Lost lists and silences.

1.

I’ve been thinking about lists— particularly the lists one is asked to assemble after the death of a loved one. The legal system frequently requests an “inventory” of the items which belonged to the loved one, a list of things which can be contested by beneficiaries and inheritants.

Lists have their silences. I did not include my mothers’ shoes in the inventory of her estate. But my mother loved shoes; she preserved her 30-year-old boots from Romania carefully in her closet. The boots were useless in Alabama, where sorority girls sport Uggs with shorts all over campuses that never see snow. Why did my mother keep those boots near the black heels she wore to work?

2.

Is silence listed or unlisted? I don’t know.

In contemporary memoir, in the industry of unpacking wounds, silence often appears as the enemy, the erasure one writes against. Silence is violence, and the text serves as indictment. But silence is also protective, a way of preserving the sacred, a way of acknowledging the unsayable. Marguerite Duras hints at this in her “Letter to Centro Racchi,” where she bows out of an invitation to speak at conference, due to fear of being asked a question which would ruin a silence central to her life. 

Duras fears being asked why her characters are always Jewish, a question she cannot answer; the possibility of speakers or audience members theorizing on an answer to what feels unanswerable, the chance " that someone might tell me why" is "intolerable" to her. She speculates that silence is what binds her and her characters to Jewishness—"We keep silent together and that makes the book."

Waking up at 16 to a world that included disaster, Duras says:

"What happened to me in between, the war, the children, love, everything fades. The Jews remain. Which I cannot speak about."


3.

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young.."

[ John Keats to Charles Brown, 30 Nov. 1820]

4.

In court, this refusal to defend oneself is often interpreted as an admission of guilt. To refuse to satisfy the answers of others is to deny the world's claim on justice, or to complicate its relation to reality. More than anything, silence challenges our ways of knowing the world. And a kept silence, an impermeable, living silence, cuts off our access to the sacred, or that which is set apart.

5.

Excerpt from Ryan Bradley’s “The Lost List” (as found in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee)

I love Ryan Bradley’s essay, “The Lost List,” which touches on the inventory of absences compiled by the mind. It prompts notebooks.

Reading Bradley, I thought of Judith Schalansky’s marvelous book, An Inventory of Losses (translated by Jackie Smith). In it, Schalansky invokes what archivists know, namely: "chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition--is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order," as "the world is a sprawling archive of itself."

The world is a sprawling archive of itself. Everything depends on what is selected as worth remembering. Or what it determined to be forgettable. What we consecrate with legend.

6.

Joan of Arc's trial is notable for its silences —- she is, after all, being tried for heresy against a god administered by rulers, or the power of those on the podium.

And she responds with refusals: "I won't answer that.... Even fire won't change my mind..... The voice has forbidden me”—-the voice being God; fire being the way she would die, condemned for relapsing into heresy, exposed to a public recitation of her countless sins, and the response: silence. Like suicide.

Who for his hunger?

In 1977, Roland Barthes gave a lecture to an academic French audience wherein he claimed that his study of semiology grew from disgust for "this mixture of bad faith and good conscience which characterizes the general morality." The mixture of bad faith and good conscience is critical both to the paranoid reading and to the virtue signaling which has evolved in order to get ahead of the anticipated bad faith.

Is it interesting that we expect to be misread?

Is is problematic that our longing for authenticity has developed into an expository seriousness?

*

The poet sits and stares at the sunrise with due disgust—she is not a morning person, not an “angel of the morning,” not one who finds release in donning lyrca and running around the block or counting her steps.

*

There is a short poem by Victoria Chang which fascinates me.

To The Margin

I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs.

Notice how things accumulate in a sort of negative theophany…. I will never love.

*

I will never stop seeing a god in our hungers for recognition.

*

Trauma is persuasive precisely because it ends a conversation – there is nothing to discuss after someone has laid human pain on the table and labeled it thus. Perhaps it is better to describe trauma as manipulative rather than persuasive; it speaks by silencing. By making speech impossible.

*

The underside of the market for self-improvement is the growing aisle of trauma products. Not every behavior or thought can be credited to the burgeoning industry of trauma. In the US, the market for trauma includes sub-aisles like gun culture.

