two poems about words

Which one I believe changes pretty much from day to day. Words and I have a very complicated relationship.

I do not think the first is a very good poem, but I have always really liked certain lines in it, particularly the ending. The second I have just discovered and need to read outloud and write down before I can decide what I think. But the counterpart of them struck me.

“Words”
by Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

“One Star Fell and Another”
by Conrad Aiken

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said–
–How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,–
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet–?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough–!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,–a night of frost? . . .
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

stealing sugar from the castle

I have some latent dubiety about Robert Bly as both a translator and a poet, but this poem — specifically this poem declaimed in his voice on the radio (turned up very very high so that he almost shouted) as I drove too fast down the 580 late to meeting a friend, nervous jittery chainsmoking, drinking a quadruple-shot coffee — made me very happy for a few minutes, was a glorious beginning to a tough day.

Stealing Sugar From the Castle - by Robert Bly

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

I don’t know, I can’t tell. Maybe it’s only good in his voice. If you want, you too can experience the poem in his voice, if you wish–not quite as good in terms of force and movement as the one I caught, as he digresses a lot, but his comments are really delightful–here. I’d love to see him read…

back to Virginia

I must keep up with the reading of her; she is so good for my soul. This is from October 11, 1929, Vol. 3 of the Diaries:

“Hence, perhaps, these October days are to me a little strained & surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ’seeing’ people … No; it is not physical silence; it is some inner loneliness–interesting to analyse if one could. To give an example–I was walking up Bedford Place is it–the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon, & I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer, & no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died–alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, & now nothing. And when I come indoors, it is all so silent–I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head–Yet I am writing–oh & we are very successful–& there is–what I most love–change ahead. … And it is autumn; & the lights are going up & Nessa is in Fitzroy Street–in a great misty room, with flaring gas & unsorted plates & glasses on the floor,–& the Press is booming–& this celebrity business is quite chronic–& I am richer than I have ever been–& bought a pair of earrings today–& for all this, there is vacancy & silence somewhere in the machine.

On the whole, I do not much mind; because, what I like is to flash & dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains–of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort–I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now, with money & so on, to do anything. … I daresay I shan’t. But anything is possible. And this curious steed, life; is genuine–Does any of this convey what I want to say?–But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all.”

Laura, again

Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden

A year before his death, Vladimir Nabokov responded to a Book Review survey which asked authors for comments on their three most enjoyed books of the year. The last book that he mentioned was his own, the controversial and never-published manuscript Laura. It seems as if the book will be published after all, a turn that has me torn between !!!! and regret. The scale has been tipped a bit towards !!!! by the last paragraph of the NYT blog linked to above, which quotes Nabokov’s comments on The Original of Laura:

“The third, as he wrote, is ‘The Original of Laura. The not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.’”

Lovely, lovely Nabokov! I want that book despite myself.

tumblr

I am infatuated with tumblr at the moment, which is an easier (and prettier) way to create the type of blog I’ve been gearing towards these days anyway: the palimpsest of words pictures poems music quotes websites, all with no obligation to talk about the Self. It’s a negative dialectics sort of blogging, one that perhaps creates a more accurate portrait of the person behind the computer than all of this solipsistic self-plumbing ever can. It has potential to be the “map of the mind” that I am always longing for. And it’s easy.

I’m not about to abandon this blog — who knows, maybe I’ll be able to write stories about myself again someday soon? and anyway I like for personal reference and archiving purposes having posted poems and book rambles in the same place — but right now I’m tumbling about here. And it looks really pretty!

adore the way this poem starts / not so sure about the end

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem
Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

miss this view

I used to smoke in the stairwell of my dorm, breaking all sorts of California laws and school rules. It was technically indoors, but was really more like an outdoor passageway with a roof. I sat directly in front of this window and watched it at every gradation of day and light imaginable. It reminded me of something from an ascetic nunnery or saint’s hovel with its stone and cracked, moldy plaster and barred windows with gorgeous sky and flowers beyond. This photo is probably almost exactly a year old now, and it has me awash with nostalgia. Miss those stairs, miss this view.

four for the price of one

• How many reviews/pieces of lit crit/essays/books/&c. begin by quoting my darling Keats’ maxim about Beauty=Truth/Truth=Beauty? If I were at all statistically minded, this is exactly the sort of question I would set out to answer, but I don’t really need the numbers to reach my conclusion: too goddamn many. Despite this annoyance, I am intrigued by the NYT review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, a book, as the title suggests, about particularly transcendent instances of beauty in the search for scientific truth. I do love a pop-science book every now and again, so long as it is well-written. I should go iron out my library fines and see if anyone’s got it. If the author is appealing, it’s possible that he could be a gem of amusement for weeks to come.

