Cafe Spice, in Towson, has the best Indian food I have ever eaten at a restaurant in my life, anywhere on the planet. It’s only surpassed by the couple of times I have gotten to eat Indian food that was home-cooked. It. Was. Amazing. Went there last night, and then came home to find that one of my roommates was making his variation on his family’s carne asada tacos recipe…Spring makes food good.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
making plans
for an interdepartmental par-tay on May 15. You know it’s nearing finals when you are having to plan post-finals blowouts. I’m in D Level again, and there are many other Writing Seminarians here, trusting the library’s atmosphere to make us productive.
Started a new story yesterday, about a woman who has an antagonistic relationship with her infant. It’s a lot of fun to write, even more so because it’s required for nothing.
There never was a spring like this
I’m in the library, grading writing, with a feeling of great freedom, as one only can write when the obligation of a deadline has been removed. It is very nice that the half-thesis was due a couple weeks before the end of the semester. It means the end of the semester won’t be so arduous.
Through the window on D Level, I can see the Ferris wheels of Hopkins’s Spring Fair turning, and the sky becoming a medium gray. The heat is elusive. It’s a real and inconstant April.
The flowers are out. Our yard, which used to be a demure dark green, looks like it’s wearing an exploding piñata. You can’t walk down the street without being pelted with seed pods. Therefore, spring poem:
To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time
I cannot hold my peace, John Keats;
There never was a spring like this;
It is an echo, that repeats
My last year’s song and next year’s bliss.
I know, in spite of all men say
Of Beauty, you have felt her most.
Yea, even in your grave her way
Is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost,
Spring never was so fair and dear
As Beauty makes her seem this year.
I cannot hold my peace, John Keats,
I am as helpless in the toil
Of Spring as any lamb that bleats
To feel the solid earth recoil
Beneath his puny legs. Spring beats
her tocsin call to those who love her,
And lo! the dogwood petals cover
Her breast with drifts of snow, and sleek
White gulls fly screaming to her, and hover
About her shoulders, and kiss her cheek,
While white and purple lilacs muster
A strength that bears them to a cluster
Of color and odor; for her sake
All things that slept are now awake.
And you and I, shall we lie still,
John Keats, while Beauty summons us?
Somehow I feel your sensitive will
Is pulsing up some tremulous
Sap road of a maple tree, whose leaves
Grow music as they grow, since your
Wild voice is in them, a harp that grieves
For life that opens death’s dark door.
Though dust, your fingers still can push
The Vision Splendid to a birth,
Though now they work as grass in the hush
Of the night on the broad sweet page of the earth.
“John Keats is dead,” they say, but I
Who hear your full insistent cry
In bud and blossom, leaf and tree,
Know John Keats still writes poetry.
And while my head is earthward bowed
To read new life sprung from your shroud,
Folks seeing me must think it strange
That merely spring should so derange
My mind. They do not know that you,
John Keats, keep revel with me, too.
– Countee Cullen
Half-thesis
turned in! (Half-brain left.)
This is our first-year portfolio, and although we still have classes and papers and other things to finish, this is the most symbolic part of completing the year.
23 pages (would be over 30 if you keep to the 32 lines/page thing, but 23 pages with normal pagination), 17 poems. All in. The thesis at the end of next year has to be about twice as long.
It hasn’t sunk in yet, but it will later tonight, at the beer garden Hopkins puts up as part of its Spring Fair. See you there.
no mascara, no evidence
Friday poem:
Makeup
My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living
and the living more alive.
Everything I say sets
the clouds off blubbering
like they knew the pretty dead.
True, no mascara, no evidence.
Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,
a faithful liar, false bottom.
Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.
The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child’s cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever.
I am small. Don’t ask me to reconcile
one shadow with another. I admit—
paint the dead pink, it does not make
them sunrise. Paint the living blue,
it does not make them sky, or sea,
a berry, clapboard house, or dead.
God, leave us our costumes,
don’t blow in our noses,
strip us to the underside of skin.
Even the earth claims color
once a year, dressed in red leaves
as the trees play Grieving.
– Dora Malech (who visited Maryland last week, and came to class)
Take that, Vatican II
What do we talk about when we talk about poetry? Punctuation conventions. Last night, at the Great Emdash Colloquium Synod of 2010, otherwise known as the proofreading party, the following resolutions were approved:
1) Two hyphens does not equal one emdash. (Sigh.)
