If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.
– Stanley Kunitz, “Speaking Of Poetry,” from his 1994 commencement address at St. Mary’s college, Maryland, from the back of the Jan/Feb 09 APR
Someone else said that he died of cirrhosis of the liver, the condition all poets kid one another about but never develop. I thought of checking that out, and then thought again. It seemed too apt, too poetic, to research into error. So let’s just say that, and leave it there. Let’s say he died of cirrhosis of the liver, and that if he didn’t he certainly should have done.
– “Youre Not The Outlaw You Think You Are,” Conor O’Callaghan eulogizing Michael Hartnett in the July/August 09 POETRY
At any rate, after having some of these thoughts, not all of them, but many, I wandered back home, made dinner, did laundry, and emailed about apartments. Today I am watering plants and, perhaps, exploring Hampden, another neighborhood close to campus. Tonight there is a party with some of the Hopkins medical resident folks.
I’m really surprised by, but also pleased by, the content of all this stuff I’m writing. It would be nice if, being back in school, I could figure out some of these ideas I left lying in a heap of rhyme in 2004. I’ve been blogging for an hour, but it’s been mentally productive blogging.
Must remember to also write some poems. 😛
I actually have a post to share, for once, about “workstyle,” the subject this blog is supposed to be about.
There is something different about being in the library this time, as opposed to when I used to be there at Stanford. I used to feel that every second I spent in the library was a second deprived from the more important work of making my theories live and breathe on the stage. My time was a zero-sum game and theater was the dying person, or the baby, to whom you cannot possibly give enough attention. Really, none of these metaphors are appropriate. I felt, always have, that I had a purpose with regards to the chorus which was not mine to disregard. A vocation. A command.
Except, now, I have, of course, given it so much – and I am free to read poetry criticism for a few hours without being struck by lightning. I think I was afraid, on this return to grad school, that I wouldn’t be able to focus, just like I couldn’t in undergrad – and that, three hours after walking onto the Hopkins campus for the first time, I’d be starting rehearsals for something.
Well, not yet, at least. I read for a long time, and I experienced that feeling which I have heard scholars talk about, but never, actually, known – the sense that theorizing might be more important than praxis. I found myself skipping past the poems to read the criticism. (Eep.) There was fun stuff – like actor headshots being metonymy for the person. The kind of observation that has no application to your life or work, but is so clever. (I don’t have the citation for that, I’ll get it.)
Creepy, huh?
Yesterday was the first day in Baltimore that I have felt more than 75% awake. I spent the morning helping the housecleaners at my housesit and grocery shopping. I told the clerk I had just moved here, and she, thankfully, did not tell me not to go out at night. The housecleaners, however did. That makes three people in twenty-four hours in Baltimore who have told me not to go out at night.
Afterwards I wandered up Charles and St. Paul Streets, from about 25th to 34th, to see what there was to see. After leaving a land of so many cathedrals, it’s amusing to find an equal density of cathedrals here in Baltimore. One Catholic country to another. I wandered past a Civil War memorial and the BMA, which is Free For All, but did not go in – I was too excited about getting to campus for the first time. I walked through some grassy parkland that’s south of the Homewood campus, and entered campus for the first time through the East Gate.
To my right was a big circle of grass called “The Beach,” with girls sunbathing, bottoms up. I want, so badly, to call them “coeds.” In front of me was the Eisenhower Library. I went in. I slumped down by the periodicals section and began my intensive program of cramming on contemporary poetry. I read the current and back issues of Poetry and American Poetry Review. Lots of good stuff. Some quotes I’ll put up.
The following is from THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt. I adore it, because I’ve started and withdrew/withdrew/C-minused ancient Greek three times, and I know just enough to be amused by the constructions. Also, it reminds me of the project I have about putting Molière into English but preserving French word order. Anyways. Fun.
“…Francis was so impatient with his happy news that he did not even wait for Tracy and Judy to leave the room but told me immediately, in sloppily inflected Greek, while sweet dopey Tracy wondered aloud at our wanting to keep up our schoolwork at a time like this.
“Do not fear,” he said to me. “It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine.”
I did not understand what he meant. The form of “dishonor” (atimia) that he used also meant “loss of civil rights.” “Atimia?” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“But rights are for living men, not for the dead.”
“oimoi,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, dear. No. No.”
He cast about, snapping his fingers, while Judy and Tracy looked on in interest. It is harder to carry on a conversation in a dead language than you might think. There has been much rumor,” he said at last. “The mother grieves. Not for her son,” he added hastily, when he saw I was about to speak, “for she is a wicked woman. Rather she grieves for the shame which has fallen on her house.”
“What shame is this?”
“(Greek),” he said impatiently. “(More Greek.) She seeks to show that his corpse does not hold wine” (and here he employed a very elegant and untranslatable metaphor: dregs in the empty wineskin of his body).
“And why, pray tell, does she care?”
“Because there is talk among the citizens. It is shameful for a young man to die while drunk.” ”
– THE SECRET HISTORY, Donna Tartt
Baltimore since Thursday has been sunny and inviting, reminding me of nothing so much as Berkeley. This may have nothing to do with its resemblance to Berkeley, but more that everyone in my family views Berkeley, California as the apotheosis of location.