I will never stop seeing a gun in the eyes of every human who bump-stocks their American Jesus.

*

Our hunger becomes text.

Our fears take shape in figurative language.

"What we know that we will soon no longer have before us, this is what becomes an image," wrote Walter Benjamin. The rotten scent of ungathered plums dangling in the air. The vines whose flowers open at night and emit a fragrance to attract nocturnal pollinators. Not all poems do their work in the daylight —-

*

The language of the promise presses up against Paul Celan's poetics, or borrows from the apophatic nature of communication by depriving it of testability. The modern promise is scientific, and therefore testable, or subject to verifiability. Testing the promise is part of the nature of a promise, as Stanley Cavell said.

*

What is the name for a prophet who never prophecies, or who gets all their predictions wrong? Are they still a prophet, or does their being and identity depend on having kept their prophecy? How does the prophet profit from speculation?

In the same 1977 inaugural lecture to College de France, Roland Barthes said: "I cannot function outside language, treating it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon."

And yet, he does. He does both. Who, shall I say, is calling?

Rabinovich's "Murphy Laws" for poetry.

The Murphys Laws of Poetry

Poetic Murphy’s law: When someone thinks he can write a poem, he always does.

Murphy’s Law of Duality: When someone thinks he can write two poems, he’ll end up with a triptych.

Corollary of Archimedes: A poem expands to fill the entire volume.

Exception to the Murphy’s law: Any fool can write free verse.

First corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed.

Amendment to the First Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed, even unprintable.

Second Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: All poems, however unprintable, will end up on the web.

Sequelae to the Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Not a single poem will be read.

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics: Editing makes everything worse.

First Principle of Poetic Evolution: “...so peerless amid all the Amazons. com...”

Conclusions of the Emergency Orthodontist: Rhymes, teeth, and barstools fly Saturday nights.

First Axiom: Any poem can be set to music.

Corollary (the all-thumbs rule): Of the myriad tunes, they will invariably choose the one guaranteed to do the greatest damage.

Second Axiom: There’s a doggerel for every tune.

The Law of Poetic Frequencies: Anthologies automatically open on the page with the host’s poems.

The Cardinal Rule of Poetic Merit: Real poetry is what I and my friends write.

First Rule of Literary Criticism:: Shakespeare is dead.

First corollary to the First Rule of Literary Criticism: Hecht is also dead.

First Law of Publishing: The shelf life of a book is inversely related to the poet’s expiration date.

Second Law of Publishing: Publishing in the vanity press is better than vain attempts at finding a publisher.

The Main Rule of Literary Criticism: I don’t like your yellow blouse.

The Law of Humpty-Dumpty who sat on Wall Street (next stop Bowery): One writes for children the same way one writes for adults, only worse.

The Law of Poetic Linearity: The author’s enthusiasm is directly proportional to the reader’s dismay.

Poetic Relativity (e=mc2): Poems travel with the speed of blight.

Third Law of Publishing: Poetic license comes with a flea and tick collar.

Mikhail Rabinovich translated by Anna Rozenshtein

*

Mikhail Rabinovich was born in 1959, in Leningrad, where he worked as an engineer. He came to New York in 1991. Here he works, of course, as a computer programmer. Rabinovich is his pen-name, though his real name is also Rabinovich. His works came out in print in four countries, ranging from "The New Russian Word" to Odessa's "Fountain" and from the "Slovo/Word" journal to "The Independent Newspaper". Mikhail was a collaborator in ten prose and poetry almanacs, published on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. He is a winner of the Internet competition "Russian America" (as part of "Tenet-2002" project). He authored two books: Far Away from Me, a book of short stories, as well as In the Light of Unclear Events, a collection of poems.

More from Mikhail Izrailevich Rabinovich in translation.

In praise of the cento, with free PDF at-home workshop.

The cento is a poetic form that relies on appropriation. It is a collage built from lines taken from other sources.

In Latin, cento means ‘‘patchwork’’, evoking the collage-like nature of combinations. In a patchwork quilt, the creative freedom comes from two places:

1 the choice of fabrics (i.e. the lines selected)

2 the particular stitching between patches, or how the poet combines the various lines (i.e. enjambment, spacing strategies, fragmentation, use of the field, etc.)

