Because the year is over, because it will go down to 10 degrees in Providence today, and the sun’s shining “as if it doesn’t mean it,” and I want to (and kind of agreed to) say something—
Here is a token—
It consists of the last four lines of a poem, but also a spot for you to stand alone on the end of Pier 4 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, with the navy yard behind you and a bleak Boston Harbor before you.
We can take turns standing in the spot—because you have to be alone on the pier, to listen to the water. The surf isn’t exactly crashing there—more half-heartedly lapping against wood, which is better, which is the spoon at the heart, not the knife.
When you read the lines, typed on white paper, laminated, and tied with wire to the railing, maybe you will get something of what I got the winter of 1999, when I would walk out to the end just to read them.
Public poetry isn’t for me, really—subway poems or bar slams—but only-person-on-the-cold-pier poetry—that is something else. And maybe you like exquisite aches, goodbyes, cityscapes. With these lines, and a view of Boston, you can maybe feel more alone, and less alone, than you have ever been. You can maybe forget the dailiness of newspapers in blue plastic bags. When I stood out there and read those lines the world was a meditation—
I don’t know who typed them up or tied the wire or choose the spot where the pier juts out most into the water. I’m not sure it was Pier 4. It could have been Pier 7, or 8. Or where that piece of paper went, or when the lines disappeared.
Break, break, break
at the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
will never come back to me. (Tennyson)
When I meet someone who seems to also have a portable cave or monastery, an inner pier, what I always forget to ask, or else never bring up, even if they lived in the Boston area themselves circa 1999, is: was it you.
Letterpress printers profess an intimate knowledge of the work they produce. They hold and set each letter. They watch the construction of language by its basic components.
Lowell, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Leo Blais may have not had letterpress in mind, but he takes the printer’s concern a step further. As a visual component to his mammoth forty-song Everyone’s Feelin Alone project, he has constructed life-size lettering for all of his lyrics and affixed the sculptures to the walls of his apartment.
Sculpting each word and setting it in relief on his wall, Blais lives with his language with a closeness few artists know. In his apartment, lyrics all but replaces sunlight—they cover the blinds, which are pulled down to create more space. Blais absorbs words, not vitamin D.
In addition to the lyrics, Blais has constructed each bit of language involved in his upcoming releases. From album title to liner note, each letter has been given the same weight and treatment.
Here’s Blais assembling the title for one of his project’s promotional releases (to the tune of one of the forty songs):
Walter Mosley lied to me! (Oh yeah, and Happy New Year!) Although, If I’m honest, perhaps I can attribute the lack of a completed novel this year on my inconsistent writing discipline. I’m not worried though; I may have bombed the nanowrimo, but I did end 2008 as Poet Laureate of Gambier, Ohio! And hey, 2009 is the year of the Ox! I am assured by those in the know that I will “earn prosperity through fortitude and hard work.” I’m also told in my astrology forecast that “If you work in a creative field as an artist, illustrator, designer, musician, composer, actor, stylist, writer, poet, or in another artistic discipline, Jupiter in Aquarius will help you see unimaginable breakthroughs this year.” I mean, if astrology was good enough for Queen Elizabeth . . . (more…)
On this, the last day of the year, in which direction do I turn my head? Over which tense should my meditations hover: the past or the future? Do I drink coffee to linger in 2008 or take a sleeping pill to get the hell out of it?
Today Janus crouches above the door, gazing both ways, facing away from himself once again. Both his faces stress me out. For me 2008 was full and productive; I did some tough and brazen things, hit some new standards, and don’t think I screwed up anything of great import, which I suppose is an accomplishment in itself and is certainly a relief. But for all of us it’s been a year of great change– time will tell if, for some of us, it will have been The Year of Change, the year after which nothing is ever the same. We have not metabolized these shifts, although we feel them in and around us. We know that with change comes gain. And with change comes loss. And anxiety. And exhilaration. Furtive peerings into a darkened future. An urge to step into it. A strong yearning to turn back.
The noble animal Man for his amusement smokes his pipe–the Hawk balances about the clouds–that is the only difference of their leisures. This it is that makes the Amusement of Life–to a speculative Mind.
–John Keats, Letters
And she said, we are all just prisoners here of our own device. . .
–Eagles, “Hotel California”
A huge room crowded with hundreds of slot machines produces a peculiar sound, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes. I recognized it, after awhile, as a kind of music, quite distinct from the sounds the people in the room were making, of far greater magnitude and yet unobtrusive unless attended to, like a great elemental sound, but thoroughly and obviously synthetic when approached and examined, tuneless and yet somehow orderly, like a dust devil or a cloud.
Not a habitue of casinos–my last foray had been fifteen or so years before, under peculiar circumstances–I was mildly surprised at how familar the scene was. The machines had changed a little; they looked more futuristic and more obviously computerized than the last slots I had seen; they still had slots, but there was little if anything left of the machine these devices evolved from. Beyond that, it was as if I had never left this room, though I had never been in this particular establishment before. The people were exactly the same: intent but distracted, staring at the whirling ideograms the slots deployed; they seemed semi-comatose and yet thoroughly alert to some inner vision of which the screens before them were the projection. As John Keats said of a stoat encountered a field: “The creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it.”
My new year’s resolutions: poems in stranger and lower places, a pen by the bed, a filthier house, memorization, tenderness, sunlight. Learning how to recognize (maybe even early on) the scope of each poem’s ambition, then sizing and ending accordingly. (As I write this, my husband yells to me that our son has a new word: “burp.”)
Here’s one of my favorite clean slate poems, by Laura Jensen:
This weekend I read Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. The novel stretches the facts and the mystery surrounding one of the first people accused during the Salem witch crisis of 1692. The fact is Tituba confessed to being a witch. Her life beyond the crisis remains a mystery. Scholars are even unsure of her race. She may have been an African slave; she may have been an Indian; or she may have been a hybrid, the product of a collision of cultures.
