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Friday Notebook 06.24.2011
More from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a very quotable novel, as it turns out: Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear. * We know things better through love than through knowledge. [A translation from the Latin of Thomas Aquinas: Amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio.] * “In Paris do they always have the true answers?” “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.” * Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.Read More
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Friday Notebook 06.10.11
“people who dwell in clocksmove with pendulous hearts” —Bei Dao, “Daydream,” from Endure * desire lifts—moonlight on midnight waves the moon itselfradiantbehind a cloud the sea working without ceasethe moon’s light transient say what you will * [This one from March 1974] The Brainis a fist or a rosethrust up by the spine.Sometimes it knotslike a testicle;other timesblackens (a stonein a glacier’s belly).Because it’s silentlike heaven, we forgetthat the brain is acrumpled mapof the infinite: lifeafter life we throw it away.Read More
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Friday Notebook 05.13.11
Friday the 13th! It figures I’d have no notebook entries to offer—the week given over to essay grading and panicked clients with last-minute projects. So, in place of new material, a couple of duds from the vault, both from 1975.Read More
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Friday Notebook 05.06.11
[I sometimes wonder if this experiment is worthwhile, especially when the notebook is so scanty, as it was this week…] The grief of the past monthshas settled in one ear. Intermittentneedles, and in between—a hisslike water when a small leak’sdeveloped in a hidden pipe joint.Wherever it’s bleeding out, waterseeks depth, yields to gravityand hums a song about itas it wanders and descends. Soonthe whole house will be made of thirst. * He’s my age, sixty, but in muchbetter shape. Still not enough to goback, though, to his younger daysin construction.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.29.2011
A thin week on the notebook front with two classes in progress and writing/design work right and left. Our personal economy seems to be resurrecting slowly, in fits and starts, which in turn puts my muse into a sulk. “You never have time for me.” “But baby, you’re never off my mind…” Etc. From A. R. Ammons (Collected Poems 1951-1971): nothing useful is of lasting value:dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.22.2011
“Recently I have been contemplating and speaking about the relationship between truth and fact.” —Kwame Dawes at Harriet Mr. Dawes’s post got me to thinking about truth and fact, mainly because I think he misses the point. Facts and truths, it seems to me, are in no way opposed to one another. Facts, I think, are like notes, and truth is like music: it’s the relationship between different notes that make music, and it’s the relationship between different facts that make truths. Music is a species of truth, poetry is another species of it, fiction another, and so on.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.15.2011
When the Thief of Voices Came to Town the Singers Unionraised a paltry ransomenough to get their membersthrough the Christmas holiday(their busiest season) the City Council voted hima tax break and with muffled fanfarerenamed the historic Main StreetThief of Voices Boulevard a local TV talk show hostdeparted from his monologue to askthe Thief to be his sidekicka jokeneverthelessthe next day he was stricken dumb(the doctors professedmystification)and before the next showshot his brains out in the green room not long after the Singers Unionfailed to scape togethera second bribeand at New Yearsbravely eked out Auld Lang Synesqueaking like mice in flightfrom…Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.08.2011
Today’s the first anniversary of my Mom’s death—and it comes, as all the subsequent anniversaries of her death will come, one day after my son Brian’s birthday and six days before her own birthday. So Eliot was only half right about April. Anyway, here are this week’s notebook jottings; they include one more or less finished poem.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.01.2011
Just one lone quatrain in the old notebook this crazy-busy week: “Rats can’t vomit.“Thus are the curled lipsof the Wall Street bankersalways impeccably dry. So let me offer up another sample from one of my old notebooks. This particular poem, written with my old friend Joe Nigg in mind, is riddled with mixed metaphors that make it unsuccessfully baroque—but I still like the playful music of it, pretty much…. Lexicomania for Joe Nigg We labor with language, our honed witsflashing like sewing needles in a sweatshop.But it’s no sweat. We like it. It keeps uskeen and intensely busy.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.25.2011
Writers not writing in English I know only through translation. Of course, I know myself only through translation—that is, through my writing. * The Spring light’sflashes as we drive pasttransfigures the shutwindows so that eventhe gray wall of the hospital’scancer wing strikes usas beautiful. * The shipwrecked sailor on learning the primitive islanders’ language: “Learning their language was all the more difficult because of its rudimentary nature. It might have seemed to a casual observer that the language was invented according to the caprice of each individual speaker.Read More