Today I will different

You wake, you say
today will be different, today
I will do what I do what I must what I will
today I will          efficient        today
tasks completed      today       organized    today
my desk in order.
Today I will          different.
Do today as if some other un-waylaid by wind

or whim or want.  Someone of will, not wanton

wondering. What song will you sing then when

samba flings you circumsolar when

lightslant leaps across your foot when
urgency, like sucking sand, slips seaward and

beckons you to swim?

 Notes
This poem was written for my friend, Gary Markle; I've rewritten it for Poem in Your Pocket day.
The photo is of a cardon cactus blooming near Salinas Bay, on Isla Carmen, Baja California Sud, Mexico in early April 2017. 

Incidents in a Life (Book I--Abridged Version)

 The shadow play, through dirty windows, of morning light on a basement wall

Book I Things Do Happen

(Abridged Version)

--Chapter 0--

(opens in shadows)

What went on before I was or did.

--Chapter 1--

(something flickering)

And then I was born.

--Chapter 2--

(there might be light)

What went on that I can hardly remember.

--Chapter 3--

(certain shapes appear)

I might have learned to read.

--Chapter 4--

(lines, delineations)

Writing doesn't come easily; I'd rather draw a tree.

--Chapter 5--

(a trajectory perhaps)

Things go on happening that I'd like to report; things go on that I'd rather forget.

--Chapter 6--

(the road runs on)

Sometimes, memory fails me, and this, too, becomes something I fear.

--Chapter 7--

(the cliff edge)

Things neglected; things left to happen.

--Chapter 8--

(pebbles scrabble over the edge)

I know I'll die but I'm not dead yet.

Mining old journals

Every season proposes itself anew; we think we've been here before, generally speaking, if not here exactly. Those of us who have the bad habit of keeping journals might, however, testify otherwise. How often I repeat myself, and then forget I've done so.

17 November is forever a melancholic day in my books, dark, sleepy, overwhelming, insomniac, filled up with too many tasks, and, across 30 years, rough stabs at poetry.

In 2012 I wrote:

  Once upon a time, or so it seemed, I forgot nothing. Now my memory flaps and comes unraveled like the clothing pegged to the line and whipping in the breeze. Everything tatters over time.

Weary.  A surge of sunshine would make a difference. So too would more sleep. A walk. The end of terms. It is coming. So much to do still: I shall never approach having done enough.

Outside, the pop pop of someone shooting. Duck hunting? Or chasing deer out over the peninsula: Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! I try to ignore it, but that doesn't work very well. Whatever is fine, we humans must kill. 

In 2011:

Rain in the night, and leaks of course....I am so tired, so deeply asleep, so immersed in dreams that are but tatters and shadows of colours now; I remember nothing but waking to find the cat curled into my side, her fur soft beneath my hand, sleep like a dark cowl upon my face....

Have to go for a long walk soon!

In 2008:

The fire burns, the dogs sigh and rearrange themselves nearby, adjusting both limbs and jowls.  I pour myself a glass of milk, drink, and try to settle myself so that I can go back to sleep.  The power went off just after dark--we'd fed the dogs and luckily, I'd made a vegetable caraway stew in the afternoon. It was done and and still warm. So we ate early by candlelight, stoked the fire, listened to the sudden eerie silence at the center of the storm, and then the rain and wind slamming into the walls and windows again. Finally, in darkness, we went early to bed.

And then I awoke. [A long list of tasks follows].

In 1996:

3 am. I wake up in a sweat, the water just pouring off of me. I've been in a deep sleep. I feel vulnerable, frightened, but I don't know why. I feel desolate, unable to protect myself.  I am afraid I won't have any time to myself. [A long list of tasks and social engagements follows.] I am afraid of leaving the idiotic safety net of my job, of indebtedness, of immobility, of temporal madness. Making time more elastic--something I have to learn.

In 1982:

I'm too tired to write a poem--it's about 2 am and I have to get up tomorrow morning for brunch with A's mother, but I still saw something:

Artificial feather roses and
old movie posters and
tattered postcards and
block party announcements and
old bead necklaces in 
small wooden boxes with
cough drop wrappers and a
button collection and 
the radio playing muzak-jazz

And I'm
thinking about how
the skin of my brain is stretching
and cracking
and there is a sharp pain
in the small of my back.

These beds may be too narrow,
but who cares?

Pictures were taken over the course of several autumns at various locations on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia--Sober Island, Taylor's Head Provincial Park, private lands near Malay Falls, and in West Quoddy.

When Last I Died, An Interview with Sophie Calle

Let me be clear; it is she--Sophie Calle--who asks these questions.  I simply answer, as truthfully as I can. (I'm sorry if you don't believe me. You should.)

--When did you last die? 

--Late last night, three hours before the moon set. And then I woke again.

