I spelled “murmur” wrong repeatedly on a project for Anne’s class yesterday. OI MOI. Thinking of inviting her to my reading Tuesday night as penance. Come see the carnage: 6 pm at Cornelia Street Cafe.
In getting ready to apply for some fellowships, thinking about what to do after nyu, I came upon the “personal statement” that I wrote when applying to this phase of my life. Call me sentimental, but I still love this essay a lot. It makes me feel more firmly like myself just to read it:
The summer after I graduated from Vassar College, I moved to Maine and got a job with the Department of Parks and Recreation, driving a small tractor that, in the winter, was used to plow the snowy sidewalks. For the warmer months, this orange vehicle was outfitted with a 500 gallon water tank, its transmission rigged so that power could be diverted to fuel an internal pump. From this pump ran a hose, which coiled around a spool mounted on the front of the rig to end in a hollow metal spike of about three feet in length. My job was to visit all the newly planted saplings in the city, using a list of the trees’ addresses and their varietals (Tree Lilac, ‘Leprechaun’ Ash, Red Maple, ‘Rocky Mountain Glow’ Maple, Three Flower Maple, Flowering Crabapple, Hawthorne, and Zelkova Serrata were favorite cultivars, bred to attain no more than fifteen feet of height in order to avoid interfering with the power lines above.) When, with the help of a city map, I located my target, I would park my vehicle in neutral, engage the pump, uncoil the hose, drive the watering spike firmly into the soil below the root ball, and finally open a valve so that water would flow from the tip of the underground sprinkler, at a rate of approximately 50 gallons every ten minutes.
During the ten minute intervals for which I stood with each tree, I read books. I read Glyn Maxwell, I read Mario Luzi, I read Dante. I read the cannonical, the obscure, whatever I could find readily at the library and carry inconspicuously in my hardhat. At the time I thought I was doing it despite the world around me, despite the men in the garage who would casually go about their business in slow motion while I stood in the wide doorway, so that the sunlight might warm me while the industrial, high-pressure hose filled my small truck’s water reservoir. I suspect now that my understanding of purgatory would have differed without the greasy, half-lit vault of the garage at my back, the Sisyphean fifteen-mile-an-hour pace of my truck, the cold mornings turning without transition into hot noons and the longed-for, dark lunchroom which, once reached, bristled silently with rivalries between the men of the City Forestry Division, the head of which, it was rumored, had thrown a live chainsaw at a coworker in wrath (although he was always gentle to me, even lending me his safety harness once when the cherry-picker was parked on the Eastern Promenade, so that I could see what it was like to stand in the bucket with the metal arm of the truck fully extended, directly and invisibly beneath me, eighty feet above the highest point in the city.)
I mention these experiences to illustrate the “research method” I have held myself to these past years: not only looking at what can be found in books, which I consider an essential practice for a poet, who can always find something to learn from both the ideas of other writers and also their stylistic choices, but also extending the same involvement to the world at large and the people who inhabit it. My poems serve as crucibles to test my understanding of the ideas I encounter.
In the third canto of The Divine Comedy, Dante partially describes the indescribable Heaven by saying that only in Paradise can individuals know, and tell what they know. I would reverse the sense of this and say that to be able to know, and tell—comprehensively, elegantly, affectingly—what I know, this is the future I’m envisioning for my poetry, my aim, and my heaven.
“I’ve been struggling with this problem of the page being two-dimensional, not plastic, not an event…”
nylon + insulation + zippers = heart
solo exhibition by oh hye-seon. hearts made from nylon stockings, insulation and massive amounts of zippers.
Behind the scenes: the making of the breakfast blog!
“university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with real life.”
“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”
“There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.”
Yes poetry still makes me feel shattered.
