Conveniently provided for me by my second class’s final exam period.
This blog is officially merging back into my everything blog. Categories be damned.
Notebooks, Categories
When I was religious, I kept a prayer journal for awhile. On the first page I wrote names and moved a Post-It marker to a different name each day and prayed for that person. I used the rest of the book to write prayers and thoughts I had while praying. I did all this in a separate book from my regular journal.
I have never kept a separate dream journal because recording and analysis of my dreams often segues into plain old journaling.
During my MFA work I kept more than one kind of reading journal. During my first semester a response-type reading journal was required. These days if I want to respond to my reading I journal or blog about it. Ilya Kaminsky had me write down favorite lines – not commenting on them, just recording them, and later writing imitations. I still keep a “line book” at my desk.
For a month during my senior year of college, I tried an experiment inspired by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, who does all of her writing in spiral notebooks. “Some people buy expensive hardcover journals,” she wrote. “They are bulky and heavy, and because they are fancy, you feel compelled to write something good.” I’d been keeping a journal since sixth grade, filling over a dozen books, but for a month I tried writing everything I wanted to write in my plain writing notebook instead of a journal. When the month was over, it was with relief that I went back to one of those “bulky, heavy” journals again.
To this day, I keep both a journal and a regular 8-1/2 by 11 spiral notebook for writing practice, exercises, drafting poems, and whatever. I haven’t had to buy a notebook in years; whenever I fill one, I pull a new one from the pile of half-used notebooks left over from school and just start filling the leftover pages. I do try to date whatever I write in these notebooks, but I don’t let their mixed-up quality bother me, and using up leftovers appeals to my conservationist sensibilities. I prefer college-ruled paper, but right now I’m committed to filling all the notebooks I have before buying any new ones. By contrast, my criteria for a journal are as picky as my requirements for jeans.
There is a significant difference between the journal and the notebook in terms of use. The notebook can mostly stay in my study, though I do take it to my morning writing group (the one where we write for two hours as opposed to submitting work for critique). The journal needs to travel with me, to fit in whatever bag I’m using at the moment, to be able to be pulled out and balanced on the knee and written in on buses and park benches.
Simply put, my notebook is a workbench and my journal is a safe space, though plenty of overlap happens: plenty of poems begin in my journal, and plenty of reflection happens in my notebook.
I am continually analyzing my life’s boundaries and overlap and reconsidering where to combine and separate, especially during transitional phases, and this post-MFA reaching-toward-a-career phase is nothing if not transitional.
If you follow me over at Quasifictional, you know I have been reconsidering this very space as a separate blog, and thinking perhaps I shall re-integrate my poetry blogging and my everything-else blogging. I am no longer so pleased with the separation I have created, especially since my everything-else blog is frequently sociopolitical and I do not feel that writing is separate from that.
In my desire to get and stay connected to the poetry world, I imagined that a “poetry blog” would aid this connection. It has to an extent, but not in any way that one blog couldn’t accomplish. After all, many of my poet-blogger friends (Annelies and Karen immediately come to mind) write about poetry and everything else in one space.
It is likely this will happen, but I need to think some before I do it, as I am not good at keeping my mind made up.
You heard it here.
Today in Language News, did you know that “nother” is a word now according to Merriam-Webster?
Exciting, I know, but that’s Wednesday for you.
Through the Norton: Anna Letitia Barbauld
In keeping with Ilya’s advice, I like to have two books of poetry going at any given time, one old and one new. Recently I was pondering what classic to dig into next, and was tossing around the idea of reading some more Romantics or Victorians, those being two of my favorite periods of English literature Collected editions of Keats, Coleridge, Yeats, and the Brownings sit uncompleted on my shelves, but I couldn’t decide who to pick up first.
It came to me then that I would pick up my giant Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2 (the Romantic era through the twentieth century) and just start from the beginning. Refresh my readings of the big names, and introduce myself to all those in between whom my lit classes never touched.
So this week I’ve been reading Anna Letitia Barbauld, the very first entry. I love her already and it seems a real shame that she wasn’t covered in my English Lit 2 survey – but I’m probably going to find myself saying that about every female Romantic (with the exception of Mary Wollstonecraft – we read her). Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” is really lovely, a meditative “excursion-and-return” (the Norton’s words) which precedes Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” by twenty-five years.