--What gets you out of bed in the morning?

--In this season? The thought of getting back into it at night. And sometimes the promise of a hot eucalyptus scented bath. Coffee keeps me up, as does the endless list of tasks life has handed me.  I cross one off, and it adds three. Or five, or ten. This is why I have to die every night; it is a way of resetting the clock.  But, alas, the list survives.

--What became of your childhood dreams? 

--They were all nightmares from which I am glad to have awakened.

--What sets you apart from everyone else? 

-- Nothing. I wear others' castoffs, and can hardly remember the last new pair of shoes.  In any case, I will surely fit into another pair someone else has tossed aside.

--What is missing from your life? 

--Nothing and then everything and then nothing again, so that I tumble into a quandry without top or bottom.

--Do you think that everyone can be an artist? 

 --Of course. Everyone but myself, naturally.  Which is why I must make such an effort to insist that I too might someday think of myself this way.  Just not yet.

--Where do you come from? 

--I grew up in a flat place south of this one, a thousand miles from the sea. The lights of the city blocked out the stars, and I thought that the endless roar of the traffic was the sound of the void.  

I was, perhaps, right about that.

--Do you find your lot an enviable one? 

--I have no truck with envy, though desire is everything.  Can you desire a lot? Yes, I do.

--What have you given up?

--Lent. Small purchases. And often, hope.

 --What do you do with your money? 

--I put it into a household account and there it disappears. I am not sad about this; what else should I do with my money? 

--What household task gives you the most trouble?

--I loathe vacuuming, spot removal, scrubbing the bathtub and fixing other people's computers.  And correcting grammar mistakes.  Yet I seem to be an expert in all of these things.

--What are your favourite pleasures? 

--You really think I'm going to tell you? Okay, I relent. One is....dancing. Nothing makes me happier. I wish I had been a choreographer. Or had known Pina Bausch.

--What would you like to receive for your birthday? 

--A complete set of poetry by CD Wright. And a really sturdy tripod. And perhaps a new pair of shoes all my own. Or a swimming pool; the sea is really too cold for sport these days.

--Cite three living artists whom you detest. 

--Artists? I can't think of one.  But politicians, managers, corporate kleptocrats? May an infinity of evil befall the lot of them, they who are the evil that shatters us. You want me to name them? Ayy, where do I begin? Just pick up the newspaper and check off the names on the front page.

--What do you stick up for? 

--Virtually everyone else.

--What are you capable of refusing? 

-- Butter. Sugar. Cream. A ride. I wish I were capable of refusing stupidity, but sometimes I tumble into it and cannot get out.

--What is the most fragile part of your body? 

--My feet. Or perhaps my breath. This is why I didn't become a dancer, although I still long for such precise athleticism. Words rarely fail me, but my body lumbers; it is less reliable than it used to be.

--What has love made you capable of doing? 

--Love has made me capable of hatred. Of rage, of going to battle.  Strange perhaps, because the opposite is not true--rage and hatred don't make you capable of love.

--What do other people reproach you for? 

--Unfinished projects. Belatedness. Abstraction. Absence.  Falling down when I should be standing up. Loving the wrong things. And they are right.  I reproach myself for these failings too, among many others.

--What does art do for you? 

--It is sometimes the only door to hope. Without it, I don't think much of human beings.

--Write your epitaph. 

--Wait, that's not a question. I would prefer not to. Not yet, though as I've said, I do sometimes die every night. See? Another unfinished project. A belated requiem.  Let us sing.

--In what form would you like to return?

--As a winged thing, fleet of foot; nimble, pirouetting, light of heart, ripe and tender like a peach in July.

The questions are French artist Sophie Calle's and have been taken from from “Sophie Calle: Interview.”  Frieze Magazine. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/sophie_calle/ 

Photo: Hotel bed, Philadelphia, PA. April 2011.

Who Doesn't Love the Night?

What...person...doesn't love...the light...the waking day?
              Novalis, Hymns to the Night

1 December 2010  5:19 am

It's the first of December and so I am up before dawn making lists. The moon has just risen, late; it hangs in the southeast above the sea, a narrow crescent surrounded by stars.  A planet--but which one?--glitters brightly above the horizon like a spaceship or satellite.  The water is silver, a reflecting pool of light, the sky dark, the islands darker still, black mounds hunched against the water.  Wind whistles and pushes at the north wall of the house, making the wooden beams creak.


The wood stove crackles. Zero degrees outside, just freezing.  Damp.  I huddle in my housecoat and slippers--have to make this quick, these lists, then toss more wood on the fire so I can slip back into bed, beneath the eiderdown and the purring cat.


It's been weeks since I've written anything but emails--and notes and suggestions in the margins of student papers.  I realize I'm enjoying the sensation of the pen traversing the page, the satisfaction when the words gather and shift, then click into place, sentence by sentence. 

