New Year's Resolution 2

"I [will] look for the L
In my name in places of light, lucky,
The good ending of tenderly."

The Letter L, Lucie Brock-Broido

New Year's Resolution 1

"I [will] plant my syllables in light.
Let them multiply there."

Reset, Elaine Equi

"A Hunger" for endnotes

Lucie Brock-Broido writes quite possibly the most exquisite endnotes I've ever seen. S. gave me "A Hunger" for Christmas, and I have been devouring the poems and savoring the endnotes like gin-soaked olives from the bottom of a martini glass. It's the insight you gain into the life of the poet that's so delicious. It reminds me of that section from a popular entertainment/celebrity magazine: The Stars are Just Like Us! They go grocery shopping (cue photo of George Clooney with a shopping cart)! They play with their kids (cue Reese Witherspoon on a playground)! I wish more poets did this (or did it this well).

"All our rainy days saved up for this."*

When I am not writing poetry -
when I am punishing myself, or cozying up with fear or self-doubt -
I arrange my life so as not to be alone with my thoughts. My silence-filler of choice is books. I am embarassingly promiscuous in my efforts. I will go to the public library and fill up with anything and everything I can get my hands on - the schlockier, the better (the point is not edification, but distraction). Mysteries, thrillers, romance, even Westerns, for God's sake.

This winter, it stopped working. I couldn't move my eyes across the page - couldn't take in another sentence. Okay, fine; I upped the ante. I started reading literature in foreign languages. The extra effort required seemed to work for awhile. I read Sabato's El Tunel in Spanish, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Urdu (don't laugh - it's hard to find literature in Urdu that is conversational enough for me to forego a dictionary). I even tried to resuscitate my college German, memorizing pages of vocabulary and reacquainting myself with maddeningly complex declensions of nouns and pronouns. Enough. I am done with it.

In the past, I have been able to find my way back to my own silence by tricking my mind into thinking I am busy. Swinging on a hammock often works; "Hey, I'm moving! Clearly I'm being productive, no need to panic." Long walks sometimes work. A non-stressful, longish commute works really well. None of these things require sustained, higher-order reasoning, but they require just enough physical engagement to pass for "doing something". No commute this year, no hammock, it's hideous outside. I need a new strategy.

*Elaine Equi, "Can't Complain."

"as though here it were a daisy...

of which darker love is demanded"*

I am ready to think about poetry again.
Paul Celan can help one do that - consider poetry even in the bleak, unlovely margins of a life.

*"The Secret of the Ferns," Paul Celan.

A Sad September

A close member of my husband's family - my bhabi - died a few weeks ago in Pakistan. She was 7-months pregnant with her third child. It has been a sad, sad time. She died of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. She was my age, maybe even younger. We can think of little else.

"There is an open field...

I lie down in a hole I once dug and I praise the sky.
I praise the clouds that are like lungs of light."*

I picked up a copy of Mark Strand's Selected Poems at Powells over the holiday weekend, and I have been absolutely entranced ever since. The back cover has a page-long pull quote from Octavio Paz, discussing Strand's fascination with absence/presence (the self, the self!); I find this ironic, since I've been largely skipping over the poems that seem to deal directly with self/fracture/post-structuralist blah blah. That paradigm shifted ages ago already. I find Strand much more engaging when he finds an open field, lies down in a hole he once dug, and praises the sky. Yum.


*Mark Strand, From a Litany