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Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
I was pregnant and was composing a letter to Steve and Vera (or possibly a Facebook status with them tagged) about a model house I was building, square, boxy, yellow, the house where I wanted to live -- just straight descriptive prose, but I had gotten stuck on a sentence describing the fence which enclosed the back yard. I kept adding adjectives but could not seem to get a complete image, and the sentence was at this point several times longer than the rest of the letter.
posted morning of January 4th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, August 12th, 2011
A bit frustrating: last night's vivid dream was a dream explicitly about words; but the vividly recalled portion of the dream is all visual imagery and context, no words. In the dream, I am writing a poem and think of a line that I want to use in it, a poorly-remembered line from a Salt-n-Pepa song. I bring up Google to check my memory of the lyric. Somehow Google will not give me the transcribed lyrics to the song, I can only find the song's video on YouTube. So I start watching it and listening. It is a fantastic, breathtaking video, with references to film noir and to Kurosawa, one that brings out resonances and meanings in the song that I have never understood before. But it is distracting and frustrating to be watching it and listening for a particular line, and trying to keep in mind the poem that I was writing and the way I wanted to use the line. The video is very long -- long enough to be divided into mutiple parts on YouTube -- and I wake up before I find the line I am looking for.
posted morning of August 12th, 2011: 2 responses
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Friday, July 15th, 2011
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
He dreamt of his distributed weight
lying hair's-breadth by hair's-breadth this side of collapse
on the springs of his mattress; his linen-clad pillow,
the thousands of hairs on the nape of his neck; dreamt of
covers and sheets and the million thread count, the
mechanics of sleep, of the pale thunder moon, of the
gasp from his lungs as his body escapes
this cold matrix of wakefulness, bitterness, playfulness:
memories of nuzzling close in the arms of the
black grinning spectre of night.
Woke up this morning without much memory of the dream but with the strong impression that I had been dreaming about being asleep. Within a few minutes the poem had assembled itself in rough outline; over the next hour or so it came into a nice sharp focus.The epigraph is from a villanelle by Roethke: one I did not know of until today. I like its sense and its sound. "I learn by going where I have to go."
 Here is a link to several pieces I've posted over the last few months that I've been particularly happy with: Memories and Dreaming -- 7 original pieces plus 2 translations. Maybe if I get a couple more together, I will make a chapbook.
posted evening of July 15th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, June 30th, 2011
A new poem from Pelele had the happy effect of reminding me of one of my very favorite poems, Kenneth Koch's "Lunch" -- and the funny thing is, I was noticing similarities to "Lunch"  even before I looked up to the top of the poem and noticed Pelele's title...
Breakfastby Eduardo Valverde
Last night I dreamed of you -- or of your father:
a tall man under his hat.
The place I found myself reminded me,
its silence, of a bird -- a bird that’s sleeping,
an engine, maybe, lying in the junkheap.
He came along, his face drawn long, like kids
when they play at grown-up
or like a bankrupt god
who tallies up his mornings carefully
and finds that all that glitters is not gold;
he carried a green bottle in his hands
and the analgesic pain that comes of touching earthly things.
He spoke enthusiastically of the sea's paternal womb,
of land unmapped, unconquered, which begins off in the darkness --
in every single letter of the word, “desperation†--
He spoke of a taste like olives, of the flavor in her breasts,
in hers who never aged but who had brought forth many daughters
each with olive nipples;
of the unease that he feels before the window in a photo
in which a bowl of fruit is standing lonesome on the floor
of the hallway in a vacant house --
or I should say, before the light that’s coming through the window,
an angel hewn of green basalt;
a solid angel, weak Annunciation.
He poured me out a cup and took the bottle by its neck.
Could not remember you; but he said,
with joy in his eyes, he said My kids were like the rattle
of the hills when trains are rolling by;
like a pack of dogs, dogs baying in the distance
to push your weary heart along the journey.
It must have been getting dark, I guess -- a solitary lamp
was turning back to ash his eyes and moustache
And me, I was anxious, I needed to pee;
I felt my dress was falling into shadow --
its weight returning --
raised my hands to my cheeks and found I was not dying
nor was I really back among the living.
