Left the hotel early on Friday morning and walked slowly uptown, got a coffee at one of the two million Starbucks along Broadway, and went to sit in Union Square for awhile watching dogs and people, mostly dogs. Bright, cool morning & everyone — canine & human — looked frisky. Went to the Strand and looked around, but didn’t buy anything because I didn’t want to carry a bag of books with me all day. As I was scouting the poetry section, I asked one of the store employees who was busy with her cart putting books on shelves if she ever got tired of books. “Nope, never,” she said, an answer I found lovely & heartening. “Me neither,” I said. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Reading at SUNY Farmingdale
I’ll be giving a poetry reading at SUNY Farmingdale (in the Paumanok Poetry Series) at 11:00 on Thursday. Haven’t done a reading in a long time & I’m a little nervous. After the reading on Long Island, I’m going to spend my honorarium staying a couple of days in NYC going to bookstores, galleries, etc. Haven’t been down to the city in a long time either — I’ve spent farm more time in Hanoi in the last decade than in NYC. To get to Long Island, I have to drive to Burlington VT tomorrow, fly to Philly, then to Islip NY, where I’ll be picked up and whisked to my hotel. Margery Brown, who coordinates the series, has been extremely helpful and totally organized about setting up the trip, for which I am very grateful. After the reading, I go to lunch with the SUNY folks then get on a train to Union Station.
Update: Lovely audience this morning at Farmingdale and a lovely lunch afterward with faculty from the English Department; after lunch I took the train into Penn Station (not Union) and then took a taxi to my hotel in Tribecca. Grabbed a sandwich at a deli and have just been gathering my resources for a couple of days of city walking.
Focusing, Or Trying to Teach an Old Dog . . .
One of the nice things about being an academic with tenure is that I have big blocks of time that I can use however I want, but that’s — for me, anyway — also a problem. I tend to fritter away time when I don’t have structures and deadlines. I get the most done when I am busiest. I’m trying to figure out how to structure my days more effectively. The need to do this has come into focus as my Zen practice has “deepened,” as they say. (It’s a bit of religion-speak I find a bit off-putting.) Basically, what this means is that doing meditation morning and evening creates a certain structure around which other things can be organized, so that creates a starting point.
I’ve always tended to work to deadlines and to write in spurts and dashes of energy separated by wide deserts of non-writing. I’ve heard all the advice and rules about establishing a regular time and just keeping at it, but I’ve never done that with writing, but now I am finding it pretty easy to sit on a regular schedule, so why not sit and write the same way? I have to weave this around my teaching and other academic duties, but in that respect I have it very easy. so that’s what I’m going to do over the coming weeks heading into summer and I’m going to keep up some kind of daily writing even when I travel. It has taken a long time to come to this, but increasingly I have the sense that not-writing, like not-sitting, is not an option for me.
And it’s not an ego-thing anymore, this writing and even publishing poems. When I was a boy I wanted to be famous, but I quit being a boy — at least that kind of boy – at about age 52. (Not that long ago, true.) I just want to make sense of things and language — poetic language — is the way I’ve always done that, even when I was a boy. Buddhism puts a lot of emphasis on silence and even sometimes overtly relegates language to a secondary status, not more than a practical instrument, necessary but deeply flawed. At the same time, Buddhism has produced its share of great poets. The genius of language lies, as the old Zen hermit-poets understood, lies in its impurity and imperfection.
Crows & A Lone Goose
In winter the crows congregate deep in the woods, doing their philosophy presumably, and we only see them high in the sky, circling in large groups. Now that the snow is melting we see them solo on the tops of white pines and cedars scouting territory for the breeding season. Sometimes one crow will follow us as we walk the dogs, arcing from one treetop to the next along the road. This morning we also saw the first returning Canada Goose. One almost never sees them by themselves, but this guy was flying north and squawking his head off. Having arrived early, he must have been lonely and looking for company. It won’t be long before they have returned in their numbers to our bend of the river, where they nest on the sandbar and get handouts of corn from Betty, who lives across the water from us.
Breaking the Ice
I don’t think I’ve gone this long without posting something since I started blogging almost nine years ago. It’s been a busy semester — I’ve been serving on a search committee and a planning committee, both of which have had to navigate certain controversial issues. And I’m teaching a survey course — American Lit I — I’ve never taught before and that has meant reading some texts I haven’t looked at seriously in a couple of decades. I’ve also been trying to arrange translation and editing work with a couple of Vietnamese colleagues and do some writing of my own as well. Fact is, I haven’t been working on poems with any serious application for several months. But I’ve also been suffering from fairly severe anxiety for several months, for which I’m now taking medication. It started after I cam back from Vietnam last spring, around the time of my birthday. Beyond noting the fact here, this is not something I’m going to write much about here in a public space, but it’s not something I want to hide either. (I am fortunate to be in a position in which making such an admission will have little or no effect on my ability to make a living, friendships, etc. Not everyone is so lucky.) Such an experience — especially coming out the other side of it and regaining some equanimity — leads one to some fairly intense considerations and reconsiderations of one’s personal history, one’s “self,” if you will. Especially at my age, when I have a fairly long vista to contemplate in the direction of the past and a somewhat shorter vista looking ahead. Or is it all chemicals binding and unbinding to receptors in the brain? More than that, clearly, though I’m not sorry about introducing the chemicals to my brain cells — they seem to be getting along quite well in recent days.
I’ve been doing a couple of things to work out for myself the nature of my recent experience (which is actually a recurrence of a very similar episode a decade ago, also after returning from Vietnam, though I think that is mostly a coincidence, except perhaps for the influence of spending a lot of time by myself in a strange, though loved, place.) I’ve begun gathering thoughts and materials for a course that I want to teach with a medical historian colleague called The Literature of Madness. I’m also in the early stages of drafting an essay with the working title, “The Wilderness of American Mind,” which will be an attempt, along with the class, to investigate the literary implications of certain abnormal states of mind, not limited to, but including my own. I am particularly interested, for the purely personal reasons noted above, in anxiety and the ratcheting and ricocheting state of mind it produces.
I have been circling Buddhism for at least a decade, probably longer, but I was so burned by Christianity as a kid that I have distrusted all forms of religion that I remained suspicious of even a non-theistic religion like Buddhism — of which there are, also, some heavily theistic forms. I survived my early adulthood by becoming a non-believer, though I’ve always had a strange attraction to ritual; mostly, I discovered that I got a lot more comfort and happiness from sentences than from beliefs, though, so I went to work as a writer. And then over the last decade I came to believe less and less in that, or in the kind of writer I had become. There seemed to be no need for such a thing as I was. That has been driving me crazy, figuratively and perhaps literally. But for the last six months or so I have been sitting zazen, reading sutras, trying find a way forward. It seems to be working.
