just the sounds

I know that these are just the names of shoes, but I was rather attracted to the rich sounds of the language on this sign when I walked past it this afternoon.  So many nice vowels.  Ooooloooo.  Uuugg.  Uurth.  Booooots.  I guess reading a lot of poetry trains you to think like this?  But I think I’ve always loved language.  Oooooloooo.  MerUuull.  Ooooloooo.  Uurth.  And a happy afternoon to you.

capital letters

I love poetry that gives me a push. Here’s an annotation that I wrote about Lucille Clifton’s poetry. She’s a new and exciting delight to me, and I know I should have been reading her work a long time before I actually did.

litany, litany, litany

A litany is a form of poetry that repeats and repeats, repeats and circles. I’ve been trying to make friends with it lately, both through reading and writing. Here’s a little annotation essay of mine on some of Joy Harjo’s litanies:

The California Poem (and The Vermont Poem?)

I’ve put this photo I took of a covered bridge here because I’m posting (after the jump) an annotation I wrote about Eleni Sikelianos’s book, The California Poem, and since I’ve never been to California, I did some thinking about what her book would be like translated into Vermont language. Vermont is my home state. And Vermont is very proud of its covered bridges.

a litany. just so you know where I’m coming from.

sometimes I feel that I have no right to speak, having never been silenced

I have never been beaten with a shaft of metal.

I have never been raped.

I have never had my skin torn open with an explosion of rusted nails.

I have never been splattered by another person’s blood.

I have never pumped my blood into another’s hands.

I have never gone hungry.

I have never lost a toe, a foot, a nose to frostbite.

I have never watched my parents murdered in front of me.

I have never seen my children taken, screamed after them, held out my empty arms.

I have never been locked away, left to rot, confined to silence.

I have never been drowned or half-drowned.

I have never shot a man, a woman, a child.

I have never stood thirsty in a world made only of dust.

I have never turned to sniffing glue to numb the hunger pains.

I have never watched my house burn down.

I have never been burned to death inside my house.

I have never been turned away from my own land.

I have never been a prostitute just to make the rent payments.

I have never been denied education.

I have never been in a land at war.

I have never had the door of the hospital closed on my bleeding face.

I have never had a number tattooed into the delicate skin of my arm.

I have never lived in an apartment that smelled of nothing but urine.

I have never been gunned down for my beliefs.

I have never been decapitated.

I have never been gassed.

I have never had my body stacked, naked, with thousands of other dead.

I have never been a refugee turned away from safety at the border.

I have never been dragged to death down a sandpaper street.

I have never sat in a cement cell, waited for the electric chair, the lethal injection.

I have never been wrongly accused.

I have never been addicted to powder or needles or pills.

I have never been pushed to the ground and trampled in a crowd.

I have never leapt from a seventeenth story window.

I have never had my tongue cut from my mouth.

I have never been trapped deep underground in a collapsed coal mine.

I have never spat blood.

I have never sipped blood.

I have never sickened and wasted in the midst of an epidemic.

I have never stepped on a land mine.

I have never been touched where I didn’t want to be touched.

I have never been kidnapped.

I have never disappeared without a trace.

I have never been silenced.

back into the swing of lines and stanzas

My next semester of school starts soon, and I haven’t been thinking about poetry much over the past month or two. It’s always there in my mind in the form of little ideas and scraps of language, but I haven’t read any poetry in a while, I’ve only written fragments, and I haven’t thought critically. I haven’t exercised my poetic mind.

So today I stopped by a used book store and parked myself next to the poetry section. I ended up buying five volumes of poetry, and I tried to select ones that I thought I would actually read.

I’m writing this blog post so that I can think about and maybe figure out what attracted me to each of these books. So I’m looking back through them right now and trying to find the poem in each of them that made me decide that the book was worth buying. The titles all made me take these books off the shelf in the first place, of course, so they’re worth thinking about, too. But I’ll stick to the contents for now.

Extensive quoting to follow:

Getting rid of books

S and I found out recently that our landlady is selling the house we live in, so now we’re getting ready for yet another move.  I never thought that I would be as nomadic as I’ve ended up so far in my adult life.  We’ve moved about once a year since college.  I’m resigned to this next move, but there are parts of it that are rather difficult.  Getting rid of books, for instance.  I just love to own piles and piles of them, even ones that I know I’ll never read, or ones that I have read but likely won’t read again.  And I’ve been acquiring them like crazy over the past year because I thought we would be here longer and because I can’t help browsing the free book cart in the lobby of the library every time I go there.  Not to mention the book sale at the library, and the book sections at my two favorite thrift stores.  At least I’ve been spared the danger of having a decent used book store in town!

So, S and I are planning to have a yard sale next weekend.  Our criteria for removing books from our collection is that we’re either unlikely to read them or else if we did want to read that title, it wouldn’t be difficult to get from a library.  That means goodbye to some classics, goodbye to some random ones that could be great, goodbye to random ones I only picked up because I thought the title was funny (see below), goodbye to some that have been on the shelves for a long time, and goodbye to some we just got last week.  I promised myself before starting to sort them that I would be brutal.  There’s a good chance that we’ll be moving into a smaller apartment than this one.  Also, books are very heavy to carry.  And we’re paring down our clothing, art supplies, cds, furniture, and everything else we own with the same brutality.  I just feel saddest about the books.

So, Goodbye to this: Sometimes I feel like a Blob

And Goodbye to this: Your First Romance

 

dressing and describing a character

Sometimes the character descriptions are my favorite parts of novels.  They often seem more vibrant to me than other parts of the same book.  Is this because the author puts in extra effort when describing a character?  To me they just seem great fun to write.