I wonder why I can't do this more often.  Chores, it seems, get in the way--laundry, cooking, correcting.  

But this too: pleasure in walking or drowsing in the light or before the fire, those moments of animal comfort we steal from the run of things to do, in order to keep ourselves flaring and flaming despite the coming season of ice and winter nights.

   Must the morning always return?
                 Novalis, Hymns to the Night

8 December 2010

5:30 am and it's pitch black but for a streak in the sky to the southeast, a break in the clouds.
Rain pours from the gutter and drums over the roof.
The dog sleeps on the couch, wakes, sighs.
The fires have all gone out, so I light them again, make a cup of tea, begin my enumeration.
Chores for the coming day.

Someday, perhaps, I'll simply rise at this hour and begin the day.  But now, given the hours we keep, it is simply the middle of the night, the time when I wake long enough to sort out a dozen miniature dilemmas, small dramas, manic schemes--anything to keep them from sieving sleep some other night.

No one knocks on the door at this hour--no one from the outside that is--which is why I can finally hear my inner rattle, the scrabble against the walls, the turn just before the moments before the coming of the light.

Visible Poetry: The First Fifteen Months

[E]verything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for-sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art….     

Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, about the poems that would become his Life Studies (14 December 1957).  Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Ed. Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, 246.

When I set out to keep a blog I didn’t really know what I would be doing. --Do we say “keep a blog” as in a diary or journal or “write a blog” as in an article or a book?  What’s the status of this kind of public-personal writing anyway?

I imagined a blog as a log of sorts, an account of activities more public than a diary, but not yet as formal and severed from my hand as a printed book.   It would contain journeys, but also, itself, be a journey of sorts—I’d discover what it was by doing it.  Besides, it seemed like knowing how it worked—how to blog—might be an increasingly necessary skill for any writer or public intellectual these days, as  all around us, traditional print media and venues are collapsing and struggling to reinvent themselves.  How or where in this environment, did one find an audience?

The blog began as a challenge I extended to my students--and some of them extended to me; could I do this thing, regularly or regularly irregularly; could I find enough to say to keep it going, to keep myself—or anyone else-- interested? 

And how was I going to handle the visual component?—After all, one of the significant advantages of this digital medium is its inventio-- its capacity for both invention and inventory--the many ways  text and image and research links and video and sounds can be transposed and interleaved on the same electronic page. I’d been thinking about the relationships between text and image--and working for several years on a long poem built from fragments of both; a blog seemed the perfect place to explore these obsessions more fully.  

It is also, I’ve found, an excellent medium for travelers’ tales—a log is, after all, a pilgrim’s progress carefully dated, secularized and rationalized, and a blog, simply web-hosted, illustrated, a digitized log. Visible Poetry aimed to extend the log form to an expanded notion of poetry—which, it turns out, isn’t really a very large stretch.

For lyric emerges from song, from the rhythms of breath and the pace of walking. It’s a genre of discreet, carefully rendered observations, often punctual, sometimes diaristic.  Photography too sometimes has this quality as camera and eye record daily movements through the world.   (Turns out, happily, that the regular necessity of producing compelling images over the last fifteen months has made me a photographer; I now have a practice that continues to expand elsewhere too.)  

If I began the blog as a way of trying to find or imagine an audience, it was in part because I was often lonely at my desk (desks are lonely places).  Thus I’m very glad for those who walk alongside me, those who speak up, speak out, talk back, send me links, letters, ideas, images.  When I sit at the screen I no longer feel like a solitary wanderer, and that makes an enormous difference.

Why now, a book?  Because sometimes you want to hold the words and images in your hands or be able to flip back and forth between months and moments in a way the screen doesn’t (yet?) permit.  Because a book lets you take stock of a distance traveled; quite literally, you can weigh it; it has heft, dimension, and the turning of the pages mimics the repetitious unfolding of thought across time.  And because you can read a book on the beach and not worry that sand and water will ruin your connection with the world. On the contrary, they are the world! 

Karin Cope

17 July 2010

West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Why do we wake in the night?

 Why do we wake in the middle of the night?

Is it so we have space to ponder, in the shadows and quiet?  Sometimes I waken already filled up--those nights I make lists or weep, scribble or rant.

Sometimes I stand at the door in the dark and look at the stars.  Or when I'm in the city, I'll gaze out at the lights of the Irving station--24-hour gas and an all-night convenience store illuminate the night.  Sometimes I'm awakened by a siren; sometimes it's the sound of the furnace switching on, fire roaring, then the pipes clattering with steam.  Now and then I'm awakened by a cat jumping or the dog moving about and sighing.

But if I awaken, it's because I'm not really asleep.  I get up then, get my book and pen and make my lists.  Sometimes a poem comes.  Sometimes it's an essay or a plan for an image or video.  More rarely I'll take some photographs or sketch in the lamplight falling over my shoulder.