There are many cento strategies, and the form really allows you to be creative about spacing, attribution, interlocutors, line breaks—it’s a wonderful form to use in order to study poetry more closely.

A cento has the thrill of a logic puzzle, or labyrinth, without a particular ending. There are many persmissions in the cento form, and each permission is a creative opportuntity, or a way in which things could be otherwise.

Play with lineation/enjambment so that selected lines are not always one complete line. Mix different source lines by stitching together fragments. Change tenses (or not). Add conjunctions/prepositions(or not). Use the original punctuation, or add your own. Use the original capitalizations, or change them to fit your plan for the cento.Use the cento in a novel way to create a tribute to a poet or school of poets…

Anyway, here is a free PDF you can download and share to play with the cento. Just click on the image below (whose illustration is by Alice Notley and part of one the writing prompts) and enjoy.

And here’s a sample writing prompt from the cento fever workshop.

Mary Ruefle: The Utmost of It

“The most of it was her handwriting.”

Mary Ruefle is the poet of the Utmost of It.

Or, that’s what I call her in my head, and on the pages of the notebooks where I address her, or question her, or simply continue the dialogue my words find with her own work, and how she sees the world.

Technically, Mary Ruefle is the poet-prosodist of The Most of It , "her first book of prose" titled after one of the 30 pieces, which is titled after its own first line: "My Aunt Miel, who never married and whom I never met, was eccentric, and the most of it was her handwriting. "

Aunt Miel was Mary’s mother's sister. The most of it was her handwriting. Miel worked as a Singer sewing machine model who sat in windows and doorways to demonstrate the aura of electric sewing to others. She was beautiful, alluring, and she wrote long letters that arrived on Thursdays which everyone wanted to read but no one could because her lettering was too large. Those too-big letters, that too-big life, that ginormous persona imagined by the speaker who remembers a game she loved playing when she was six.

The game involved standing inside of Miel's O's, and then lying down, allowing them to encircle her perfectly, hopping from to to o in "soon,", while her own sister “crucified herself” on the t's.

Both girls "would like our letters side-by-side"when the word "Tom "appeared the sisters are performing for their mom but also sharing in the letter from their aunt.

And the question about letters is how one can live in them, or how one can relate to them across time. Miel’s 25-foot letters couldn't be kept or preserved, but they are also the combination of every child's dreamed freedom — page 63.


”The most of it was her.”

Confession: I love taking one of Ruefle’s claims and cutting off the end to see how the claim walks afterwards. The most of it was her handwriting. But the most of it was also her, somehow, this woman named Aunt Miel who was living in a world the child could only imagine.

“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips.”

Here is how Ruefle qualifies that metaphor.

From Ruefle’s My Private Property.

Ruefle’s irreverent reverence is epistemologically contagious.

I mean: one way to play, or to write, or to do whatever it is we do with a pen and paper, begins with borrowing the head of someone’s else’s statue and building your own torso, maybe adding hips, or even fleshing out feet.

I mean: “Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips…” is where you begin.

“Fear has only the word ear inside of it.”

Ruefle frequently uses a word as a starting point for a poem or essay, and then circles it, poking at it, shining light on it, setting child minds around it, exploring the ways in which the word relates to life.

Sometimes, she leaves this word in the title.

Her essay, "On Fear," is wonderful; I return to it constantly, particularly her articulations of dread. And I’m excerpting this portion just to emphasize how Ruefle literally plays with etymyology —- how she treats etymology as a form of human play rather than scholarship.

From “On Fear” by Mary Ruefle.

“I want to go into the forest and collect lichen.”

"How could I recognize the dead lichen among the living lichen?" Ruefle asks in "Lichen" when trying to find a way to collect forest lichen without causing any harm by "kidnapping a lichen mother".

“I had to admit I could not tell the difference between the living and the dead,” the speaker acknowledges.