Here are a couple recent ones that I enjoyed.  They amused me.  Both are from The Dancing Druids by Gladys Mitchell.  It’s my current bathroom-reading mystery novel, obtained from the free discards rack at the library.

“Laura was as bold as a lion, but was as superstitious as a warlock.  She was full of dark fancies drowned in primordial deeps.  She also believed, with healthy, female instinct, that dangerous and delicate missions were less unpleasant in the daylight than in the dark.  With respect to the house itself, she was torn between a frantic desire to visit it and an equally strong determination not to go anywhere near its boundaries.  She was, in fact, like a child who both dreads and longs for a ghost-story just at bedtime.  The thrill would be worth it, the aftermath definitely not.  In other words, although Laura was both practical and hard-headed, and although she was brisk, jimp, and daring in all that she undertook, she was also the prey of an inherited belief in the legends, spectres and bogies of a Highland ancestry.  It was one of the many reasons for her adherence to Mrs. Bradley, who was legend, spectre, and bogie all in one, for she felt, without realizing it, that the greater demon kept the lesser demons at bay.”

I had to look up “jimp.”  It’s apparently a Scottish term that means slender or scant or neat or elegant.  Perhaps also archaic usage, since the novel was published in 1948.

And then there’s this description a little later in the book of Mrs. Bradley herself:

“Mrs. Bradley cordially agreed.  She herself looked very far from appetizing in a sage-green costume and a bright red blouse, an heirloom brooch of vast proportions whose only virtue was that it did at least conceal some of the blouse, stout shoes with crepe rubber soles, knitted stockings, and a rakish diamond clip on the side of her shining black hair.”

Doesn’t that seem a bit of fun to have written?  If I ever write a novel myself….

crow hill

Where do ideas for poems come from?  For me, it’s almost always something very small.  An image, a phrase, a brief moment in a conversation–I call them seeds.  It’s when I feel an opening inside my head, a fascination, a connection, the potential for growth.  Then I try to save that feeling, to sort of incubate it in my head until I’m ready to plant it, I guess.  Sometimes nothing ever comes from these seeds, of course.  But sometimes it does.  Yes.

So, the other day I was visiting my parents at the house where I grew up, and I happened to notice the name of a road near their house: “Crow Hill.”  This name has been common knowledge to me since I was a kid, but I never really thought about it as an image.  A hill.  With crows.  Yes, there really is a hill there.  The road goes up quite steeply.  I don’t know about the history of the crows, though.  Crows are fairly common birds, aren’t they?  Maybe they used to congregate there.  Maybe someone with the last name Crow used to live there.  Who knows.  My grandfather used to feed dog food to the crows near his house.

Whatever this history, though, I have this image jiggling in my head now.  A jumping-bean seed?  There’s a swirling of the words, my childhood, my grandfather, black birds, a road, harsh cries, landscape.

So perhaps a poem will come.  Perhaps it’s even now putting forth roots, underground where I can’t see it.

refining my vocabulary

I was washing the dishes earlier today (one of my least favorite chores) and I started to think about the word “clean” along with the word “cleanse” and how they mean pretty much the same thing don’t they, or do they have a difference in meaning, and why do we have both words, and what’s the essential difference between the two words?  Is “cleanse” an archaic form?  And if so, why do we still use it?

Thank goodness for that ultimate reference tool, the internet, to stop these spinning questions in my head!

First I did a google search, and found this information from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms: “Clean is the word in common and literal use for the removal of foreign matter (as dirt, litter, and debris) typically by washing, sweeping, dusting, or clearing away…  Cleanse in this relation seldom wholly loses some hint of its basic notion of making morally or spiritually pure: it is, therefore, the term of choice when the matter to be removed is or is felt as foul, polluting, or noxious or the action is rather one of purifying than of merely restoring to order, freshness, or neatness…  Unlike clean, cleanse is common in essentially metaphoric extension in which it always retains the suggestion of removing what is vile, harmful, or obnoxious…”

From that I was reminded of the spiritual use of “cleanse,” which feels rather obvious in retrospect.  Maybe this experience of looking it up will cement the concept in my memory.  Actually, this was probably one of those cases of knowing how to use a word, but not being able to define it, like the meaning only existed at an unconscious level of my brain.  Isn’t it strange how that happens?  Does that happen to other people?  Sometimes I’m perfectly confident using a word in conversation or in writing, but if I was asked to define it I would be stumped.  And then when I do look it up I find that I’ve been using it correctly after all.

Anyway, the Dictionary of Synonyms is an interesting and exciting book to have discovered through my clean/cleanse distinction quest, and I’ll probably seek it out again for similar questions.  It seems more useful than just a basic thesaurus.  Or has a more refined purpose, anyway.

I also logged into my school email account so that I could access the Oxford English Dictionary and read old English usage examples and such.  The OED seconded what the Dictionary of Synonyms had said, of course, and also gave me a few more examples of differences between “clean” and “cleanse.”  “Clean” can be used to mean “streamlined.”  It can also be combined with other words: “clean out” is to clean by emptying, “clean up” has financial connotations, etc.  “Cleanse,” on the other hand has the distasteful relationship with ethnic cleansing, its purification meaning corrupted by prejudice.  Yuck.

Again, I knew all these meanings already, but it was interesting to read about them again.  It was satisfying to have a thought, a question, and then to go and answer it for myself.