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Sigmar Polke, This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya)

This is one of my favorite paintings (and poems). Back in the day, before April turned from Poetry Month into tax month, I would linger over my favorite art and read poems waiting for something (or nothing) to happen.

Not to make it sound too idyllic, I was often bored.

There is a picture of me, though, leafing through an Egon Schiele album, some seven years ago. It was taken in a darkish pub on a hot August day, one of the most surprisingly surprising days when my sandals fell apart and I walked barefoot through the main streets of Poznań.

For years I remembered that a couple of pictures were taken on that occasion but had never seen them. Until Gryzmak dug them up in a box last Christmas. Between the summer we first met and our meeting six years later they had been waiting among other photographs and papers. Objects can be patient like I never can.

I envy that kind of poise as I fill out my forms and wait for magnolias to kick into full bloom. Now they are teasing me, on the verge of opening but still keeping to themselves.

What's admitted by the door can be kept
by the mind. Can be trapped
in a list. Can be lifted

by the tail and tenderly placed
where it will no longer be
in the way. It was never easy.

(from Mary Jo Bang, "This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya)")

Sometimes it's hard to make connections and the concluding sentence chooses to imitate the spring.

The End of March

Away--off to New York for three frantic days that seem very distantly related to the construction of a crypto-dream-house, but, nevertheless, believe me, the path to it leads through Manhattan flower shops, and bureacrapcy, and requires nerves of steel.

Please send us positive thoughts through the land and over oceans.

Liepāja beach, originally uploaded by la-la-laine.

Elizabeth Bishop
"The End of March"

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string?--But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(This one time, as you see, I didn't stop myself and posted one of my favorite poems.)

Urodzinki

(Znalezione gdzieś w sieci)

Dla Ciebie, dla mnie, o krok od Twoich urodzin.

Reading Assignment

A few weeks ago I bought James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break on Amazon. I was very surprised by how student-friendly the price was and an anniversary edition to boot!

My surprise was even greater when the book arrived and I discovered that it makes a great prop for the tiny teddy bear and that there is no way I can read it without my reading glasses.

Now, I am an adult and should be better at handling such things. And yet I do feel slightly apprehensive about the reaction of the other critics and poets kids when I take out my little book tomorrow in class.

Tricycle and Meadows

Tricycle. How the hell do you pronounce that?

I bought Tricycle for Mr. G. today and the first thing we did was solve the "Which Buddhist Personality Are You?" quiz. Mr. G. is equally Greedy and Deluded, while I am Deluded with a tinge of Aversive. Considering that I am not a buddhist, I still feel like I learned a lot about myself.

In the solutions section, they mentioned something about meditative space that would allow me to believe in pretty things instead of constantly imagining disasters.

After reading Robert Duncan recently and rereading my favorite meadow poem by Elizabeth Bishop, here's what I think they meant:

Cape Breton meadow, originally uploaded by LandVike.

Incidentally, we're planning a trip to Nova Scotia later this year, so it all connects (if you're properly overinterpreting quizzes).

Back to grim reality:

earlier today I almost froze my fingers off. I really can't tell the weather here by just looking out the window. It was sunny and so I breezily left the house with my pretty and useless purple gloves. And, guess what, weather.com was not pulling my leg: it really did feel like -21 Celsius. When I got back home (i.e. was blown back downhill by icy gusts of wind), my fingers were red, swollen, and pulsating with heat. Fortunately/unfortunately, I can type (as you can see) and need to write my essays I cannot write due to my usual intellectual paralysis. I, indeed, am Aversive and Deluded.

Sunday Confessions

It's Sunday evening and after a week filled with 19th-century sentimental fiction, I feel whimsical.

The downside of studying literature is that though you do get to fill your life with reading interesting things, it's not necessarily that the assigned reading is what interests you at that particular moment...

So I started drawing up a list of what I'd really feel like reading now (but can't because I'm reading lots of other things). On top of the list is Stevie Smith. I only ever get to read her poems online, without the drawings, and read essays that mention the drawings but never reprint them. I need to change that. (And why did I ever give up drawing? At least I'd have another way to vent...) She's fun, brief, morbid, and didn't waste her time writing lofty manifestos. (Although I don't think planning and going about your suicide is a better way to spend your time.)

I'd also like to read Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (since reading this post; yes, I know I didn't exactly run to get the book asap).

And Mary Jo Bang's last (i.e. most recent) book of poems. It took me shamefully long to get it.

This children's book, which I read at least three times as a child.

Since I already got in this oddly confessional mode (because I'm drafting a paper on the confessional poetry), I might as well say that I'm pushing away reading a batch of essays on New Criticism and its impact on contemporary literary criticism (snoring already?) by contemplating whether I should make myself another mug of tea with soymilk. Soymilk is fat and so New Criticism has better dietary effects.

(Snoring already?) Off, then, from the realm of unread to the realm of reading assignments...

PS: Tea in the US deserves a separate post.

The Art of Losing

I lost my mother's watch. Actually, I lost the watch my mother gave me. And my favorite teaspoon. It should take me some time before I misplace this house and I can't really see myself hiding the continent from everyone, but I do feel like my losses are a disaster.

And a sign of a serious disability.

Card purchased at a store with vintage jewelry and trinkets, DeWitt Mall, Ithaca, NY.

Both domestic and foreign, given who I am and where.