Because the poet knows the lichen is "not of " her species, she knows that she does not know the shape of their lives. Nor could she know the shape of their death – although she concludes that lichen "certainly did not bury their dead" because she seems to associate this burying only with humans. The evidence that lichen bury their dead would likely look similar to evidence that lichen did not bury their dead, which is to say—- how would a human know?

"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he previously imagined possible." This is how she opens "Hazeline," trying to figure out when her father died if he claims to have died during surgery.

What happens to those who die and live? What does it mean to die for a minute? At what point does one become officially resurrected? Ruefle's interest in theology intersects with moments of human absurdity—and I love this aspect of her irreverence.

Look, sometimes the poet destroys us by redefining a word with an image. “Deconstruction” will never be the same.


Utmosting Our Way Through the Dark

I want to end by sharing the talk on bringing joy to your writing practice which Ruefle delivered at the Bennington Writing Seminars Commencement Address on June 11, 2022.

And to draw attention to how Ruefle plays with words in order to parse them, how, for example, she evokes the relationship between “poetry” and “poverty.” But also to note her respect for ruins—for the ruins of books, humans, stones, artwork, civilization, idols, “slow-motion cherry blossoms,” and anything we don’t see disappearing, anything which disappears without giving a damn whether we see them doing their disappear-tango thing.

I love her.

I love how she quotes Tom Cruise so that I can laugh and cry at the futility of this calling, or the absurdity of dreams, hopes, beliefs, hero stories, Tom Cruise in general…

“Words, words, words”—Ruefle, more than any contemporary poet, prepares me to write the incredible joy of not knowing anything at all, and watching in fascination as language rips open the seams and mouths bloom like a run in the crotch of tan pantyhose while standing in line, waiting for a sanctified wafer which may also be the body of a human who died.

Annie Ernaux on abortion (from IWWG free-write August 2022).

[This is an excerpt from a longer workshop given for International Women Writer’s Guild this summer. Other readings for this workshop included "Etiology" by Linda Gregg; "Short Talk on Defloration" by Anne Carson; "The Little Girl Dreams of Dying" by Cameron Awkward Rich; Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920, collage, mixed media; "Cut with the Kitchen Knife" by Rosmarie Waldrop; Carlos Drummond de Andrade's "In the Middle of the Road" (trans. by Elizabeth Bishop); Robert Desnos, "Dove of the Ark" (translated by Timothy Adès); Linda Pastan's "The Almanac of Last Things". If you’d like a copy of the handout, email me and I’ll be happy to share it.]

It Keeps Happening: Annie Ernaux’s temporal strategies

Each word has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning. 


My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry so much that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. Abortion is one of those words — it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. Abortion, in many ways, is meaningless when one says it because it's abstraction overwhelms its contextual reality. As a word, abortion is like God, nearly meaningless and certain to evoke strong emotions.

If anything is still interesting about abortion, it is this abstraction—this failure to mean what we expect when we use it.

Epigraph from Ernaux’s Happening.

One of my favorite French authors, Annie Ernaux, titled her book about abortion Happening.

In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux  found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to break the silence of shame. 

At a time when abortion was illegal in France, Ernaux attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died.

Happening is not the same thing as happened. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time. 

Although the book includes a memoir, it has been called an "eponymous novel." Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errors of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. But abortion is the subject today—and abortion is a topic that haunts the author —it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Chist. Throughout the book she wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it. Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. 

*

Am I the author of my abortion? I have asked this question of the writer who uses my name. It is a question I love for its frictions.

Two more thoughts:

  1. "I shall have no more power over my text," Ernaux writes. Writing about it will also have its aftereffects—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.

  2. "This thing had no place in language," Ernaux says of abortion. It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: "(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy." 

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable, the marginalized. 

To quote Ernaux's book:

I want to pause at this invisible ellipsis—or the breakoff point—the cliff labeled “This investigation” which waits for you to stand at its steep edge and look down. There is no “correct” moral response or sentiment: I laughed during my abortion. I laughed at the absurdity of suddenly finding myself fallen. A “fallen woman” may find the fall interesting.

The war and W. H. Auden: Britten, Mann, and pacifisms in poetry.

In the spring of 1939, at a talk sponsored by the League of American Writers, W. H. Auden fell in love.

