Sunday, February 7, 2010

Riotously Realized Dreams and New Friends

(A bit belated, as I'm easily distracted)

First: I am in no way a football fan, in fact, I'm pretty rabidly anti-football, but there is something to be said for a city, no--a whole state-- so full of electric ecstasy, of pure, shrieking feeling so thick and real you could swim through it, slather it on your soul. In the end, I still appreciate the story of the underdog's triumph. Also, it's nice to have Louisiana come out on top once in a while. So congratulations, Saints.

Second: I have a new best friend and constant companion, courtesy of my poetry writing class: Robert Lowell, father of the Confessionalist movement. Of course, he's dead, so I'll have to get to know him through one of his books, Life Studies, which I am to keep on me at all times. I am to converse with and consult him on various things (pizza toppings, life changing decisions, etc.). Again, this is using the book of course. Reminiscent of Ouija, I'm to ask the question, and randomly flip to a page and point to a line, which is his response. As dorky as it sounds, I was kind of excited when this was assigned. I like making friends! Luckily, we seem to be getting along so far. I'm glad my ghost oracle isn't Sylvia Plath, I heard she can be kind of a bitch. Here was our first Q&A session:

Q: So, Robert Lowell, what’s our relationship going to be like?

A: faced with this opinion, pored over his book of instructions

Q: Way to be literal, Robert. How do you feel about this inhospitable winter?

A: sensationally sober

Q: What did you think about the 50s?

A: At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street.

Q: Rather positive. How would you have lived your life differently?

A: it was the eroding necessity of moving with him, of keeping in step.


Q: What was most valuable to you?

A: Those dinners, those apologies!


Since then, he has also instructed me to go home because I was sick, laughed with my over the drunken antics of my boyfriend & co., and chided me for not doing my homework. I'd say we're off to a great start. In honor of our new friendship, I'll post one of his poems here.



Epilogue by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's
illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the ph
otograph
his living name.


Thanks, Robert. Rob? Bobby? Still haven't settled on what to call him. I'll ask him about it later.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Itch I Can't Scratch

Let's play catch-up:

I had a lovely domestic Christmas (there's a rant in there somewhere about the relationship between me and domesticity, but it's gotten all tangled up along the way), a cozy New Year's, and I just passed a year and a half with my boyfriend. I've just started in on a semester that looks like it will be somewhat challenging but informative and ultimately productive.

In other words, everything is going pretty damn dandy. Which means, of course, that some messy complication is about to round the corner full speed and knock everything out of my grasp. But these things do happen.

I won't lie; being content makes me a little itchy. I find myself idling over the price of airplane tickets or craigslist postings for apartments and jobs in more romantic cities. If no one is looking, I crack open unlocked doors just to make sure they don't lead to Narnia. (No, I don't do that--I'm too much a coward, and that's the problem.) I am torn between crazy week-long benders that end with me waking up in Toronto or Istanbul and plodding along to maintain my grade point average that they tell me will get me somewhere someday.

But this itchiness has been mitigated recently by my meanderings back into the world of poetry. If I can climb and adventure and do crazy loop-de-loops with my mind, then surely I can stay where I am with my body... for now.


Creative product wise: Planning to work on my formal poetry, hoping to improve my meter and general sense of things poetic. Taking a poetry writing class will force me to actually produce this semester. ...meybe?