I’ve been talking a lot lately with folks about memory and its absence, perhaps brought on by the finals-week tinge of amnesia. There are many things that I don’t remember, but remember again when placed back in the place where they took place. I remember the place – and the place remembers the rest.
Author Archives: weinberg
Across the moon like a prison bar
Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
– from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I used to have this entire poem memorized, though I can no longer remember in what grade, or for what teacher, this was done. It was pre-high school for sure. At any rate, this stanza has always been my favorite, and my favorite line of it is the one about the moon. It gets stuck in my head the way a song does. I suspect that if I put some effort into it I could get the poem back.
At long last,
I finally wrote a thank-you letter to Stephen King. Check out Premium Harmony if you haven’t – it’s positively O. Henry. I reread his interviews in times of particular selfpityingness, and they always have the effect of getting me back to work. I like his short fiction, I like what he has to say about writing, and I like his prose style most of all. I wish I could get through more of the horror.
Anyway, I’m glad I did it. I just took out a blank card, wrote a few things on it, and that was that. I’m going to have to go put it in the mailbox soon: having an envelope addressed to Stephen King in my room is creepy.
I look forward to being older, less squeamish, and able to read more of his work. I think it’s like eating spicy food: you have to let the tastebuds die. I’m going to check out Lisey’s Story, I think, when I’m done with work. He wrote it in the aftermath of his accident, and it sounds like a good one.
the arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week
Ian McEwan has a new short story in the New Yorker called “The Use of Poetry.” Here’s his scientist protagonist, after discovering Milton is not beyond him:
He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him. No longer. From the moment he won Maisie, he was intellectually free.
I wrote, earlier,
here, that experience had to change to enter into poems. I am finding, now, that the problem in most of the things I’ve written this semester is that I was not true enough to the experience. It’s just that true is something other than I thought it was.
complainment
I suspect that there is some part of my process, now, that is as useless and perverse as the way I used to write out blocking, step by step, the night before, and read it to actors until they had memorized it. I don’t know what part it is.
the morning after the night before
Last night, department holiday party – shades of ON BEAUTY. I feel relentlessly adult, attending a department holiday party that is not my father’s, but my own.
It’s snowing. It’s Baltimore and it’s snowing. Unlike with rain, I always wonder how the sky doesn’t run out of snow. It seems so laborious to produce.
Some days, days when lots of work needs to be done and words placated, you start the day by losing your phone, and spend an hour and a half looking for it, before you discover that you dropped it inside one of your rain boots.
Still snowing. Downstairs, my roommate and friends are singing and playing acoustic guitar, a Saturday-morning service. The sound of voices and strings.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
It is not possible to be any kind of writer other than yourself. Some days, it is not even possible to be the best version of yourself, or a good one. On those days, all I can do is try to be a more tasteful version. It’s like – you didn’t iron your shirt? Again? Then don’t take off your jacket.
We are seven
1) The last day of classes is Monday.
2) Of late, the writing of papers has gotten me into some silly situations – when you find yourself flipping through a Collected Poems and muttering all the last stanzas aloud to see if you can find hidden ballad meter, you may have gone too far. That’s not to say I’m not going to keep doing it.
3) Outside, it rains.
4) Fiction is all about quotation marks and how to display them. This becomes clearer the longer I have to teach it. I never would have thought they would be so problematic – but they are! You could spend the rest of your life puzzling over quotation marks.
5) I saw the moon move across clouds like ice-floes one night a few weeks ago, illuminating a small searchlight of a circle as it drifted (yes, I know, the clouds are moving, not the moon) after a graduate reading, and it occurred to me that, rather than attempting to capture the movement and the light of the moment in theatrical presentation, I now have to try to capture those things in words. The impulse is the same, but the method is different. If it is to be captured at all, of course. Delusional. The moon: observed in captivity.
6) Poetry is sometimes about taking out the words.
7) words
a fight with my own dog, for god’s sake
Competitiveness you went down to Testosterone Village last night
And got loaded. What was I supposed to do with you today,
This morning, when you tried to get me into a fight
With my own dog, for god’s sake, over getting
To the newspaper first?
– Kenneth Koch, “To Competitiveness,” New Addresses
Dara Weinberg 