Dog park trees, taken yesterday, which was really a glorious day after Sunday's rain. Dora and I spent about an hour just being there, in the sun and the fresh air.
I didn't take my normal dog-walk selfies, but here we are at the park, sitting on a dog-agility climbing ramp:
TODAY:
Mapping out my work carefully for the week, because there's a lot of it. We have three weeks' worth of poems scheduled for the Sun, so I have to get back on my intro-writing horse. My colleague opines that the introductions have been too long, so that's either good news or bad news from the banging-them-out standpoint, since he also wants them to be "lively," which is sometimes hard to accomplish in a hundred words. Anyway, time to gird myself to do all that again.
So, daily, what I'd like to work on are the following:
1. One brief-but-lively Sun essay
2. Responding to the Able Muse slushpile. Say half an hour.
3. Course outlines for Homeschool Connections
4. Some project of my own
I did finish a whole draft of the sapphics poem yesterday. Now I just need to tinker, to perfect the meter. It's long, like eight pages, but oh well. I hope it's not tedious. I hope every line is a surprise to the reader (assuming this poem ever has readers), as it was to me.
Got word that one of my two secondhand linen skirts has shipped. Yeah, the dopamine hit. It is undeniable. I have hit pause on shopping this week, and maybe next, but I'm excited to have a couple more new things on the way, to enliven my midwinter doldrums. I'm really curious to know how the red linen skirt is going to work --- it's going to be a louder note in my otherwise muted closet. If it doesn't work, I'll just resell it, but I'm hoping it'll be a fun addition, even if I have to be creative about what to wear with it.
Meanwhile, I resolved yesterday that my rule for today was going to be:
1. Wear a skirt
2. Wear colorful tights
And here's what that ended up looking like:
Wool& Camellia dress, with this old thrifted linen floral skirt over, and my thrifted alpaca cardigan for warmth. Snag tights in "Colonel Mustard," which I chose because I haven't worn these since last year, and I thought my outfit could do with some sunshine to make those flowers bloom. The yellow doesn't actually match anything (and I'd never wear it next to my face), but it coordinates with blue, aqua, and the greens here perfectly well --- therefore it coordinates with the whole thing. Thrifted Birk Madeiras on my feet.
Other things I can wear with this skirt (off the top of my head):
*Maggie (marine blue)
*Fiona (teal)
*Snag "Thicket"/sage-green tights
*any navy tights
*boots
*sandals
*any blue cardigan
*green cotton cardigan
*blue/gray lambswool pullover
*navy Patagonia baselayer merino tee
*sky-blue WoolX tee
Tomorrow's challenge, while I'm thinking about it:
1. Wear the white lace-yoke top.
2. Just do it.
3. Just wear it with something.
I like this little practice of not necessarily planning a whole outfit (because what if I don't want to wear that?), but of making one tiny rule that pushes me to wear what's in my closet.
Still reading Hard Times (o, Mr. Gradgrind . . . ).
Contemplated a couple of passages yesterday in The Reaper Essays:
From an essay called "The Elephant Man of Poetry," on narrative in the poems of Robert Frost:
What [Homer, the Brothers Grimm] and other writers discovered is that a story begins with need. The poet must make sense of a situation that is troubling him and say it to someone else; the reader needs to make sense of the world, which troubles us all . . . The poet who beguiles the reader with the story itself will answer that need in all of us --- to learn about and understand our lives. Only when the story as a whole becomes a metaphor does this understanding occur. The poet's responsibility is not to meditate on his process of telling a story; it is to tell the story as if he were discovering it line by line. This process will fulfill the need of poet and reader. It will render the experience and its comprehension through the poem memorable.
Another memorable passage sprang at me from a subsequent essay, "I Have Seen, I Know." This essay begins with a discussion of bad and good acting. There's the actor who has already decided how he's going to feel (or convey feeling whether he feels it or not) and simply anticipates, as the drama unfolds, the moments when he will feel, or pretend to, the correct feelings. Then there's the actor who, as The Reaper says, "reacts" --- is so present in the experience of the drama that his emotions surprise even himself.
The passage:
The poet who writes hoping to strike the proper attitude --- the right way his persona should speak, the right political stance --- backpedals in anticipation. What he says, whether right or wrong, is predictable . . . The poet who engages in real narration will always be surprising just as life with its emotional eruptions is always surprising.
Clearly all these thoughts are related --- this is essay after essay about narrative, about the sufficiency of narrative, about how lapsing into meditation and meaning-making generally results in rhetorical puffery (many such cases; examples abound), and how this puffery generally happens, even in otherwise good poems, when the poet's trust in the story he/she is telling falters.
What I am thinking about is the fact that the things of this world mean something and don't need me either to summon them into meaning, or to persuade you, the reader, that I have summoned them into meaning. Neither the things themselves, nor you the reader, need me to tell you what they mean. They just need me to tell you what they are, out of my own need to understand them as they are, which presumably is your need, too.
There's something deeply Thomistic in all this, the insistence on ontology as the basis for poetry, not epistemology. In all the Summa, Thomas is striving to identify what things are, in their order and their relationship to each other. He isn't trying to make new meanings ring from them by juxtaposing them and saying what this juxtaposition makes him think of. His writing isn't simply reportage, but it is dedicated to pointing out truth for the sake of truth, not for what the truth does for him, personally.
Although I can think of exceptions to The Reaper's rules for poetry (Donne's "Air and Angels," for example, is not at all a narrative poem, yet is a great poem), I think they're generally right. They're especially right in the ways that they're tilting at particular mannerisms in late-20th-century American poetry. They're not going after John Donne. They're not going after T.S. Eliot and the Four Quartets. They're going after the kind of solipsism that sets in when you've decided that your universe is empty, and you're standing at its center, which is more or less the working definition of solipsism, but anyway, they're going after what happens to your relationship to the stories you tell once that solipsism has set in.
I find myself far, far more in sympathy with The Reaper than not, and in fact think that a lot of these arguments find their conclusions in the fact that reality is sacramental, and that you don't make it more so, or whatever a non-religious version of "sacramental" might be, by trying to pump it full of your personal hot air. They're not trying to articulate a Christian poetics, but I think that much about their poetics points that way. While I don't think there's really one single ChristianPoeticsTM, I'm always seeking out what I think MY poetics is, and how, in that poetics, to account for what I believe to be true about reality --- because somehow poetry (mine, but also anything I'm going to think is good) has to account for what I believe to be true about reality.
In short, with Thomas, I believe that there is objective reality outside myself, and that it is both material and spiritual. I believe that the material is animated by the unseen presence of its Maker, who must be present in all things, or they would cease to exist. I believe that the project of my life is not only to love that Maker more, but to understand the reality in which that Maker has placed me --- and to understand that that's everybody else's life project, too, which is why it's helpful for me to do my best to articulate that reality as it is. It can be an inner reality as well as an external reality, because we do all have interior lives, but my own interior life, or the interior life of a character I might happen to create, is only interesting, compelling, and ultimately meaningful as it touches the interior experiences of others. Otherwise it's just idiosyncrasy, which has a pretty short shelf-life. That doesn't preclude my having a particular personality or a particular voice. It just means that my ultimate subject is not my own particularity.
Come for the clothes, stay for the poetics, amirite?
LATER: