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Friday Notebook 10.14.11
I’m posting this two days late because the calendar and I have been on the outs lately, both work and personal deadlines slipping like fish through the pirate-skeleton’s bony fingers…. A detail from Lascaux. The photographer’s watermarkdoes not date from the paleolithic. The following passages are drawn from Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. I’ve never developed a liking for Eshleman’s poetry, which takes up much of this book, but the prose sections are illuminating: Poetry twists toward the unknown and seeks to realize something beyond the poet’s initial awareness.Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.07.11
Some imp makes melike to scare myselfwith what-ifs * * * In those days I was in the full flush of my scientific knowledge—unaware that the dogmatic theology of science was itself a kind of folklore…. * I saw quite unmistakably that man had set astray the natural periodicity of sexuality and so forfeited his partnership with the animal kingdom.Read More
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Friday Notebook 09.30.11
STORM SEASON Veils of rain trailed by low clouds snagged on the shadowed peaks, as if the body poured its anger into the panicky atmosphere: dense drops striking granite; cold white flashes under the skin.Read More
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Friday Notebook 09.23.11
Well, it’s been another fallow week. What can I say? Well, how about this oldie—a baldfaced imitation of the inimitable Russell Edson. Reading it in my three-ring binder from 1975, I recognize . . . well, this past week: A Short History of Existential MedicineThe corpse was having an enema. Of course, this won’t do any good, said the doctor.Why not? cried the corpse.My good man, you are already dead, explained the doctor. Isn’t there a pill I could take for my condition? shouted the corpse.Nothing would help, the doctor replied.Then give me nothing! shrieked the corpse.Read More
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Friday Notebook 09.16.11
Okay. So I missed last Friday’s notebook entry because (a) I had nada in my notebook, and (b) I was working like a madman to get my two classes in place for University College, where I teach off and on. One of the classes is new and conceptually difficult to construct for online delivery; the other is a poetry writing class I’ve taught for several years but which I’d become unhappy with, and so I decided to restructure it for this quarter’s face-to-face iteration.Read More
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Friday Notebook 08.26.2011
I’ve been reading, as a sort of relief from poetry, the utterly European novellas of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. The first three quotes below are from Open Doors; the second is from Death and the Knight. They are two of the four novellas collected in Open Doors and Three Novellas, the title of which implies that Open Doors itself is not a novella. Well, maybe so. Although it is must 72 pages long, it is structured like a novel.Read More
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Friday Notebook 08.05.2011
When it comes to a person’s opinions, we’re generally less interested (or should be) in the opinions than in the quality of the thinking that led to them. Poetry is the opposite; for readers, the end result is everything. Only scholars and other poets care how many drafts Yeats went through to arrive at “The Second Coming.” And it almost certainly didn’t matter to Yeats how great a struggle the poem involved, once the poem was done.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.22.2011
The world is that small spaceyou occupy. The rest is rumor.Be careful where you choose to go.You have freedom, but only thinkyou can live there. Rememberhow you refused that cap and gownget-up to collect your family’s firstcollege degree? How your mother cried?Freedom! And now she’s gone. Somebonds are roots, others—fetters.Freedom can be fetters, too. * After hurricane Rita, this placewas just shredded jungle. Nowit’s Jesús and Lídia’s casa,built by him, by hand, on weekendsand vacations, the way my fatherbuilt our first house.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.15.2011
Another scanty week for the old notebook. Just a few traces… “This is a world with a new order of disease.” —Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World * The Meteor Between the bars of a reformatory cellan orangecame flying in a flash and fellplop like a stoneinto the johnAnd gazing at itthe prisoner shoneall splattered with shitin a blaze of ecstasyShe hasn’t forgottenShe still thinks of me. —Jacques Prévert, tr. Norman R.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.08.2011
“You have to make an about-face and leave the poem, [Char] said to me, and this you must do at the moment of deepest emotion, when you belong to it most entirely and you are at your weakest. Yet the turning-away is unavoidable, and you must find the strength to accomplish it.Read More