As the dawn comes I stoke the fire and creep back into bed.  I'll wake later, sleepy and baffled, mind befuddled, in no wise as clear as I'd been in the night.

I tend to wake more often when my days and weeks are filled up with tasks and others' concerns.  When I'm teaching for example.  When there's less time (if any) to think my own thoughts or plot my own projects.  I wake when I'm anxious, excited or frightened.  I wake to keep watch, but also to lose my sense of time.

Waking in the middle of the night?  It's a way of stealing hours from the light and greedy day.

Images
Beaver Harbour at Dusk from Nolan's Head, NS
Quoddy Bay at Night--brief clearing during a storm
Clock, Halifax

Sometimes I Just Need a Little Feeling of Satisfaction

I've never forgotten something my friend Kristin Bergen said one day when I came home and found her, not finishing a paper she'd been sweating over, but polishing the brass doorknob from the bathroom door: This, she said, brandishing the doorknob, is something I can start and finish satisfactorily in half an hour. My paper.....not a chance. Sometimes I just need a little feeling of satisfaction at a job well done.

What she didn't say in quite so many words, but what we all know and often fear is that--as Robert Lowell put so well--writing often feels like an exercise in humiliation. You work and work and work quietly, alone at your desk, and then after many hours you may have very little to show at all. Half an idea, poorly expressed. Some fragments tending towards a poem. An outline. A few paragraphs of a story that could be exciting, but must begin somewhere else. An essay you know your next reader will demand you rewrite completely. A careful piece of research no one will read at all. It's enough to make a body take up polishing doorknobs.

Even when you do manage to make it through all of the revisions, the polishing and perfecting, and you send off your story/poem/essay/manuscript, more often than not it seems, if it comes back--plenty of submissions simply drop into a black hole, a pit of blankness-- it's been judged unsuitable for the press or publication in question. Keep writing, the rejection letter sometimes says, better luck next time. Often things come back with no comment at all.

This is understandable when you look at incoming writing from an editor's point of view--believe me, I've been there! At any small press or magazine or for any contest the inbox volume is usually overwhelming, and often, the quality of submissions thoroughly underwhelming. After you read several hundred, you're at a loss for what to say, even about the works that you like well enough but simply can't accept for one reason or another. The business of editing unpublished manuscripts can be as bad as grading: after a day or two of wading through the boxes you get a sort of depressed glaze; impossibility and humiliation permeate your airways like communicable diseases. But oh the joy when you think you've made a find, when the words have been artfully fitted, when the overall form is striking, pleasing, the polish lustrous and fine.

And. But. Such fit between reader and writer seems, alas, rare. At the moment, I'll admit it, the rejection letters are piling up. Is it because I need to write more, to write better, to submit more work, hone it more sharply? Absolutely. No question; no end in sight to that. But I'm also certainly not knocking at the right doors (where are they? How does one find them?), not working within the compass of a large enough writer's community, not yet sorting out how to work the "business" side of this undertaking as well as I must....particularly in this recessionary, web 2.0 "crowd-powered" climate, where publishers and publications are failing at catastrophic rates and writing and editing and information production are less and less remunerative.

Some days, particularly those foggy, dusk-dark days of early summer in Nova Scotia, it can feel as if everything in the world is ranged against this writing enterprise. --I get it; that's why so many authors drink or suffer what the psychiatric professions call "mood disorders," what William Styron, in his memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, calls "worsening emotional weather." I get it; I'm in it. It's hard sometimes to have faith that this collection of fragments, these unruly impossible words will lead to anything, lead anywhere, shed any light on anything. Sometimes it feels as if the words ARE the demon cloud you're buried beneath. We're all writing. Are we all also reading? I'm less sure.

As Marike says, explaining why she's traded words for paint these days, paint sometimes provides immediate satisfaction. You can point to something and show what you've done. Even if it is full of problems, it still looks like something. When you write, on the other hand, no one glances at what you've put down and then looks again more carefully because they've been drawn in by the colour, the pleasing lines, the slash and puzzle of the form.

She's right. Reading demands more concentration than that, more commitment. When you write you are asking a reader to take something in, to make sense of it, to digest it. And if your work is still in rough form, above all if it is a large or ambitious work, it can be pretty indigestible. So it remains private, a solitary painful shame, a fragment destined to grow--and to cut you along the way until it does.

Me, that's why I cook, and why I invent recipes. It's usually a reasonably punctual undertaking--has to be done in a short time frame, with a limited number of resources. It has to be tasty, colourful, balanced, pleasing, digestible....but even there I crave impossibly complex, surprising flavours and forms....

Something anything piquant please to set against this blankness this sorrow this sunless grey day!