Not finished with this yet. A kind of work in progress :
one of those free feelings
the whole smell of the
desk—empty unhurried
space—old varnish
ole
a walk a day back
exposed a big foam rubber
mattress—one
torn corner half gone
a giant something
breakfast toast
if you’ve ever
slept rough
any kind of weather
Reviewing photos from summers past. Especially like this one from Buncrana, Ireland.
(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
poem spring ‘24
on the kitchen counter
a blue plastic water bottle
nudged by a tangerine
difficult to fight against it all
what with a dan de lion
leafing green blossoming yellow
downstairs in a crack in the concrete
Another way in might be this dream?
A group of friends wanted to kill a moth.
What was the point? No matter.
They asked me to kill it.
I shied away from the furry
body, the fluttering wings
touching my face. No,
I awoke.
Cumulus
Or stratocumulus I can’t …
The way they seem just
To hang there unmoving
White and gray in a bright blue sky
Then the distant mountains bluish
The fields a shift of green then
Autumnal yellows toned oranges
Move your gaze back up
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!
three words
sun hammers my
craniocervical junction takes
a mallet to say out of here
all the while the rain
forest is going while while while
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.
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 !
Continuing to marvel over Vincent Van Gogh's descriptions of color in his paintings. As here, in an 1888 letter to his sister, Wil: "Right at the back, black cypresses against low white cottages with orange roofs--and a delicate green-blue strip of sky.... [N]ot one of the flowers has been properly drawn ... [and] they are only small dabs of color, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet, but the impression of all those colors next to one another is there--in the painting as in nature...." Painting with words! His writing brings out a lot about his theory of art, obviously.
