cheeries

 

Dear Chérie,

I often write cheeries, when I mean cherries.  This is somehow as it should be.  I am making some ceramic cherries.  These are the proto-cherry.  Watch this space for more, possibly.

These cherries may put you in mind of a cocktail I made up, the Don't Worry Baby;  I can tell you right now that the Baby, I Don't Care cocktail (as soon as it is invented) will be even better than the Don't Worry Baby.  In the meantime, baby, have this great book of poems.  Have this, too; baby, I don't care.

Well, will ya look at that!?

 

Debbie Harry

Dear Whom it May Concern,

Every once in a little while, upon a time, so to speak, I get so ebullient, so touched by something I read that I cannot bear not to share it; and so I get a little pile of the book* to give to friends, or I email everyone with the essay.  Well, once upon one of these times, I was filled with love and admiration for Helen DeWitt.  Well, no, that isn't quite right, because I am still filled with love and admiration for Helen DeWitt.  I think she is a great, great mind.  I feel my cells changing when I read her books.  I adore her, and when I went to share a thing she'd wrote, on cloud nine with my affection, I said that it wasn't just that I loved her, it was that I wanted to inhabit her, to be her.  One of my friends said:  You cannot be her; she has blonde hair and she smokes!  A pause while we consider.

I still wonder at what that means, that rebuttal.  There is, I think, an irony, in that being blonde and smoking is actually available to anyone with, hmm, say 20 bucks and a few hours?  So, those are not the things preventing me from being Helen DeWitt.  The obvious reason, is that someone is already being Helen DeW.  Namely, Helen DeW.  And all of this is crazy self-evident, so what am I saying to you today, exactly?  I am saying:  what are we doing if we are not trying to be like the humans we admire?  Where else can you go for the teachings?  (And yeah, I will give you cats as role models, as mentors, as idols, and in fact you can take the whole of the fauna, and the flora too, and take geo physical while you are at it, but it seems to me to make a lot of sense to emulate those we admire, in any and every way.  And you know, sure, you can model yourself on the cosmos, too; it seems a good design).

You might wonder, though, what has become of my topic: the impulse to share things I love.  Well, it takes an occasional beating from clumsy responders, but even now, I have three very fine poetry books stacked up and ready to give to what I hope will be a receptive and open heart, and I am so excited about it!  And, if they land poorly, that is fine too, because a book lives a long life** and many other readers will come upon these three specific copies and maybe one of those readers will want to be Sandra Cisneros, Ada Limón, Olivia Gatwood.  They won't even need bleach.

* e.g:  Faux Pas, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, Cold Comfort Farm, Cary Grant's Suit. 

** the used copy of Wuthering Heights I read was 76 years old.  I read a copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the library that was 100 years old!  It worked just as good as new.

poetry corner

Terminator. 

Dear Readers,

Solstice Greetings!  You know I only want to give you the best; the stuff I am the most besotted with, the most enthused by, the most singful of praise for.  And so.  I read a book that was full of the sexism of its time, and it was okay, even with all that rubbish, but, and yes, who knows that my little missives to you here won't be dismissed as sexist in 60 or 70 years?  But, the point is that 'meh' is not for the Dodo.  The point is also that amid vast leaf piles of meh one can find a gem fairly regularly, and so I give you this poem, Spring and Fall, which was in the meh book.

I hate to admit my ignorance, (but if I don't admit it, I will continue endlessly in ignorance!) but, why are there these little diacritical marks all over this poem?  I know some of you learned English Majors can enlighten me....

what is it made of?

 

Dear Everyone Occupying Space at This Moment,

Are objects made of poetry?  Without doubt.  What else is inside a thing?  What other potentiality could there be?  What would there be that will not rust, combust, or decompose?  If you counter they are made of atoms, I say; there is your proof!  Little things we cannot see, tiny theoretical impulses are poetry itself!

