(a kind of poetry of place) :
Chicago
those tremendous bust years those
dances in those intown college rooms
people can be tremendously giving
even in the city
fight the repetition principle
as much as well you one day do fight
minuet laughter at sight of holiday mask
as silently as perhaps tears another’s
Woolf and Eliot
Clarifying briefly, my observation yesterday that discussing good and bad writing takes us to more complex questions will, I’m sure, seem simplistic. Obviously, a large part of literary studies and other disciplines for that matter are “about” such complexities. The essay by T. S. Eliot I mentioned in fact implies some of these matters in terms of whether or not the critic/poet “of our own time, with its elaborate equipment of science and psychological analysis, is even less fitted than the Victorian age to appreciate poetry as poetry.” Virginia Woolf—and a great many people along with her and with Eliot—was asking herself some of the same questions. By 1927, when To the Lighthouse was published, these two Anglo-Modernist writers had developed rather different answers. However a longer commentary on this will have to wait as I am currently outside Barcelona and unable to consult the source books needed to do it proper justice.
I intended to post this salutation closer to this year’s Dalloway Day celebration, in mid-June. Excuses follow, but perhaps it will be of some interest as it stands.
More ideas about the poetic aspect of Virginia Woolf’s fiction have come as I’ve gone on with re-reading The Waves. Poetic obviously has different meanings. Poetry or verse, as we might also call poetry that isn’t prose. T. S. Eliot, in a short article titled Poetry in the English Century uses both words. He is writing there about the Augustan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (depending on how one defines that period). But notably for my short comment here Eliot emphasises the fact that good poets can also write good prose and good prose writers can also write good poetry,
One thing that strikes me about this topic in general is that it leads us to other considerations about the successful/unsuccessful features of what we consider to be good writing.
And when we
start on such additional considerations we are bound to go into ethical
questions, political issues, and such. The conversation then becomes longer.
But especially in times of crisis like those we face today it is a worthwhile
one. Happy Dalloway Day!
Kitchen repairs
Try to take it like a vac—time
elsewhere while the builders
undo past cooking oil foils, our
faux marble counter and a
toaster’s antique failings.
Time to score a point, dream away.
Elsewhere, you know, have
a think, gild stuff. Purr.
I see a ridge
Markedly in the usual sense.
Over the window sill,
out across nextdoor’s roofing,
on across the road,
the fields, then town.
I see a ridge
then the town proper a
definite split reversed maybe.
But there imagining alignment.
Different times of the day.
Closure.
Or perhaps ContentForm.... In any case, a recent experiment:
In the rain
Enlighten-
Ment crayon-
Hale
There that
Blue horse
Again
So sky-flighted
In the rain
News first thing this morning of the death of Ahmad Jamal. Such a very great individual and musician. Montse and I bought his album "Pittsburgh" in that honeymoon style trip we took to New York City in 1990 or 1991. I think you'd really enjoy listening to that if you can find it, which I'm sure you can. Try to hear his music, that special use he makes of sound/silence. Very wonderful, very true rhythmically.......
visit
house set way back
a few cattle flying the lawn
there is that lien
shocking some party goers
a great deal more
would still fit the lawn
graze glue and
the blue of the sky
In relation to technical
problems I’ve set up a provisional Twitter account. At the moment the account
is purely bare bones and I will be changing the name some time in April. As I
posted previously, Twitter Help/Support has been notified of the tech
problems. At present I am reading but not sending tweets.
Happy Saint Patrick's Day ! On the way to Spring. New reading includes Michel de Montaigne's essay "On the power of the imagination." Inspiring lots of thoughts on the German concept of Stimmung, meaning mood, in English. Perhaps this is a kind of poetic shifting of gears after my recent reading in Vincent van Gogh's letters. His favorite color apparently was yellow, an interesting one when it comes to mixing paint. Somewhat differently, moods can be mixed, But then much in human creation seems to depend on adding and subtracting. All the while, choosing........ Toward Spring !
As indicated in my previous post LinkedIn has been renewed. Twitter info was also to be revised but it seems this will have to wait until their security allows me to access my account. I've made them aware of the problem. It might be related to the information published on Wire magazine, link below.
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-leak-200-million-user-email-addresses/
My LinkedIn profile has been updated. I've added some information to the About section and replaced references in the Publications section which was previously lost. Thanks to all for looking in !
grasping
past the big oleander bush
backing off the tiles onto the lawn
staring at the railing
staring at the terrazzo decking of the porch
through the spaces between the balusters
between the top rail and the bottom one if you
prefer to look at it that way the way the
birds had gone silent
silence the air
traffic on the highway
about a kilometre away bikes
then the brush decorator’s brush
natural bristle
ancient the bristles nicked into at the toe
or torn half-torn away
remnants of paint (water base)
on the ferrule and
on the handle
It's well known by now that 2022 marks the centenary celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
The celebration continues of course and there is now a Twitter hashtag with information about a free online seminar of talks and readings in regard to Jacob’s Room on 26 and 27 October.
So the tag is above and I highly recommend Jacob’s Room to anyone who hasn't read it and has an interest in poetry in the wide sense of the word. I should add perhaps that I don't yet know the names of the people who will be speaking at the October gathering. I'll try to find out and post.
Two photos from the Vall Fosca region of the Pallars Jussà comarca
The trail from Gento Lake and Erica growing on the mountainside
A photo from our 2019 visit. I've posted other pictures of this area here, easily searchable happily enough. Hoping to make another visit this autumn!
Seeking cooler weather and a change of scene .... The photos show a growth of foxglove along one of the streams near the hotel and (2) spring water coming out of the mountain area.
Virginia Woolf’s poetic fiction
I’m late with this in terms of Dalloway Day 2022 but it’s on a rather constant theme in writing, that of expression and form. It’s from a longer piece in preparation.
That there is a poetic element in Woolf’s prose writing is hardly a new thought. But I think some of her short fiction contains some particularly interesting examples of this literary feature.
Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short fiction Woolf published in her lifetime. Her experimental fiction in that book is generally seen as avant-texte for the novels. One story in the collection, “Kew Gardens” (begun 1917, published 12 May1919), contains sustained sections of poetic writing about Nature. The beginning:
From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves halfway up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.
Thus we find a space in which natural things grow, an organic space touched it seems by a miniature spectrum of three primary colors. As the passage continues, the colors are spoken of as “lights” and we are told “the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.” […]
And thus my beginning. More information later. Happy Dalloway Day to all !