Hair tumbling over his eyes, jacket wrinkled, Auden read "Elegy to Yeats" aloud as the much-younger Chester Kallman listened with interest. After the reading, Kallman used Thomas Rogers, Auden's  favorite Renaissance poet, as currency to begin a conversation. One conversation later, the two became lovers.

"I am mad with happiness," Auden gushed in a letter to his close friend,  Benjamin Britten. 

Auden and Kallman.

Auden and Kallman set out to travel across the US by train and bus.

Auden expressed his hatred for the "unspeakable jukeboxes... the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs" as he worked on a prose treatise, "The Prolific and the Devourer," addressing the question of artistic duty during wartime.

On a stop in Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood told Auden that, like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, he had become a pacifist, rejecting the impetus to kill the young German men he had once loved or cared for. "The trouble about violence is that most of the punishment falls on the innocent," Auden wrote, channeling Isherwood. In this treatise, Auden concluded that the works of war should be left "to those who believe in them," but he didn't draw a hard line against soldiering, or the artist who felt called to serve in uniform.


*

Klaus and Erika Mann issued warnings of what they had witnessed. In 1930, the Nazi press denounced Erika as "a flat-footed peace hyena". She was committed to fighting fascism continuously. Klaus had lost his German citizenship in 1934 for publishing Die Sammlung,  a journal by artists exiled in Amsterdam. His brother, Thomas Mann, was still (cough) figuring things out.

"Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish," Klaus Mann wrote from the house in New York.Austrian novelist Franz Werfel was married to Alma Mahler, who had brought a suitcase carrying Mahler's scores, Bruckner's Third Symphony, and Warfel's manuscript in progress. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped bring them to safety once they passed through the Pyrenees. While American intellectuals debated liberal responses to tyranny, Hitler demanded absolute unity from Germans. 

When Hitler's armies invaded Poland, it was clear the European war had begun.

Auden wrote the poem, "September 1st, 1939" in commemoration of that day which represented, for him, the  immensity of history. While he supported the war against Hitley, Auden also saw the Hitler in each of us, meaning that war would not resolve what education failed to alter. 

*

Edward Mendelson expands on the two sides of Auden in “The Secret Auden”:

At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.

Certainly, Auden used poetry and correspondence to untangle his thoughts. (A critic described Auden's poems as "colloquies between various quarters of his mind.)

"I'm delighted to see my friends for an hour," Auden wrote, "and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo."  The persistent problem was truth – or not knowing how to judge one's actions given that hindsight would define the good, the just, the right. In the US – as in his mind, Auden lacked a foundation for ethics - the leap of faith felt too loose, religious, and unmoored.

Pacifism could not bring about world peace by seeking individual incorruptibility; in this, he agreed with Niebuhr. Lack of action in the face of catastrophe could not be ethical, and Isherwood's commitment to yoga and personal development seemed like an easy way out from the dark side of humanity. This tension inherent in magical thinking would bring American writing communities, especially those centered and appropriation of Eastern religious practices, to the point where counterculture went mainstream. Only the sacred had an excuse to bail out – but the secular sainthood competed with the sainthood of the monk for a world one had abandoned. 

In a letter to Britten, Auden poked at his comforts and defenses, urging him to risk coming out, or to risk standing for something, which is how Auden was construing this risk at the time. To quote the letter:

After spending time in the Midwest, and writing a libretto about the Midwest, Auden told Charles Miller "the land of the lonely" was the "true America," and he wished someone would write a novel about it.

“The Lonelies could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel,” Auden wrote, adding:

Auden blamed Benjamin Britten's musical impasse on his avoidance of openly-lived homosexuality. He introduced Britten to Arthur Rimbaud, inspiring the cycle of settings Britten would name, Les Illuminations. The cycle repeated the phrase: "I alone have the key to this savage parade." 

W.H. Auden; Sir William Menzies Coldstream; Benjamin Britten

Britten's essay, "An English Composer Sees America," was published as he and Auden worked on the operetta, Paul Bunyan. What Britten and Auden seemed to want from this musical was the depiction of American mythos, and the weakness at the heart of this mythos, namely,  that freedom created new moral challenges.

