And I was calm as the plane went down

Sometimes I wake up with a line of a poem stuck in my head.

I've been thinking these days about that space above the things on which we focus. Sometimes, it's the sky:


Sometimes it's the walls and ceiling of a natural history diorama:


Last night I dreamed that the plane I was in clipped the Sydney Opera House before it went down. We were hovering above that eminently photographable skyline identifier.

I've never been the kind of poet that writes from dreams. I write from research. I read. I visit archives. I look through photographs. Frankly, I don't know how to write a poem from a dream; I don't know how to make that relevant to a wider audience than myself.

But I like waking up with a series of words in my head that I trust to be a line of poetry.

Mute and hardly active

Bird Specimens, Study Skins, originally uploaded by profholtz.

The past several days, I've had the distinct feeling of being mute. I feel as though I'm giving stillbirth to words.

I haven't written anything about which I'm content in longer than I can remember.

I need to be bolstered up and ordered by something, but I'm not sure what that might be.

I wish to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.

These days, I've been dreaming about Ireland, about the UK.
[Jillian Green doors everywhere.]

It happens a couple times a week and it's things as specific as basking in dappled aprication (the best way one can, I think) in some NUI garden in Galway, with the smell of it and every blade of grass making its way through my dress to my skin. It's as tangential as incorporating a street into another cityscape. It's been a room in a Cardiff of my imagination.

Tonight, it's my wish that my self-conscious will allow me to curl up in a vast and obsolete cement ear.

Hitch and turn

Sundays are my favorite. It's the time of my week I allow myself a kind of stillness in the space of the day to contemplate and stretch and read and cook and do whatever it is I'd like. I suppose I'm conventional in that way.

I spent some time yesterday listening to the absolutely dreamy Solitude Trilogy by Glenn Gould. I also watched The Weather Underground, which of course makes me think about poetry. (Documentaries do that to a girl - all that carefully constructed and overlapping language, palimpsestic discourse.)



I have been really struggling with how to negotiate my relationship to poetry lately. I haven't written anything that I would consider finished or polished in far too long. I've been re-reading old work with disdain (I know this isn't that strange an occurrence, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant).

On the other hand, I can feel the influence of the kind of thinking poetry engenders in most aspects of my life more keenly than I have in some time. Yesterday, I worked on a sound project for hours - recording it, considering how best to score it. What I have in mind, could, indeed, read like poetry, I think, but it's footing there isn't secure. I'm picturing something that would owe a great deal to a Benjamin J. Mansavage Klein score: a layered thing that you peel back and reveal to yourself in shifting ways each time. Another possibility would be to set it up as telescopic web text.

The difficulty that this little sound project is so clearly a component of is my tendency of late to write very little that isn't part of a kind of closed circuit. I can imagine this being quite a lovely sort of new media, multi-disciplinary sound poem, but I am making it for a very particular audience: me and one other person. I've been feeling similarly about the Charcot poems, too. I begin to suspect that they comprise an entire book that I wrote to myself...or perhaps to multiple selves (a self of circa 1995-1999, a self at a specific future point, et al). My insomnia series is definitely not for public consumption, but it's a really compelling project, nonetheless.

When I was a teenager I was adamant that essays and poetry were close kin, that there is a kind of hitch of logic or turn of mind that occurs in both, when they are successful. I find myself, more and more these days, full of hitch, full of turn, but lacking a way of wedding those steps to some kind of appropriate means of public consumption.

Discovering strange little poetic moments on the Web

I've done something delightful to my browser. Michael Day, an artist whose work I esteem in great measure, has put together an exhibit through Add-Art. Add-Art utilizes a firefox plug-in to replace all web ad content with art. Lovely.


Michael Day, Filter 5

So, for instance, yesterday, when I was looking up the last lines of "The Dead," I saw this:



I've noticed that having the ad content replaced changes the quality of the way I read on-line. It's more still; there are fewer moments in which I feel tugged in ten directions.

I've written a small bit of text to go along with the exhibition, which you can read here or here.

Pigeon-finity...

Things I have learned this week:

• reading about boredom does not always create enough intellectual stimulation to stave off boredom (Heidegger, I'm talking to you)
• once you start researching boredom, you will never be able to use the word "interesting" without being self-critical
• pigeons are commuters
• Wordpress is really, really annoying

I have a new post up at TheNervousBreakdown.com.  It's about superdoves.  And boredom.   Please take a look if you'd like.

The intimate mathematics of gravity on the body that has not slept

This winter more than any other I can remember, I've redefined my relationship to snow, and to walking in it.


I haven't been sleeping properly this season - it's either been over-long and oddly ineffective (waking up with every muscle thoroughly drained of energy) or it's been totally absent.

I started a poetry series of little things that I write exclusively when sleep-deprived. I wrote another just now. Last night I couldn't sleep. I sprawled out and flipped through sundry books; I took other books off my parents' shelves (Connolly's selected writings were too intense, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - with another person's marginalia - was much too compelling); I paced; I looked at things. Eventually, I took a walk in the woods that surround may parents' house. The moon wasn't out, but the snow gave off the most gorgeous ambient light.

Someone had been cross-country skiing up there. I wonder how they were able to avoid branches.

I listened to the trees creak. I held onto their trunks when the wind made them sway.

I rested at the top of the hill, determined to wait until I heard an owl. I did.

And as I started to return home, I saw a coyote. It looked at me. I looked at it. We parted ways.

I came home and thought about things. Earlier in the night, I had heard my father murmur that my mother is so beautiful as he was falling asleep. What a privilege to grow up amidst a love as deep as theirs.

Who could sleep in the face of that?