2) The use of spaces before and after emdashes is a matter of style*.
If you have other resolutions to submit to the council, please do so at this time.
*over substance.
Wise is lightweight
Thursday poem:
Against A Dark Field
Hate makes my head light.
Hate rides its particulars, styled
after fireflies, after envy. Our bed rises
on its liquid. I hate the heavy
body known, by rights,
as mine. The window’s colony of wild
ideas, appointed, hovers. Wise
is lightweight. Undercover
I withdraw from us and turn
into pure fuel. You blacken with sleep. I green with burn.
–Heather McHugh, from her book Dangers, also collected in Hinge & Sign. There’s more info on her at the first link, which is the Academy of American Poets, but her website is, happily, spondee.com.
hello, out there
I was recently reminded of the fact that I possess a blog by one of my students. It has been a long time since I’ve written in it.
So.2. Since I last wrote here, the chorus group has met two more times, to work on some Shakespeare and some Yeats. I have been really consumed with this, to the extent that I’ve forgotten about almost everything else.*
All three meetings, so far, have tested me and the methods I have in ways that I really need. I hadn’t realized to what extent my chorus techniques were becoming didactic from primarily teaching in student contexts. Working with adult actors and musicians feels like such a luxury. I have missed it. I have missed it in the way that you miss things in French, where the missed thing is the subject and you are the object.
With this group of people, there is nothing to teach, nothing to be communicated — there is only the chance to explore a largely unexplored region of performance, and I am learning from their work. It’s amazing.
We are doing things that I haven’t tried in years, if ever, including doubling voices on top of other voices with digital recorders, and using simultaneous pieces of different texts. I am back in an environment where my word on a subject is not the final word. That’s a good thing. I have even done something which I haven’t done since Clytemnestra/Cassandra (if there is anyone reading this besides Z who remembers that, I will give you a prize): participated in the vocal realizations of the choruses myself. That is to say, sung.
I have dreamed of being able to work on choruses once a week for a long time. (This is a revised dream from the original dream, which would have been working on them every day, all day and all night.) It is startling to me how long I’ve waited to make this happen, and how I probably wouldn’t have made it happen, at all, if not for the particular environment of Hopkins and Baltimore, for the Single Carrot actors I know, for the friends from poetry classes.
I have lots of interesting sound files that I would like to put up, but that probably won’t happen until after finals are completed. I do, however, hope to create some kind of Internet presence for them that will allow me to post them more regularly. Maybe a subpage of this site, or another site. Or a Myspace.
At any rate, I’m very grateful to the collaborators who have made this possible.
* Oh, and — the “half-thesis” or first-year portfolio for the MFA is due to the faculty tomorrow. Needless to say, that’s about all there is to talk about right now.
so,
Good meeting on Saturday. Choruses (poems) spoken, music played. I have notes from it. I was going to put them up here as a rehearsal report of sorts. Good intentions. But we’re going to meet again next week. I am looking forward to this project generating sound files, to having something that can be played to explain itself.
Apart from that, a lot of discussion about whether a flawed interpretation of a great text matters — whether the text’s greatness transcends the interpretation. It does, I suppose. It must.
Also heard M. Doty read at the BMA. He mentioned a sense of discomfort whenever he hears his poems set to music. I can see why. Of what he read, I didn’t hear any with a choral component. But there are many poems with that sort of public and dramatic structure — many, many poems — that are suitable.
Also, would he not be as uncomfortable if the poem was not “set” to music? Not pinned, as it were, to the notes? If the principle of improvisation were present? I am preaching to my own choir. Obviously, I think that would be different.
Dear World,
You,
if you are a musician, an actor, or a singer,
in Baltimore, Maryland,
or like speaking poetry,
are invited to an
extremely informal
free-and-open-to-the-planet
Choral Speaking workshop: exploring the speaking of Greek choruses, and other similar poetic texts. With live, improvised music,
with the possibility of forming an eventual working group
to continue exploring this stuff,
but with no obligation to do so.
Come and say some words, and play some music. The word “Grotowski” will be mentioned.
Saturday at 1 PM
3033 Guilford Avenue
Contact: Dara Weinberg, daraweinbergATgmail.com.
PS. Marsupials? Really?
Dara Weinberg 