• Robert Falcon Scott’s journals of the lost Scott Expedition are online and free at Gutenberg! I am very excited to have discovered this, can’t wait to read them, & must remember to look for Shackleton as well, as I have been flirting the edges of an obsession with polar exploration ever since January, when I began to have dreams of wandering through Antarctic landscapes. In my dream my fingers fell off every time I removed my mittens, but always seemed to regenerate. I refused to throw them away, and carried them with me in my pack. The dreams were pervaded by a great sense of looking for something, though I didn’t know what, and would spend days after I had one pondering, trying to remember, eventually resorting to playing unsuccessful divination with Freud in hopes of interpretation. I gave up after a bit, accepted them, and decided that rather than it being any very significant subconscious event it was probably just Annie Dillard saturating my mind. I was deeply affected by her essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Religion! the Absolute! Antarctica! history! poetry! all in one gorgeous essay! O, she is a sublime synthesis:

“I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone.’ I have a taste for solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate conditions?

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.” –Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”

• Sometimes I like to perambulate the entire circumference of my school’s library with the posture of a monarch surveying her domain: head up, spine straight, arms crossed loosely behind the back. I often pause to kiss the books like babies — Nabokov, 100-year-old copies of Keats and Shelley, misshelved french philosophers. At other times, when I have been studying for hours and just want to weep, I lie on my back in the poetry section and cover my face with an open book, not even someone who I love, just a pretty book with a pungent comforting library smell.

• I dream of living nearer to the lake so as to become well acquainted with the ducks and the geese. Observing them has been my central delight this week, though I have to be careful about my propensity to make meaningful eye contact with the geese, as it makes them react with aggression. It’s just that I want to approach the world from now on with a strict policy of meaningful eye contact in all interactions. But geese are not people even if their yoga poses might fool you into thinking they are!

justifiably proud

It doesn’t matter anymore if the work I churn out in the next few weeks is shoddy; I have garnered an academic and personal achievement sweet enough to mediate it all:  the response to my philosophy midterm, particularly the Heidegger/Nietzsche question:

“C — This is outstanding writing on an enormously difficult subject. A+ (circled twice)”

I cannot emphasize enough how enormously proud of myself this makes me, and how significant this pride is. I tend to meet even the best grades with stubborn dissatisfaction and a sense that I could have done much better, but in this case I couldn’t have worked any harder to reach a level of understanding of this most difficult and fascinating of philosophers, and to articulate this understanding. I did everything right when I worked on Heidegger and the midterm — rereading, working with the OED and the oxford dictionary of philosophy at either elbow, taking voluminous notes, thinking long and deeply and critically on the question before I began writing — and it shows. Despite earnest intentions, I rarely work so well because I usually do it for the wrong reason:  to prove myself to the teacher or my father or my friends, to garner favor and affirmation. This time I worked honestly, because I was fascinated and truly wanted to understand as best I could, and not because I adore my professor and wanted to impress his enormous intellect, and it is reflected in the writing that I produced. And it tastes really incredible.

confession

I know teachers say it’s evil and unreliable and all, and there’s no way I would ever cite it in a bibliography, but I totally have at this moment eight tabs open to various wikipedia articles relating to Derrida and deconstruction. If I fail on this paper I am going to blame this heavy wikipedia supplementation for perverting my understanding. But if I do well? Then I will have discovered the key to surviving philosophy as a non-philosophy major.

Those Graves in Rome

This is rather long, I know, and sometimes the eye, even the poem-loving eye, (I am talking about myself) balks at long poetry. But this — about Keats!! I like it, think it’s worth the length, and so am lifting it from this website without permission to repost here. Martha at April_is sent out a Levis poem today — based on that and this I hunger for more.

Those Graves in Rome
by Larry Levis
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is the narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & and crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats’ name isn’t even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn’s,
And Joseph Severn’s infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you’d have to know the story—how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple & unbearable: “Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water.” On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn’t. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can’t walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I’d almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child’s smeared
Fingerprint on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then—
The children crying to the doctors for quinine,
And to the tourists, who looked like doctors, for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either—although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name—not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

rattlesnake

Reeve 60631, originally uploaded by otisarchives2.

Following a text-message discussion about snakes, I spent a while looking at pictures and x-rays of their skeletons online. Conclusion: I like snakes metaphorically, mythologically, biblically, and skeletally. In flesh and movement they are frightening.

I do tend to think that everything looks delicate and poetic in x-rays. But snakes especially.

not even solitude in mountains

Sometimes my eyes won’t stop counting and everywhere I look the world is made of odd numbers and then an internal narrative starts up in responsive overdrive, flooding sentence fragments of description and allusion. And between the whispershouting of it all — the numbers, the words, the world — I am deafened.

…

Less morosely, April is national poetry month. I am sure there is a T. S. Eliot joke somewhere in this fact but I am too tired to find and deliver. I am sad that I missed the first day, failed to commemorate and post a poem, but maybe it’s a sign that I should not attempt daily poems. I have not, after all, prepared a warehouse of pre-picked poems, and I do not trust serendipity to lead me every day to the necessary gems and masterpieces.  However, if you crave that sort of thing I recommend you go here and sign up for the mailing list. The person who runs it has a nose for great stuff, and few things are as delightful as getting daily poetry without having to go through the trouble of seeking it out for yourself.

archaeology

Home for spring break. Very windy here. Not much else to report from the homefront.