In an essay on Paul Bunyan, Auden articulated it: "what happens when men refuse to accept this necessity of choosing, and are terrified or careless about their freedom, we have now only too clear a proof."

The prologue of this American Opera included a trio of wild geese announcing the coming of Paul Bunyan - the religious exceptionalism was there, but the message was not well-received by critics staring at war in Europe. The disconnect continued.

Janet Flanner's essay, "Paris, Germany," first published in the New Yorker in 1940, attempted to convey the complexity of the exile community Just as the US press started to complain of an excess European presence in media — "an intellectual blitzkrieg"—-that dog-whistled to chauvinist xenophobia. 

In a letter to his sister, Britten said that he was "definitely disliked" for being British and "because I'm not American (everything is nationalistic)" and because he wasn't "educated in Paris."

*

On the day France fell to Germany in World War II, Auden gave the commencement address at Smith College. He said death and fear made it difficult to stop and think, to consider what was happening: "Nevertheless, that is our particular duty in this place at this hour. To try and understand what has come upon us and why."

*

Auden was practical rather than mystical. When he won the National Medal for Literature in 1967, he refused to accept it in Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian, where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics and propaganda.

When Time magazine offered him $10,000 for a short essay on empires, Auden wrote “The Romans”, and maybe this is a good place to end my notebook dump, quoting Auden’s essay:

“I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.”

*

Auden’s poem, “The Geography of the House,” was dedicated to Isherwood.

"I shouldn't have minded a vestigial tail," Louise Bogan said, after telling Auden about a man who sobbed when confessing his vestigial tail to a fellow cab-rider.

"No," Auden replied, "one can always stand what what other people have."

Homophones.

Homonyms are words which share a name, or “have the same name” (etymologically), whether by spelling or sound, despite the vest difference between those two variance. Usually, homonyms refer to words which are spelled the same . . . Like the arid desert heart of the one who deserts you at Piggly-Wiggly.

Homophones are words which sound the same but are spelled differently, and mean different things . . . Like except and accept. Social life feels very accepting until it begins excepting you out of it. The film reel makes it difficult to discern what is real. To write the wrong is not to right it. I'll find you in the aisle with an ad for a tropical isle beside it.

The altar is where flesh alters itself into bread. The band got banned by local officials. A bear who is bare comes bearing acorns. The bread we eat, the habits bred by shared meals. To sell one's blood includes tiny red cells. The cord on the floor, the chord in the air. To elicit a smile, or to provoke desire with an illicit photo. The fairy has wings. The ferry has an engine and floats on water. Someone ferried us here. We marry and hope to be merry. He may mince words when looking for mints.

The oar helps move the boat, or something, in the sentence where the ore is buried beneath the earth. Each soil has its ores.

To sew is to connect with a thread. So, he said. Sow the plants seed that food may come of it.

One may pray for mercy. Another may prey on the merciful.

His hands on my waist, the waste of clean water.

One particular beast’s tail is another's tale to tell. Yet another’s tell to read and recognize in the game.

We is massive. But the wee is tiny. And oui, elsewhere, is yes.

Anyway, it’s fun to keep a running list of homophones in your poetry notebook. They make great hinge words and have the capacity to turbo-charge a volta.

[Motivating myself to work on this project by collaging and making an image public— this is my tactic. This is how I nudge myself towards the things I set aside in draft…]

Here’s what Charles Simic wrote in his essay, “The True Adventures of a Franz Kafka’s Cage”:

While the bickering of two housewives over whose son broke the window of a funeral parlor was putting the judge to sleep, a policeman brought into the court room a birdcage accused of propositioning a street sparrow to have a go at one of its swings.

A literary cage is, I think, a lovely conceit.

On journals and notebooks as genre, briefly.

In his 1918 journal, Andre Gide wrote:

It is from the point of view of art that what I write should be judged, a point of view never taken, or almost never taken by the critics… Moreover, it is the only point of view which is not exclusive of any other.


The journal continuously revisits itself and its conclusions in light of new reading or knowledge. The production of self, in this form, is tentative: it is willing to be rearranged or remade.

