of the Body, was indeed published earlier this year as part of the Quartet Series by Toadlily Press. It was a small collection. I now am researching, revising and drafting new work for the next manuscript.

I guess I'll end this inaugural entry with a quote from Agnes Martin, who wrote, "When I draw horizontals you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like you're expanding over the plane." I hope to keep expanding.