nox

Some things Anne Carson said tonight:

I thought a lot about vanishing anyway.

My profession is about having an effect

on people by making sentences.

A real moment of exhilaration came

when I discovered staples.

Overtakelessness.

I wanted to fill my elegy with light

of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.

Helplessness built a wall in her.

Prowling the meanings of a word,

prowling the history of a person,

no use expecting a flood of light.

But all those little kidnaps in the dark.

Anne Carson read from her new book,

Nox, an elegy to her brother who died.

She calls it, "an epitaph in the form of a book."

I went to Poets House in New York, an amazing

place near the foot of Manhattan.

Here is Carson's translation of a poem

by Catullus that she says has been with her

since high school -- #101. He wrote it

as an elegy to his brother.

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed--

I arrive at these poor, brother, burials

so I could give you the last gift owed to death

and talk (why?) with mute ash.

Now that Fortune tore you from me, you

oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,

now still anyway this -- what a distant mood of parents

handed down as the sad gift for burials -

accept! soaked with tears of a brother

and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell

Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Part 3

I'm excited to see Anne Carson's latest collaborations, Stacks and Bracko, with sculptor Peter Cole and choreographer Jonah Bokaer. I've admired Carson's work-- The Glass Essay, Plainwater, Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband have been important. I return often to her translations of Sappho, If Not Winter, and Grief Lessons, four plays by Euripides. The reading/performance is to be staged at NYU later in the week.

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.

On Not Knowing

FEMA Trailers
Pensacola, FLA

Anne Carson quoted in a recent interview in The Guardian, "Not knowing what one is doing is no prohibition on doing it. We all grope ahead."

Which is a bit how I approach the work of this blog project. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this and although I listed some things to do here, there's a part of me that wants this to be spontaneous or at least a tad open to the whims of a day. Here on the first day of the new year.

On that note, perhaps it's a good time to highlight some books I'm reading and podcasts I'm listening to -- a rather schizoid accumulation: The Architecture of Happiness on how we react to the spaces we inhabit, how the buildings and other structures in which we spend our time move us; What is the What, Dave Eggars' latest on the Lost Boys of the Sudan. He retells one story in that young man's voice. Very moving, another tale of children ruined by grown-ups. All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward Jones, his short story collection, really great writing in here. A soon-to-be-published poetry collection that I'll read again (poetry does indeed need to be read several times at least to take in the full force of the work). Let's see for pod casts, Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt interviewing Jorie Graham and John Yau and Italo Calvino...each one a kind of unexpected synchronisity on the work of remembering, among other topics covered. Oh yes, a several video-casts from TED, one on love by an anthropologist and the other on the brain.

Where's this going...who knows. To end on Carson again, "when I get too many words, I don't feel I'm saying anything." Which happens to me a lot these days. Strange sensation for one who loves words.