With I, Tituba, Conde means to give voice to an invisible woman. Arthur Miller imagined intriguing possibilities for the accusers, but Tituba is a minor character who disappears for the bulk of the play—and reappears as a madwoman. For Conde, Tituba’s historical and narrative disappearance speaks to the larger problem of women’s voices. Tituba is not the only woman of color whose life simply vanished in the face of the dominant culture’s historical priorities. With the novel, Tituba—and every woman who lived and died as a slave—has her “revenge,” an audience compelled to know more of her story.
That said, on Amazon, one edition of Conde’s novel has limited availability. Another edition is out of stock. Tituba remains in danger of becoming invisible and unheard, a hazy ghost despite her role in one of the most curious moments in American history. It doesn’t seem fair that she can still get lost in the cultural and historical shuffle. Is that the postcolonial curse? Is that the way history works?
The state of English departments has been on my mind of late. So I’m interested that the new issue of Chronicle Review devotes three long articles to the topic “What Ails Literary Studies?” That alone suggests that my perception that something is amiss is widespread. No doubt the timing also has to do with the Modern Language Association meetings opening later this week in San Francisco, (and how did I fail to work up some scam to be there rather than central Ohio between Christmas and the New Year?).
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, at least not now, bewailing how literature is taught or how curricula are structured. More immediately interesting, for the sake of the KR blog, is the growing paradox that the writing of literature (or at least the attempt to do so) is thriving as never before both in undergraduate and graduate institutions. The point is that students of all ages–and the KR Young Writers program is evidence as well–do still care about literature. They love it. They read it. They want to write it and be part of the ever more healthy community of writers and readers. (more…)
I haven’t left the house in days, because of the snow that has just now stopped. I was born in a blizzard but have lost my snow-muscle since moving to the Northwest and so I stay in, looking and baking and padding about in silent disrepair, marveling at the erasure. The sound of the road, the birds, our neighbors have all lifted and instead there is just this lovely light reflecting in. I feel a little bit stir-crazy, a little bit new. Though I haven’t been writing poetry during this particular Storm of the Century, this kind of fast-hearted trance reminds me of that place we go to when we write. It makes me think about the writers who really never leave the house–there’s an Austrian poet I just read about who hasn’t left the house in years, and there’s always good old Proust. It’s interesting to me how staying in the house can turn you wild, can un-domesticate you. That venturing out is what keeps us tame, that we are each other’s tethers, but that staying in one place for too long is unmooring. As writers we are always talking about the importance of finding a balance between this interior world and the outer one. A true balance usually means the souvenirs from the circus show up in our poetry. The danger of being too much in the world, of course, is not writing. And the danger of not leaving the house usually is not having anything to write about. A couple years ago I moved with my husband to Los Angeles for his job, and for the first time in my life I had the option of writing full-time. My version of discipline: I told myself I wasn’t allowed to leave the house each day until I’d written a poem. A good poem. And read a significant part of a good book. I could smell the orange trees through the window but I stayed at my desk, and each day it got harder to write what was increasingly a lifeless poem. Eventually I went back to work full-time, and my writing slowly came back to itself. I was so angry at myself for not being able to make better use of those enormous interior hours, and it’s that challenge–how to let the wildness of isolation inform rather than silence one’s writing–that draws me to writers who’ve made good of it. What beautiful wilderness there is in the same four walls.
7. Sprung Vision; Or, Who is Duane and Why Do I Have His Syndrome?
Perfect 20/20 vision will not be enough to pass an eye test given to military pilots. It also involves “contrast sensitivity.”One must be able, for example, to see a white cat walking in the snow.
Nothing! No oil
For the eye, nothing to pour
On those waters or flames.
–Robert Lowell, “Tooth and Eye”
The light was almost unbearable.
“Look right,” said Dr. de Souza. ”Look up. Look down.” He was examining my left eye with what I can only describe as an illuminated lens. His technician had spent 45 minutes taking detailed digital photographs of my retina–through layer after layer of retinal tissue, I was told–but if Dr. de Souza had made any use of those photographs, I never saw it. My impression is that, though Dr. de Souza works in a clinic that possesses all manner of marvelous devices, he prefers to trust himself instead of the machinery. Throughout my encounter with him, I was impressed by his aura of quiet authority and confidence, which was the very opposite of off-putting. I trusted this neat, semi-handsome, self-possessed man, and I was glad to trust him.
“Look left,” said Dr. de Souza.
“I can’t,” I said.
The burning lens flickered away. “You can’t? Why not?”
“I have Duane’s Syndrome in that eye.”
With my right eye, the one not being examined, I saw a smile flicker across his face, an expression I can only describe with the hackneyed word elfish. Dr. de Souza resembled an elf. Indeed, it occurred to me that he might have been one.
“Duane’s Syndrome! Really!” He bent closer to my left eye. “Look left?” he said again, this time with a different tone.
“Really, I can’t”
“Interesting,” he said, “Very interesting. But it causes me a little problem.” He stepped back and stroked his chin. “I must see your entire retina in order to find where the rip is. When there is that much blood in an eye, there is surely a rip. But if you can’t move your eye, I can’t see the whole expanse.” He paused again, looking at me as if I were a coconut that was being resistant to cracking. “What to do?”
The question was rhetorical. He knew exactly what to do.
“Here’s the thing. We’ll just pop that eye a little.” We will? He produced a demonic little metal spatula, which he pushed all too firmly against my upper eyelid, into the seam between my eyeball and its socket. “Now,” he said, “Let’s see.”
8. Hotel California 
Watch a short film about the Young Writers