I spent the day before yesterday learning about my housesit – plants, cats, more plants. I was warned, strenuously, not to go out at night. K and I drove to her community garden in Druid Hill Park, where I saw, for the first time, okra in its natural form. I get to water and eat it, and I also get to drive S and K’s Volvo. The parking brake, passenger-side door, and gas gauge do not work, but it moves!
At night, I took the Volvo out, braving the traffic of Baltimore for the first time. People here drive like they’re on skateboards, and most of the streets are one-way. I picked up my friend T and J, both residents in Hopkins medical. We went to Bo Brooks on the waterfront and ate enormous crabs with our bare hands. I was warned, for the second time, not to go out at night. I took them home, as they both work much harder than anyone else on the planet.
I was temporarily startled when the Washington Monument loomed up in the middle of northbound Charles Street like the resurrection of the Hermai, but realized I could drive around it. Spent the rest of the night finishing THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt.
I almost bought a copy of THE SECRET HISTORY in Chicago, but didn’t. The edition looked too new and blue. I wanted it to be creepier, somehow, after all the hype about this book. And then I found it waiting for me when I got here, in S and K’s tall, academic bookshelves. It is, of all things, a proof copy from before publication, with a Bennington bookstore bookmark in its pages. So cool. S went to Bennington, where Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and others also did. I had forgotten.
I have been reading it in bed with a great sense that the book followed me from Chicago to Baltimore, along with what makes me me. This has been reassuring. One of the reasons I’m going back to academia, for a time, is a sense that some portion of my identity which lives only in university libraries has been lost, or lessened. Finding the book here makes me feel like I am on the right path.
I finished it at about 2 AM and didn’t sleep very well – but I’m always glad to lose sleep to something well written and troubling. It’s about a group of classics students who lose their moral bearings and start killing people. (I’m giving away nothing that’s not in the first sentence – the book isn’t a mystery, but a road map of ethical deterioration.) I dreamed of a person with his head smashed in.
All these warnings about not going out at night, plus TSH, made me kind of jumpy about letting the cat in at 2 AM. I sort of expected to be shot.
Nothing, however, happened. Calvert Street was quiet, suburban, streetlit, car-parked and spotlessly clean. I think the Baltimoreans are a little excessive about their warnings. I am not going to disregard them, but I just want to point out that I let the cat out without either of us sustaining any injuries – and the cat seems to live outside all night and return home without gunshot wounds.
I have realized that one of the things that made the US Artists Initiative blog so popular was the way that I gave each post a sense of a day. “In the morning, I did this. In the afternoon, I did this. At night, I did this.”
I have hitherto avoided putting that much detail onto my personal blog, out of a desire for privacy. I don’t really want to tell everyone in the world what I do in the morning, afternoon, and night. It’s one thing when you’re participating in a highly structured and public program, but another when you’re, I don’t know, reading Harry Potter all day.
But I do think it was effective.
I am going to compromise by giving future posts more of a sense of place and time, if possible.
A few hours of restorative DAOTC* has left me in better shape to comment on my current shmintellectual pursuits.
I’m working on something which I have irreverently titled The Dara Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in preparation for my MFA program. I am making a list of all the poems that are most important to me: both those other people have written, and those I have written myself. When I get a printer, I’m going to print them out and put them all in a binder, in chronological order, so I can refer to it easily. Credit for this idea goes to LaCona, who once told me to make a list of everything I had done. Ten years later, I’m doing it.
One of the things I need to remember but have often forgotten is that when I was a freshman, having a lonely fall semester, I wrote a 365-page, 365-poem document, tied together through the loose narrative of a plucky but misguided antiheroine. I showed it to one person, an unfortunate Stanford professor, who never commented on it, and then I lost both the original and the computer on which it was stored. This is probably a good thing.
364 out of the 365 poems in this document were TRASH of the TRASHIEST variety, but there are one or two that I think are worth remembering. One, in particular, contained this one line that I thought was really good. It was a semi-sonnet. It used a limited sound palette. It was the first thing I’d written in some time that could be descrbed with the word “restraint” as opposed to “excess.” It was derivative of Sara Teasdale, but it was still, to my mind, the best poem – and the best line – I had ever written.
I still kind of like it, honestly. But remembering how I thought it was, like, THE GREATEST LINE OF POETRY ANYONE HAD EVER WRITTEN BEFORE OR SINCE gives me humility. You never know what is good when you are working on it. It takes forever to get perspective.
About eight years later, I rewrote that poem. I didn’t choose to rewrite that particular poem, but I wrote another little semi-sonnet about failure and wanting to be alone which had a very similar tinge. Except this one didn’t suck as bad.
So perhaps, in another sixteen years, I will rewrite this same poem, and it will be good enough to be something. But by collecting the things I have written which remain important to me, I can see what my subjects are. (One of them is the word “rot.”) And I can get a sense of where I am going by surveying where I’ve been.
This poem to which I have been referring is not good, or even interesting, to anyone but me. But to see it, and know that at one point, it was the best thing I had written, gives me a lot of perspective. So it’s going in the Anthology. As is a lot of stuff that just makes me laugh now.
* dicking around on the computer
…Money don’t grow on trees.
I got bills to pay,
I got mouths to feed,
There ain’t nothing in this world for free.
I know I can’t slow down,
I can’t hold back,
Though you know, I wish I could.
No there ain’t no rest for the wicked,
Until we close our eyes for good.
– “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked,” Cage the Elephant from their self-titled CD
Dara Weinberg 