Lull

Tracing a Thirst

for Ed  Foster

called it: tracing a

thirst, the poem

as it

sluices a

passage; with each,

dry

utterance, edges

towards its

own

ob-

fuscated source.  no,

not the

world, the

world's, but,

per-

haps, its 

very

postulate.  what the

winds

would lap and the

tongue,

ultimately,

muscle: breath, like

so

many

empty bubbles, brought

to

that pleated lip.

by Gustaf Sobin

Snow delay here. Quiet is falling outside, big clumps of it. How long can it last.

Sobin is a poet I'd not heard of until an acquaintance recommended his work. His book, By the Bias of Sound: Selected Poems, wasn't easy to find. I had to search out the Small Press Distributors folks. He lives in France, according to the book.   I'm reading on.  Here's a short bit from a longish poem.

Sudden Essays on Shadows and Substance

      if the shadow points

it's because the    shadow's drawn;   drawn  I

        call it 'you,'  'yours,'

when it's never yours         but

the glint you make      that pulls the shadow through...

   

Thaw

I've been reading Fanny Howe's collection of essays, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life. Her chapter on Thomas Hardy sent me to the bookstore to find The Woodlanders, which I'll read as soon as I finish Howe's book, start the one on the origin of language, and, well, this is how it goes with me. An associative chain of readings. I look forward to Hardy, though. A turn from the contemporary fiction on my reading table that has been disappointing lately. Just finished Enright's The Gathering, a Booker winner last year. Nothing special. Dysfunctional (of course!) Irish family that reminded me of Alice McDermott's American counterparts (Charming Billy for instance). She did a curious playing around with memory and imagination that may have been what captured the judges' attention. 

But back to Fanny Howe and Thomas Hardy.  I liked some of her observations on his writing.

"He writes as if he were ploughing a path from the wall to the gate. The future is always behind him."

Which made me think about the Aymara, a South American indigenous people with an antithetical concept of time from ours. The past is in front of them; the future behind. Their gestures for past and present reflect this mindset. They point backwards to refer to future events. Not illogical really. What lies ahead comes from behind I think.

Other Howe thoughts on Hardy:

"Hardy lived in the years when land was becoming landscape."

"He was one of the last great describers, an occupation that film would soon take over. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, he labored to make no manual distinction between words and natural things as sensual realities."

I like being reminded of Hardy, especially today, with the rain sluicing across the last snow mound, muddy remains streaking the road and now the runoff slowing, cloud and grey pulling back as the late afternoon light finally pushes forward.

  

with artists

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you -- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you." --Monet

Today was spent with artists...visual artists mostly, some writers, listening to them talk about their work, looking at stuff in their studios, drinking in their sentences and words about how they were doing what they were doing and what they were thinking about as they were making their videos, installations, paintings, performance pieces, short stories, plays and it was like running to the ocean after the whole year away--the first swim, the cold cutting your skin, the salty waves whooshing into nostrils as you stroke and dive and surf them, never wanting to leave, your brain exploding with the words. It was like that. It was more. The technologies--cameras and paint and brushes and pencils and computers and stuffed deer heads and I thought about my long time away. Then I read something I'd written a few years ago--capturing a dream:

...somewhere in a neighborhood -- on a lawn, trees and houses and we're talking and the future is an issue and the atmosphere is charged in a science-fiction-y kind of way -- thinking about the future and a goddess being only not a goddess but a woman with some kind of power says we need to find out about memory, about how long it takes for a memory to fade and to do that she says you can go up into the atmosphere toward the universe to the moon and circle it and so i do arms out i fly i take off with a leap straight up through the layers and higher it gets and white and clouds but like fog or haze and cold but i dont feel that just the sense of flying and i reach the moon and circle it and then i return and because we think it takes a decade for a memory to dissipate i come back to where i had been -- the same lawn but 10 years have gone by and everything is changed houses gone people gone or aged and i walk through the streets the yards the town others are gone but not me and i wake up but not really in this state of amazement....

this is an old dream not only my dream the dream of flying and i like that i found it i had forgotten about this dream and that i found it today when i went swimming again.

deep freeze

Gray

gray

"the order of the mother"

one degree Fahrenheit

News armature:

Expect sleet or snow     west coming east

   You may not have wanted to be there

   It may have been because of the pain

helicopter       on your left side

man asleep

child            on your right

jean valentine

the old year passes

So I've been at this blogging thing for about a year now. I'll admit I'm not the most organized blogger. Nor am I clever, whacky, full of irony or sharp-tongued opinions on much of anything. I started this endeavor partly as a way to connect to -- what? Myself perhaps. As a way to contain the brain storm whooshing on through. I also proposed a year ago this activity would serve as a study tool.  By writing here occasionally about what I look at and read and underline, I hoped I'd be better at looking, thinking, reading, writing, etc. When you live in the woods and don't get much of a chance to converse with folks who like to look and read and underline, you end up talking to your self a tad too much. I hoped this space would give me a less kooky way of talking to myself. 

I've been surprised and pleased that others have found their way here, particularly since there's a surfeit of conversation throughout the blog-0-sphere, even among poet-types.  

I know this is the time for resolution, revision, renovation. Mine is to get here more often.

 

this is the end (almost...)

farewell, sire--

like snow, from water come

to water gone

--Raizan's death poem

the work

Horoscope for week of December 27, 2007

Lake Vostok is as big as Lake Ontario, but no one on earth knew about it until 1996. Scientists who had been drilling through Antarctica's thick sheets of ice discovered it two miles below the surface. Here's what they were able to find out about the ancient lake: Hermetically sealed off for at least a half million years, it gets no sunlight, has an average temperature below zero, and may harbor life forms as exotic as those on other planets. And yes, it's in a liquid state, for reasons you can read about at tinyurl.com/2lq79d.  All that, Libra, is prelude to the following announcement: Lake Vostok will be one of your Prime Metaphors in 2008. I predict you will dig deep to discover an ancient, pristine mystery at the bottom of your life. In my astrological opinion, you should explore it thoroughly, driven by an innocent sense of wonder and a robust analytical curiosity.

fa la la la la la la la la

merry merry

the season