Tentativity occupies time and space differently from rigidity. The marble statue is rigid — it asserts itself against tentativity. The notebook is fluid.

As Roland Barthes remarks in his first published essay, “Andre Gide and His Journal”: "The stream is more durable than marble…”

The ellipsis is Barthes’ own. The ellipsis, itself, is common to journals, a marker of where a thought trails off to be picked up later.


And there is something poetic about this notebook’s ellipses — some way in which the uncertainty of self’s relation to time crosses both forms.

I’m thinking of Frank Bidart’s “Self-Portrait, 1969",” which uses ellipses in order to move back and forth between the self in the world and the self in the mind’s eye.

“He’s still young,” still overdetermined by what the word young allows or evokes.

Bidart plays with the eye a bit: this poem is composed of two stanzas, but the extreme indentation of “Once, instead,” makes it seem like three stanzas exist. The use of the field, the long blank before the qualifying condition, drags its finger along the rim of a sink, and all that white porcelain.

When I begin this poem
to see myself
as a piece of history . . .

Frank Bidart wrote this somewhere, in a poem, according to my notebook, which lacks the poem’s title and imagines each line as the first line of a triptych.

There is a way in which the journal or notebook genre enables the placing of words behind each other rather than after each other — it is disorienting to be the speaker inside a chronology. No conclusions can be drawn about the subject who is the speaker.

”I was writing this poem about someone else,” Samuel Cheney says in “This Was Before The Wedding.”

I was someone else before the wedding. Who am I now?

“I lost my father before I was twelve years old,” Gide writes.

From Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate, translated by Dorothy Bussy.

The day when Gide’s mother “changed the black ribbon in her morning cap for a mauve one” . . .

Should I watch With Andre Gide? Isn’t this question mark actually wanting to be an ellipsis . . .

On a different note, Roland Barthes published an essay titled “Deliberation” about journals and notebooks. In it, he explains why he didn't keep a journal; and why the notebook, as a text, to him seems to fail, or to be implicated in the aesthetics of failure. But some of his favorite writings were notebooks, particularly those of Andre Gide. Imagine the ellipsis.

Hashtag with poetry prompts from Kim Addonizio.

So much cruelty is framed as truth-telling on social media. #hottakefromhell I’m studying myself in the frame of social media posts, learning about this woman named Alina whose performance of perfection is stippled with protests to the contrary. #hownottoparent I’m a frame within a frame of competitive marketing in a publishing industry increasingly reliant on authors to hustle their books or mothers to worship their children or grandparents to repost cringe-worthy memes. #therealme doesn’t believe in competing for human relatives and attention but I have so many friends who #tribe, and I'm beguiled by new apps that commodify the market of self-improvement metrics which give us a sense of control by marking tiny achievements. Socialized early by school grades and tests, do we ever outgrow that training to display how well we’re doing? #performativewellbeing correlates with inflatable ego, which others evaluate on the basis of the size of the inflatable jumper one can afford for a child’s birthday party. #whocares #hashtageachheart #signifysomething #googleityrself

#poetryexercisesfromKimAddonizio

  1. Find a line by someone else and look for different nouns or adjectives beginning with the same letter as the line. Play with substitutions.

  2. Write a poem for the end of something with "lost" in the title. See "Lost Poem" by Ted Berrigan.

  3. Name a specific time or place in your title and then write a poem about it.

  4. Write ten openings that begin in media res.

  5. Write a poem to the future modeled on Brecht's "To Those Born Later" or Ruth Stone's "Look to the Future."

  6. "Jot down a list of things you see around you and fall recklessly in love with all of them."

  7. Make a list of 50 favorite words and write a poem with them. Then experiment with framing by adding in words from a cookbook or a how-to text.

  8. Write a lyrical list poem like A. Van Jordan's "afterglow" which uses slashes to build pauses through a string of associations.

  9. Anaphora is the repetition of an opening word or phrase. Write one that borrows "but" or "the bluest".

  10. Write a poem that repeats the last word or phrase of a line in the beginning of the next line.

  11. Article, adjective, noun: article, adjective, noun, verb, adverb.

  12. Write an opening sentence. Now change period to comma and add "as if" or"because" or etc or although.