I have found a few ancient notebooks of mine — from when I very first began to keep them. It is fascinating personality archaeology, a phrase which I say with special relish because the one I just read was oriented specifically towards my imagined future career as an archaeologist:

“11/15/99

This is a new thing, just started today. I want to prepare for my future profession (archaeologist) by keeping this record of my days & doings & my current historical intrests [sic]. There, it’s official now. My new Archaeological practice journal. I will do my writing in ink, and my drawings in pencil. To be continued…”

“11/17/99

Katie is still out of school. Jess is really mad. I am too, kind of. Sometimes I wish I had mono. Following will be an ink drawing that will practice my drawing skills:

[a (rather impressive!) sketch of a pot, in ink, as promised]“

“11/22/99

Did you like my pot picture? I did. Next (on the following page) I will draw Giza, compleat with a sphinx and a camal. [ed. note:  sic, sic!]“

The picture on the following page is titled C. A.K.’s New & Improved Giza. I should take a photo & post it because, though my pyramids are strikingly one-dimensional, the camel is cute and the sphinx shows remarkable character — it’s golden. A later, much less refined picture of the Parthenon, features a donkey that looks more like an alpaca. I was big on infusing these historical scenes with dramatic sunrises and token animals, it seems. Because everyone knows that the ability to draw passable camels and donkeys is necessary for any budding archaeologist.

on the bright side, I’m now officially on spring break

Holy god.

I just wrote a NINE PAGE philosophy midterm. Nine pages. TWO QUESTIONS. Heidegger! Marx! Horkheimer & Adorno! Nietzsche! Habermas! HEIDEGGER!

The man is fucking insane.

(But have I mentioned lately how stunningly mad smart hot he is? Emphasis on the smart, of course. I love him. I would not put myself through this level of torture for anyone less.)

the last two lines of this poem are some of my favourites

since feeling is first
e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

a brief regret drummed out from behind the pages of a textbook

It saddens me enormously when I feel, as I have all this semester, that I don’t have time to process my learning in a truly deep and thoughtful way; namely, by writing through and about the ideas that I encounter. I don’t mean essay writing so much as personal freewrites, a diary of the mind. Without writing like this — formulating thoughts in my own words, positioning myself in relation to them, arguing or conversing with them — I tend only to engage in the most shallow of ways, skimming the fingertips of my mind along the surface of a text as I conduct a time-pressured dash whose only goal is to finish and gather a sentence or two for classroom discussion. This, one of the great sorrows of being a student in academia! — to feel the mind alight with curiosity at the multitude of paths and questions contained within a book — and, never losing this awareness, to pass them by without pursuit.

There are not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the week, not enough weeks in the month, not enough months in the year, and not enough years in my life to satisfy the hunger of my curiosity. And I hate when I allow this truth, and its accompanying panicky awareness of running out of time, to keep me from even trying.

beings being in the light of Being…

“The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.” — Martin Heidegger

For Heidegger, as far as I can understand, thinking is a way of touching — or perhaps opening oneself up for exposure to — that which is larger than us . For him this is Being. Your (and my) interpretation of what that “something larger” is may be different, which is something that I do like about him: the number of different belief systems that can be fitted into his essential framework, schema, approach (a shallow statement which he would hate, probably, and disagree with). This approach is, by the way, absolutely maddening to me, but which has also been revealing glimmerings of intense beauty. It strikes me as incredibly gorgeous, the concept that that which is most essential to ourselves is something that can never be looked at directly — to look directly at Being, to pin it into the violence of definitions, is to kill it, and so it must be tip-toed around, described through negation and sideways glances and peripheries. It’s like some sort of unicorn hunt, or perhaps search for a white whale, that takes place entirely on a level of delicate abstraction.

I think my heart softened and my understanding peaked when I realized how extremely mystical Heidegger can be (or perhaps just late Heidegger — we must make distinctions, and I’m not, after all, reading Being and Time). Which tempts me to ramble on my ever-complicating relationship towards God in Words, but not right now (wrist!); I’ll just say that I have an inexplicably intense sympathy for mysticism these days. Reading Heidegger as religious (saintly) ecstasy transposed into a philosophical framework makes me as open-hearted and partial towards him as I am towards John of the Cross or St. Theresa of Avila. There’s just something mad-eyed and glorious to it all, and it calls to me.

14: can’t type/copy-pasted edition

Appeal to the Grammarians
by Paul Violi

We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we’re ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back,
the flat tire at journey’s outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it — here and now
As I sit outside the Caffè Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, “See, that’s why
I don’t like to eat outside.”

13: je tombe

Yesterday I fell. I have very poor balance at best, and walked like a drunken pirate long before Johnny Depp ever internationalized the gait, but the thing about being a dizzy person is that you get very good at catching yourself. Though I trip and stumble almost every time I move, I rarely fall. But yesterday I did, and I am worried that I might have done considerable damage to my wrists. They were pained to begin with — tendinitis, one of the common hazards of studentship — but now — O, there is no comparison. My right wrist is definitely sprained, and I am doing paranoid internet research about breaks.

I’ll need an amanuensis if it isn’t better tomorrow or the next day! I have papers to write (one to do now) and this post, my typing test, has proven the activity unbearable.