Two images in particular seem like they could have come from Koch's pen, the woman "who never aged but who had brought forth many daughters/ each with olive nipples", and the man boasting, "My kids were like the rattle/ of the hills when trains are rolling by" -- also the general flow of the text and of voice reminds me of Koch. (I have probably intensified this similarity in my translation; but I believe it is present in the original as well.) The "analgesic pain that comes of touching earthly things" is going to stay with me for a long time.
posted evening of June 30th, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Last night's (intensely visual) dream involved a long walk and an unexpected park. Monique and Jeremy were visiting NYC and we had made plans to meet up in Astoria; I had some time to kill beforehand so took the subway up to the Bronx and started walking... I was looking for a place to cross into Manhattan -- my plan was to walk around the northern tip of Manhattan and then cross to Queens. (The imagined geometry of dream-NYC was not exactly the same as real life but was roughly similar.) There was a bridge without a pedestrian walkway, but I noticed a narrow foot bridge next to and below it. Pedestrian traffic on this bridge was quite heavy, it looked like the sidewalk of Broadway in Midtown. I crossed over, jostled by the crowd, to a point on the west side of Manhattan just below the northern tip, and started walking north. As I rounded the northern extremity of the island, I happened on a park I had never known about. It was designed around a long pier of bedrock extending north into the waters of the Hudson, the tip of which had been carved into a dragon figurehead for the prow of Manhattan. Behind this was a reflecting sculpture -- a large rock sphere hollowed out and lined with mirrors arranged in a complex pattern, and with a small pool of luminescent liquid in its base. I spent a long time gazing into this and was startled from my reverie by my cell phone ringing. It was Ellen, telling me that she and Sylvia had gotten home safely after a long and unpleasant train ride. While we were talking, I woke up.
posted morning of June 26th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
by J Osner
Sinking into the warm black pillow of night. I’m dreaming
Masks, new faces, costumes I will wear
Internally, so I won’t know myself,
My face, my clean white tablet lies
There on the pillow looking up at me.
So paint! Draw crazy patterns on your cheeks;
Sculpt horns and wild protuberances, scars
Where your clean virgin skin is lying smooth.
Add blemishes and warts around your mouth,
Sprout tufts of wiry hair beside your nose --
just let yourself go,
make a May Day parade
of masks:
We’ll set them up
For all to see
We’ll let you know
Which ones will work,
Which ones will trick you out obscenely sinister unrecognized and sneaking stealthy sliding past
the doorways of your ego lurking dark around the alleys of your childhood memories;
And when I've gone to sleep I’ll see
My costumed armies waiting
And the desolation staging
Where they play.
posted morning of May 11th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, May 9th, 2011
I am traveling by train in central Europe, with a beehive in my suitcase (packed in Tupperware). My current destination is a town called Letze Oido -- I had thought based on my reading of the timetable that the train I was on stopped there, but it turns out I have to make a transfer, so I'm waiting in the station. A Serbian man is transporting beehives; I open my suitcase to show him my setup and notice that a couple of bees have gotten out of the container and are buzzing around in there among my clothing. He smiles and asks me in decent English whether I speak German; I say "ein Bißchen" and he asks me in extremely broken German whether I know where the bathrooms are. Another passenger sitting nearby directs him. I'm still not sure on which track the train for Letze Oido will be stopping --I notice a train pulling out and worry that I may have missed my train. I make a mental note to write this down in my journal.
posted morning of May 9th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
Some beautiful stuff in this piece from Seven Nights. (Some nice writing about this lecture at I've Been Reading Lately.)
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Yo he tenido -- y tengo -- muchas pesadillas. A la más terrible, la que me parecÃo la más terrible, la usé para un soneto. Fue asÃ: yo estaba en mi habitación; amanecÃa (posiblemente ésa era la hora en el sueño), y al pie de la cama estaba un rey, un rey muy antiguo, y yo sabÃa en el sueño que era un rey del Norte, de Noruega. No me miraba: fijaba su mirada ciega en el cielorraso. Yo sabÃa que era un rey muy antiguo porque su cara era imposible ahora. Entonces sentà el terror de esa presencia. VeÃa al rey, veÃa su espada, veÃa su perro. Al cabo, desperté. Pero seguà viendo el rey por un rato, porque me habÃa impressionado. Referido, mi sueña es nada; soñado, fue terrible.
| | I've had -- I continue to have -- many nightmares. The most fearsome, the one which has always caused me the most fear, I used it for a sonnet.* Here it is: I was in my room, towards dawn (this was the hour in the dream, I believe), and at the foot of my bed there was a king, an ancient king; I knew in the dream that he was a northern king, a Norwegian king. He did not look on me: his gaze was fixed blindly on the ceiling. I knew he was an ancient king, for his face was one that would be unthinkable today. Then I felt the horror of his presence. I was looking at the king, looking at his sword, at his dog. At the end of all this I awoke. But I lay continuing to think of the king for a while; he made an impression on me. Retold, my dream is meaningless; dreamt, it was fearsome. |
I love the way Borges discounts this imagery in his final sentence -- it is similar to the first few lines of his story Ragnarök (a story which I hold out hope that Winston Rowntree someday will decide to illustrate).
