To My Soul

                                                                                Jeanne Illenye's Orange Glow

Will I miss you

uncanny other

in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave

the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,

and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had

give way like coffee grains

brushed across paper...

 poem by Jean Valentine

The New Yorker, April 23, 2007

Poem by J.D. McClatchy

Mercury Dressing

To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency--
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex his counterpart)--
Unsteadies the routines of his heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?

But suddenly, he disappears,
As so much else had down the years...
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there.

The New Yorker, April 23, 2007

The Kill Box

Was reading a post on Switchback Books about Girlesque Poets, feminism, the Woman question and the warped template, the exclusive bible of patriarchal histories. Below are some quotes that ring with me: 

"I have never thought there was one way women did or should or could write: style, form, structure, language, rhetoric are all tools consciously and unconsciously used in the deep agency of writing. As Woolf said in A Room of One's Own--certain material differences between men and women are still constructed and perpetuated in our society, and it is the job of feminism to resist these, to try to dismantle these, and, as well, to understand their impact, which can be considerable in the case of artists. This is the importance of feminist reception and writing inspired in the general matrix of ongoing feminist critique."

--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

"For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us."

--Adrienne Rich, "'When We Dead Awaken': Writing as Re-Vision"

"I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind."

--Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium"

"...who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

--Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"

"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.

If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this 'within', to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of."

--Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Sharp shooter, put your boots back on - the dryer's buzzing like a dog pound leash.

I must contort this peony furnace into pliable beige, flip the roast, stir the pot.

Wipe the glaze from your chin. I must get back to being what I am not.  

TED-x Videos, My Current Read and some...minor Preoccupations

So, I'm watching a TEDx video about Death in the 21st Century and what I've just learned from the soft-spoken good Doctor, Peter Saul is depressing me. Namely, that many of us will live to a "great age"; not old age, which is somewhat of a new buzzy phrase for me, but sadly, many of us will die of a "dwindling capacity," that leads to frailty, and finally, to death. He shows a Klimt painting about the separation of Death and the living, observing the terror on the face of a woman who's afraid that he's coming to claim her (he wasn't). However, what keeps distracting me is his watch. He and I appear to have similar tastes in watches, as I think he's wearing a 1946ish, 18k, Baum & Mercier with a blue sapphire windup and a dark brown leather band. He likes his watch very much; he flashes it and glances at it frequently, much like one of Bob Barker's hostesses would.


So, I'm reading Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him and enjoying it. Marx's writing is contagious. I find myself, inside my head anyway, to suddenly be more quick-witted and sharp, which is just me trying on her coat while I'm reading her. Coincidentally, I read an article this morning on Yahoo by Virginia Heffernan entitled "Will Obama's Julia Celebrate Gay Marriage?" And her prose is rife with Marxisms; Pat's not Karl's.

On to TEDx Warsaw and Renata Mienkowska-Norkiene's  talk Working Out Conflict.

later  

Gabriel Yared

mmm.....  so good - another musical rapture, so few.  so precious.

Finished Enduring Love

Great pace and emotional yank-factor funhouse energy and wit. It's nice to be the author. You create a protagonist who gets it right almost every time, and exposes the misperceptions of just about everyone he comes into contact with. And boy do they pay for it, as does he.

Now, on to the next book: Him Her Him again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx. Already through Chapter One and have also had many laugh out loud moments. I can't read enough lately, I am going through books as if they were gossip magazines. Voracious is how I would describe it. My brain just wants more more more and I've got enough to feed it, for now.

Sleeping 12-14 hours a day has really helped my brain bounce back. Lately I've been back to the old speed of ideas and manic sort of writing ready pages first draft. I am happy, singing and dancing as I cook or drive. I sat today for 2 hours listening to a biographical documentary on the English monarchy while writing on here and reading drafts for revision.

I am tired now. My sleep is calling.

Gorgeous amplification.

"Wind" by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Alu

Well, I heard Alu on John Diliberto's Echo program, and I was immediately curious. He was playing "Martian Rendezvous" at the time -- I had one of those NPR fundraiser moments, where they remind listeners of how many times we've sat in our cooling cars in order to listen to the end of an enthralling show; I searched her and got a listen to the rest of Lobotomy Sessions at cdbaby.com.

Alu, in my 'not going down without a kick and a scream' opinion is at her best on the last three tunes: "Amy," "Martian Rendezvous," and "Luna." While her lyrics are sharp as the toes on a Dorsey Cut pair of heels, her voice is truly showcased when she drags her vowels out like slow, wildly colorful, warm taffy. The haunt --and the hot-factor, happens in these three songs far more authentically than the first seven.

Poem By Maura Stanton

I finally had some private time today to read. I picked up a book I had bought used over the winter. fanning the pages, I could smell a faint musky perfume inside the folds. I think I would have liked where this book lived before I became its owner. I wonder what scent will be left on it when I am through?

What piqued me most was that I had written the short short in the previous post early early this morning, and the first poem I opened to in Stanton's book is this:

The Snow House

I could kick down the children's igloo
in two minutes, telling them how dangerous
structures of snow can be, or merely
fall against the roof...
They watch me gravely, expecting
admiration for the ice welding
done with the garden hose for permanence.
But I remember my husband's story
recollected in irony:
how the neighbor children
sealed him in their snow fort
& when he burst through, was it
imagination? His lungs hurt--
That night I dreamed of ghostly children
passing me in a snow field.
"We have buried him!" they chanted,
melting as I ran blinded
into the white dark of the blizzard.

Remembering that dream, these children
frighten me with their innocence.
Their eyes would darken
if I described suffocation in their ice palace,
how adults fear their small fists
smashing towards them in visions
trapped like kaleidoscope designs...
infinite, made with a few stones.
That child in the red hat
is me, moving across the snow, singing.

Crawling inside, the blue walls
remind me of my brother's snow house
where I hid once in anger,
licking the ice until my tongue stuck.
"Let's pretend to freeze to death!" the children
shout from outside as I imagine
turning silver before their shocked eyes
the way I wanted to then, absolute
under my mother's wild hands.
Outside, I wipe the frost off my cheek
praising their fierce construction.
If I kicked their snow house into snow,
I'd return each night
to build it up, flake by flake...



The structure of this poem is so smart. The child in red... I am a woman in red lost in the palace of winds...

Addendum: At the same time I was writing my post below, my daughter was taking her final exams. When she came home from school, she said in her final art exam, students were instructed to go to the internet, choose a picture, and write a story to it. She chose a photo of a woman sitting in a tree in the desert from the 1900's. The woman was wrapped in white gauze. Collective unconscious, indeed!