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

Where I've been...

It has been so hard, finding my way back to the boards, the blog, poetry. Back from vacation, sure, but plunged immediately into the insanity of my older son's first year of high school - a performing arts school, with auditions the second week of school, which meant hustling to help him prepare a new monologue and a contemporary jazz song. All this along with watching him take public transportation on his own, a hundred thousand anxieties on my part.

But all is well; he was cast, he met a girl, he knows the way home.