Friday, December 26, 2008
Twenty Buck Day
Four more greeting cards in mailbox today, three from online acquaintances out west, the other included a check for $20 (thanks, Edie). The card exchange list I'm on went out late this year, you can send to anyone & as many or few as you want. My cutoff was last Saturday's 10 am corner mailbox pickup. Every mailbox around here has a 10 am pickup.
I like my new winter parka jacket, it's pretty light weight, light charcoal, warm enough. The first day I wore it I dripped a little bit of coffee on it. Trying to clean it with a brand new sponge left a pale water stain, & I thought, this won't do, the jacket will be a mess in no time, maybe that's why it was 1/2 price. It had a new jacket smell & was wrinkled from being folded tightly in the small mailing bag. The jacket is not waterproof. Wednesday I got caught out in a rain shower, the jacket got wet, & when it dried the water stain, a lot of the wrinkles, & new jacket smell were gone. Just needed a washing to break it in.
Mulling over inaugural ceremony poet Elizabeth Alexander's advice to "write the poem and worry about who reads it later, to bring forth that which calls from within and separate that act from the matter of a poem’s public life." Don't write to publish. Which leaves unanswered the matter of a poem's "public life." I have held back a number of poems from publication, even though anyone likely to be offended wouldn't have read them in obscure little literary 'zines. I have read them to audiences. There are experiences of which I wish to write, & post or publish, but haven't because I wondered if there was a consensus view or memory of them. I'm not a historian. Nobody else involved in those experiences is interested in discovering a common narrative, or we would've been writing one together for the past two decades. But there is madness in it, & I suppose only novelists are really attracted to that theme. Poets, of course, are mad, & we know it, so we focus on hypothetical sanities. I've never been obliged to censor myself.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I like my new winter parka jacket, it's pretty light weight, light charcoal, warm enough. The first day I wore it I dripped a little bit of coffee on it. Trying to clean it with a brand new sponge left a pale water stain, & I thought, this won't do, the jacket will be a mess in no time, maybe that's why it was 1/2 price. It had a new jacket smell & was wrinkled from being folded tightly in the small mailing bag. The jacket is not waterproof. Wednesday I got caught out in a rain shower, the jacket got wet, & when it dried the water stain, a lot of the wrinkles, & new jacket smell were gone. Just needed a washing to break it in.
Mulling over inaugural ceremony poet Elizabeth Alexander's advice to "write the poem and worry about who reads it later, to bring forth that which calls from within and separate that act from the matter of a poem’s public life." Don't write to publish. Which leaves unanswered the matter of a poem's "public life." I have held back a number of poems from publication, even though anyone likely to be offended wouldn't have read them in obscure little literary 'zines. I have read them to audiences. There are experiences of which I wish to write, & post or publish, but haven't because I wondered if there was a consensus view or memory of them. I'm not a historian. Nobody else involved in those experiences is interested in discovering a common narrative, or we would've been writing one together for the past two decades. But there is madness in it, & I suppose only novelists are really attracted to that theme. Poets, of course, are mad, & we know it, so we focus on hypothetical sanities. I've never been obliged to censor myself.
Labels: about writing, home furnishings
