Jane Kenyon Under My Bed
B y which I don’t mean to start talking about how hard it is for me to talk about poetry; how when I tell you what books I’ve read this month I’m not going to name poetry books because books are not a unit of poetry. And I’m not going to tell you how when I was in college, broke, money just enough for rent, gas, cigarettes, I determined the only books to buy, keep, savor, invest in were poetry and philosophy being not reliant–you must hear youthful scorn here– on mère plot. I don’t know a lot of things now I knew for sure at nineteen and twenty. But this morning reaching for a shoe I instead grabbed Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems that had been set down just under the edge of my bed when it had accompanied me towards...
Read MoreStories for Self-help
T he advantage to staying in bed until there is just enough sunlight in the room to make the silhouettes sharp presences rather than looming suggestions is that at the edge of the mattress the blue-green sheets are illuminated in this long narrow band of near whiteness which makes you think of those images of the sun rising over the earth from space. Of course it also allows you to tell yourself that you are nursing the cold that has crowded your head, made breathing work, filled the spaces that you are used to taking for granted as space in your head, altered the acoustics of everything that is disconcerting when you are so regularly focused on attention to what you hear. Staying in bed allows you to pretend everything hasn’t been just hard this week, the...
Read MoreEating the Whale
I look for the keys to this thing and find them in the back of a drawer filled with oddments like rubber bands and paperclips. Or maybe I was looking through the drawer, found the key, and puzzled, what was this to, again? Right, I have a blog! And never mind that the blogging software I was using doesn’t work with the current operating system installed on my computer, that I had to reset passwords, that nobody blogs anymore*, that stats have become mercifully impossible to trace by another forgotten password so I cannot obsess over whether anyone reads this, you’ve got your privacy as I keep my own. Somehow, ridiculously my own blog still calls out to me, the words in my head still want to be in the world, even though the world and I seem to be in an uneasy...
Read MoreCatalogue of Silences
S omeone, somewhere, wrote that a silence was only meaningful if someone was expecting you to talk. And I want to explode this because where does the meaning come from, the act, the not communicating, the expectation, its breaking, does it mean what I mean it to mean? Meaning-siginificance, meaning-intention? So posit not just a silence, but a screen between us, I cannot see your face:I don’t know if it’s mute pain or calculated, sitting back, in control silence. I imagine the one, and then the other, though I generally fail to imagine all of the in-between silences. I don’t know if you’re there, don’t know if you know I’m there. (so okay: we’re both silent. either one of us could break it. And then it becomes a different game, a who’s...
Read MoreMeditations on Bringing Home a Dog
H ow is it something can have been missing and you don’t even realize it was missing until it comes into your life and you startle, “So that’s what was missing!” All of these years I’ve gently (I hope) tolerated other people’s dogs, hopefully not projecting too much forbearance, since I wasn’t a dog person. Raven and I could almost be defined by our not being dog people, particularly since both of our sets of parents were so very much in love with their dogs, and our childless siblings paid such keen and loving attention to animals, even the brother whose professional and traveling life makes keeping a pet impossible. We had our cat who, though she is more or less indifferent to our presence, we like having around; still...
Read MoreAn Encyclopedia of Literary Fallacies
B y which I mean not so much a set of mistakes in literature itself, literature being exactly what it is and not needing me to beat up on it at all, but the sort of pitfalls in thinking and perception to which one is liable when one reads too much. And I am convinced there is a more elegant way of describing it, which, being a girl who has frequently been accused of reading too much, I ought to be able to bring about, but the unfortunate fact is that I labelled this category — I remember precisely the moment, sitting on the bus on my way home from the accelerated French class, head propped against the cool glass, staring out the window, so it was my sophomore year of high school — at the moment when it occurred to me that somebody was behaving exactly...
Read MoreRestricted
T he rules by which we live in five categories: Vital – you walk on sidewalks rather than down the middle of the street, you don’t eat those mushrooms, etc. Conventional – cultural rules by which you know whether to wait in a restaurant to be seated or to find the empty seats and help yourself, how to behave in various social situations, avoid the strange looks from others. Pedagogical – submission to which you may not understand the reasons why, but you do it anyway in trust of your teacher. Wax on, wax off. The unnatural shape of your hand at a new musical instrument that, built into your technique, will make more advanced passages possible. Arbitrary (oulipo) (puzzles and games) – these add challenge to ordinary activities, are...
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