I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.
But please give me HDTV.
We had to take these two trees down today in order to get HDTV satellite reception. Well. And also because they were too close to the house, and shaded the garden. They were indeed lovely, but so is the open space. And so, I hope, will Rachel Maddow be in 1080p.
Well I’ll be goldanged. Why am I paying for therapy when I can get analyzed here quite brilliantly for free? Thank you to Alex K who identified Diving Into The Wreck as my dream association in the last post. Right down to the “body armor of black rubber,” “the grave and awkward mask.”
Adrienne Rich figures rather prominently in the memoir I’m writing, and clearly this poem has lodged itself somewhere deep in my psyche. Here’s a site that lists comments from various writers and critics about Rich’s 1972 poem. Margaret Atwood said about it in the NYT Book Review:
“This quest–the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the “I” and the “You,” the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful–is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.”
I won’t say any more about what I’m working on. I often feel like blogging is a kind of “spilling my seed,” a dispersal of my thoughts before they’re fully formed. Kinda like that puddle of ink in the last post.
Hey, are there any readers in the Twin Cities who might be interested in earning a few bucks to look up a Star Tribune article for me at the library on microfilm? Contact me here!
Thanks to everyone for all the discussion on the last post about Prop 8 and Haiti. I’m sorry I’ve been so absent. I’ve been lost in my own subterranean murk and it’s hard to surface.
I had this dream the other night that I was in a cave full of water. I had a wetsuit on, and I was adjusting my mask because I knew that I had to dive down into the water and swim underneath this big ledge. When I surfaced on the other side, I’d be out under the open sky. Some other people had already successfully done it. But I was really anxious. It was scary to dive down there without really being able to see the way out—I just had to trust that I’d find it. I was having a really hard time psyching myself up. Finally, I got my mask sealed tightly around my face and was about to jump when…I woke up.
I drew you this picture of it. Then I ran upstairs to get my ink wash, to shade the drawing, and on my way back into the office I dropped all five of my jars of watered down ink on the floor.
What could it all mean?
