I’ve been meaning to point to this text & audio page with Duncan’s poem about his mother & now I’m finally getting around to it. It’s a remarkable poem both for its music & for the precision of its language. The beauty of this poem startles me every time I read it, but I had never heard it in Duncan’s voice.
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Buying a Chair
I ordered a leather chair today, as a gift to myself for my 58th birthday later this month. A chair for reading. And when I say a chair, I mean a chair — it’s not terrifically large & its lines are simple, but it’s the sort of chair you you have to special order & have built to your specifications. I looked at about a hundred leather samples this morning & going strictly on look & feel chose nearly the most expensive one. Fuck it — 58 is creeping me out slightly. It won’t be ready for about six weeks, so I will have time to rearrange my work room to accommodate it.
Update: Ooops! I’m only turning 57. Hope this doesn’t mean I have to cancel the order for the chair. 57 isn’t creeping me out quite as much as when I thought I was turning 58. The even numbers are the worst.
Late Spring Birds
In the yard, mostly goldfinches, sparrows, & chickadees. Heard a loon call around 5:00 a.m. the other morning, then spotted him flying over an hour later while we were walking the dogs. Carole says she hears a kind of crazy desperation in the loon’s cry, but I hear more mournfulness — anthropomorphizing in both cases, of course. There appears to be a pair of crows nesting in the woods beside the pond just across the road: at least I’ve seen them hanging around that location & they fly through our yard several times a day on their rounds. Driving out Rt. 11 toward Potsdam yesterday, I saw an oriel dart across the road with its unmistakable orange. Then we have our usual population of jays, flickers, swifts, Canada geese, turkey vultures, & herons.
Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience
In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet operating like one of those old-fashioned weather instruments in which a stylus scrapes a line upon a rotating drum covered in smoked paper. Here is an example:
Ever, Again
Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!
and would I could. I’d
fly, drive back to that house
up the long hill between queen
anne’s lace and common daisyface
shoulder open stuck door
run springwater from kitchen
tap drench tongue
palate and throat
throw window sashes up screens down
breathe in mown grass
pine-needle heat
manure, lilac unpack
brown sacks from the store:
ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one
big onion, milk and orange juice
iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing
potato chips, dill pickles
the Caledonian-Record
Portuguese rose in round-hipped flask
open the box of newspapers by the stove
reread: (Vietnam Vietnam)
Set again on the table
the Olivetti, the stack
of rough yellow typing paper
mark the crashed instant
of one summer’s mosquito
on a bedroom door
voices of boys outside
proclaiming twilight and hunger
Pour iced vodka into a shotglass
get food on the table
sitting with those wild heads
over hamburgers, fireflies, music
staying up late with the typewriter
falling asleep with the dead
Well, it’s a sly artlessness I see now while typing it out. First, the registered patch of experience is a memory & memories can be edited, consciously or unconsciously. (The way one edits memory, consciously or unconsciously, counts for everything, morally & aesthetically, which for me, increasingly, amount to pretty much the same thing.) The telegraphic registration of small details add up to a record of an experience that has been recovered and reexperienced, perhaps more intensely that it was the first time. (What is the positive term for nostalgia?) And as readers that recovered experience becomes our own through the graphing of details. Also, we all know that rich is a “political poet,” but I think that leafing through the newspapers “Vietnam Vietnam)” has the effect of placing the speaker’s recovered experience in the context of a particularly intense moment of history. It is also, of course, a poem about making poems inside both personal and national histories.
[The poem above is from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 by Adrienne Rich, published by W.W. Norton.]
Whitman Podcast
I’ve had the idea for a while that I want to read all of “Song of Myself” & post it to the blog. This is a test. Whitman’s Song of Myself (1805) Section 1 & 2
Note: Volume issue is fixed, but there is a pretty bad buzz in the background. Still figuring the best way to set Audacity, the sound recording program I’m using.