first snowfall

Galatea Resurrects #11 is out.  There's lots to peruse.

And you can read my review

of Kate Greenstreet's chapbook,

This is Why I Hurt You.

It's snowing here in the east. And a snow day is a reading day. I'm reading Talking Hands by Margalit Fox. It's non-fiction --about a remote village of Bedouins in Israel where the residents have over centuries developed their own sign language. I've just started, looking forward to getting into the details of how this indigenous language was constructed, how gesture/image and "word" go hand in hand, so to speak.  I continue to think and read about the way image-making informs language-making -- and vice versa. We talk with our hands, our bodies, whether we're deaf or not.  Though it's not signing, our gestures are used to emphasize and illustrate our words, as we scribe the air. I'd love to make a poem that could be translated into sign language and then re-translated and then even painted or sung or danced.

Breakage

Fragment. No suggestions.

Did she say who sought refuge
in unhappy love

Day by day, we're moving into night



Slight accent, and the falling
"Leave a window open"


"Which of these is life? the true life?"


It's meant to be sad and bright, lit up
like the boat of the dead

I thought 2 hands would be 2 people.

--Kate Greenstreet
"Which of these is life? the true life" Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals

I'm re-reading case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet, or at least I'm re-reading it by skipping around and looking again at the poems in a kind of random way to see how they stand. At the same time I'm also reading a great book called The Unfolding of Language, which looks at the "invention" of language, though the author maintains that language wasn't actually invented but keeps happening and is always in process as it continues to change -- new words are added, tenses die out, cases disappear over time. I haven't exactly found the direct connection between the books. Maybe one will teach me about the other. Lately, it occurs to me that language works like human nature in that factors like survival, convenience, necessity, beauty, hunger,desire -- impact language's process the way they impact people and our interactions. The other thing on my mind as I read Greenstreet is story-making, story-telling. I guess I have been obsessed with narrative as a writer for a long time -- primarily because I'm no good at plot. It seems to me that stuff happens in a kind of fragmented way and later we make a story out of events to help us make sense of it all, to understand why we did certain things or behaved in a particular way. And then we turn to myth, to religion, to psychology, to art even. Or we make a mythology out of our lives so that we can believe there was a reason for the choices we made. Wasn't it Stanley Kunitz who said we should make a mythology of our lives?