*What poem is he speaking of here? Anybody with knowledge about this (or whether this is a red herring) speak up in comments please. The only reference to a Norwegian king I can find in his poems is in El reloj de arena when he speaks of the Saxon king Harold offering Harald Hardrada "six feet of English soil."
posted evening of August 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 17th, 2009
I made a vegetarian sauté last night that reminded me of how good vegetables can taste by themselves -- no meat, no seasoning besides a little salt, just vegetables and a little olive oil and wine. Here is the recipe (to serve 1 -- I was eating alone last night -- increase as necessary):
Stovetop Autumn- one smallish yellow onion, diced
- two cloves garlic, minced
- ¼ apple, diced
- 1/8 head of red cabbage, sliced thin
Combine all ingredients in sauté pan and cook for about 15 min. stirring occasionally, until cabbage is tender and onion is starting to burn. Deglaze with a few ounces of red wine, stir scraping the bottom of the pan, and allow the liquid to boil away completely. Serve with bread and apples and red wine.You don't cut everything up and then sauté it all at once -- the timing is best if you cut up each ingredient after adding the previous one to the pan. So everything has been cooking for a few minutes by the time the cabbage goes in. The thinner you slice the cabbage, the better it will taste.
Last night I dreamed about cooking -- I was making a stewed chicken and rice dish and bizarrely using my espresso pot to cook it in. It came out beautifully -- the grains of rice were soft and puffed up so they looked like orzo -- and they overflowed the pot like popcorn, spilling out onto the stovetop, which was already covered in some kind of red sauce that I had been cooking before that. It looked really tasty and lots of people were there hungry and wanting to be served... As long as I am thinking about recipes, here are a couple of links: The NY Times Magazine reprints a recipe for Worcestershire sauce originally published in 1876 (although it contains the direction "refrigerate", which surprises me -- were refrigerators standard kitchen appliances in 19th Century NYC?*), and an updated version from Boston chef Barbara Lynch. The updated version is made with Vietnamese fish paste so does not require any fermentation time, it's ready to serve right away; the old recipe takes a month to mature. Worcestershire sauce traces its ancestry to the Malay condiment kecap, as does Ketchup; at The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky looks at the history of this condiment. And here is an old piece by Malcolm Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum.
 * Wikipædia reports that "At the start of the 20th century, about half of households in the United States relied on melting ice (in an icebox) to keep food cold, while the remaining half had no cooled storage at all, possibly excepting a 'root cellar'." So I'm thinking "refrigerate" is a modern edit of an 1876 recipe.
posted morning of October 17th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, May 15th, 2009
Cool, the first time I can remember having dreamed about blogging a dream. Maybe it's on my mind because of the e-mail exchange this week with Lep and other Feg maniax about remembering dreams. In the dream I was writing down (i.e. the inner dream), I was riding the uptown 6 train, possibly going to a gig, and got off at Spring St. But as the doors closed I saw that I had left my violin in the train, on the seat. I hesitated a moment and then ran quickly through the tunnel behind the train, making it to the Bleeker St. stop in time to get back in the train and retrieve my fiddle. Ed Levy was also on the train, (possibly this is the enclosing dream now), and I was telling him how I had always fantasized about chasing a train through the tunnel, and how happy and proud I was about having done it. All I remember from the enclosing dream, besides the blogging part, is the closing image: a friend, possibly college friend Ari, is giving me a meditation lesson. We are seated at my kitchen table, where a candle is burning, looking deeply into each other's eyes -- thinking about it now I realize this is not standard meditation practice, but in the dream it seemed pretty normal. I experienced an alteration in my field of vision, where Ari stretched out horizontally and shrank vertically, and expanded to fill my eyes.
posted morning of May 15th, 2009: Respond
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