Barbauld’s poem is a mediation on the night sky and the nature of the universe, infused with strong feminine imagery such as “Dian’s bright crescent, like a silver bow.” It delights consciously in the setting of the masculine sun, and the rising of the feminine moon. The speaker looks into the sky and contemplates God, draws back humbled and in awe, but in the end reasserts herself and her desire to “behold her Maker” and “Unlock the glories of the world unknown.” It’s a spectacular poem: beautiful, feminine, feminist.
With this taste of Anna Barbauld from my Norton I’m eager to read more of her work, and her name will be in my mind on my next used-bookstore excursion.
Title goes here.
I chucked “Appletree” after discovering a local lit mag with a similar name, so I’m still pondering a title for this blog.
The Notebook, The Window, The Teapot
And one more for today: from poet Alison Townsend it’s “The World Outside My Window – balancing teaching and the creative life,” which gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from this young poet and teacher. I don’t care how many times this sort of thing has been said; I need to hear it again and again. And again:
These hours in my study are a kind of practice or exercise, no diff erent from a musician practicing or an athlete training. They are what Flannery O’Connor described as “keeping an appointment with the desk each day.” With my busy schedule, I know that if I don’t write fi rst thing, there’s a good chance it may not happen. And so, while there are days that I miss, especially in the thick of the semester, I try to get to my desk regularly, knowing that it’s discipline that helps the writing come through, not inspiration. Writing begets writing.
And:
I feel extraordinarily fortunate that my job is so closely related to my art. I get to think and talk and wonder about language, writing, and literature every day, and my students endlessly inspire me in their courage and inventiveness.
Hell yes.
Hat tip to Shaindel Beers for tweeting the link.
Dreaming In Other People’s Voices
From today’s Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of the poet Charles Kenneth Williams, C.K. Williams, born in Newark, New Jersey (1936). After graduating from college, he sat down and tried to read everything he’d ever heard of. He read Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Shelley, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Miller, Frazer, Jung, Plath, and Ginsberg. He said: “I’d fall asleep every night over a book, dreaming in other people’s voices. In the morning I’d wake up and try, mostly fruitlessly, to write acceptable poems.”
(I love the idea, although if I’m going to read in the evening I have to start before I’m sleepy; otherwise I never make it through more than twenty lines or so. Also, I love writing in the morning. How about you?)
Janine Pommy Vega to perform at ACC
Tomorrow at 12:30 pm in the Dearlove Art Gallery at Adirondack Community College, Janine Pommy Vega with be performing with jazz pianist John Esposito, as part of the school’s ongoing Writers Project.
I’m very much looking forward to it and will blog on it afterward.
Writing poetry, for me, is the opposite of an addiction. It’s the high I forget as soon as it wears off, though every time I come back to it, I hope I never forget it again.
If There Is Another World
Astoria by Malena Morling: A Review
The first poem in Astoria, “If There Is Another World,” is in several ways an ars poetica for what comes after. Morling writes:
If there is another world,
I think you can take a cab there–
or ride your old bicycle
down Junction Blvd.
And the poem’s ending,
And if you’re inclined to, you can continue
in the weightless seesaw of the light
through a few more intersections
where people in cars
pass you by in space
and where you pass by them,
each car another thought–only heavier.
invites us forward, setting the tone for a volume both grounded and otherworldly.
The single detractor, for some readers, will be the occasional wordiness that distracts a bit from the image at hand: “A / red rose of the same material // as the dress was attached to / the middle of the upper / lining which was also red.” This is a small complaint in a book so lovely and enjoyable.
Lorca’s influence is notable, not just in his mention in several poems but in the gentle surrealism that enters the poems in the form of televisions washing up on the Shiomachi shore, a man in a business suit with garbage cans for wings, a man on the train eating himself up:
Limb by limb,
pant legs, shirtsleeves
shoulder blades and all.
“Seemed Pleased,” in which a little girl on a plane frankly announces that her mother is dead, recalls Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven.” A Romantic sense of the beauty in the everyday infuses this collection, especially in such poems as “Simply Lit,” in which the poet asks:
Isn’t it enough to be a person buying
a carton of milk? A simple
package of butter and a loaf
of whole wheat bread?
Throughout this book is a similar delight in everyday sights and tasks, in the imaginations of children, and in the oddities of human perception. Astoria is a beautiful contemporary volume whose poems draw me back again and again.
This review is also posted on Goodreads.