Here is a poem on some small, un-identified cut brass chips that came to me.

You gave me tiny shiny squares of golden light.
I sent you back a sewn order of gold.
I had to cheat, too, with glue, but I'll never tell.

And they were so crooked and poorly aligned; Agnes Martin
would have died again, even as I thought of her when I arranged them in their

sloppy, 

messy, 

that's life grid.

a diminished thing

 

Ovenbird, detail, by John James Audubon. 

Dear Poetry,

You know how it is; somethings just really grab you, haunt you; dig you, explain you, get you, keep you.  I have been kept by this little phrase for nearly a year now:

"...what to make of a diminished thing."

This phrase is often misquoted in my mind as "what to do with a diminished thing," which is, my friends, the essence of poetry:  'to do' is very like 'to make,' but it is also planets, galaxies, apart.  Let me expand like these galaxies:  you 'make' both a sandwich and sense.  To 'make' is to interpret in some cases and senses.  To 'do' is nearly any action under the sun.  You do not really 'do' sense or sandwiches, even though you 'do' lunch.  Hmm, yes, you are right;  in the UK, they do say, let me 'do' you a bun or a pastie or something or other, but generally, doing is kind of a more active feeling.  Would that behemoth shoe & culture making(!?) machine have advertised "Just Make it?"

Well, now that I have you halfway down the shoe aisle of the big box store, forget all that, turn around and join me here again, while we do this Robert Frost poem together; it's called 

The Oven Bird.

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

PS

Your song of the day, the Ovenbird.  And, did you catch all that 'mid' and how it relates to 'dim?'  Very lovely!

Poetry weekend, continued!

 

Dear Weekend,

Here it is, as promised:  the lovely Joy Harjo reading For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.

brushed

 

MMXX2020
Edmund de Waal.  Oak panel with liquid kaolin, gold leaf, graphite, compressed charcoal and red oil stick in an open aluminium frame. Gilded on reverse.  25 × 18.5 × 5 cm

Dear Viewers,

Here is a nice film, of an artist using clay in a very painterly way.  The thing, I think, that makes a painting, is not so much the paint, but the brush.  "Painterly" is the word that artists use to indicate the gestural tracks and traces left by soft and wet materials being moved and spread by a brush.  Edmund de Wall is also a very fine writer, and if you haven't already, you should read his beautiful book, The Hare with the Amber Eyes.

Friday: I'm in love.

 

Trimline Telephone, 1968; Designed by Henry Dreyfuss (American, 1904–1972); USA; plastic, metal, electronic components; 8 x 23.5 x 7.5 cm (3 1/8 x 9 1/4 x 2 15/16 in.); Gift of Henry Dreyfuss; 1972-88-179-1 Collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Dear Receiver,

As I live and breathe!  Have you seen this?  Meaning of course, have you heard of Dial-a-Poem?  Because, I don't know how in the world I have lived without knowing about it!

Dial 641-793-8122, poetry is standing by!

You can read more about artist John Giorno and his project Dial-a-Poem here, on the SFMOMA website.

The One Hundredth Anniversary

Alice Smith, S. J. de Crasse, and G. H. Halleran sell copies of The Suffragist in Boston, Mass.  Bettmann/Getty          

This image comes from The Atlantic.



 

Dear Worried,

I think where we might be getting into trouble is in thinking that we are somehow smarter than we were some time ago.  It's so nice to feel like we are getting somewhere and celebrate the schadenfreude of how much better it is now.  Of course, yes, it is much better now.  We have no plague and we can vote, and steel can be made into tools, and no one needs to grind acorns at the rock by the river. 

And yet.  We do all this on the backs of those that came before us and we will be the stepped upon of the future, so make sure you are good and sturdy. 

Here is a scholarly article on just what we are celebrating/complaining about, and to mark the 100th anniversary of a women's right to vote in the United States, I give you Girl, a poem by Olivia Gatwood.



i don't think i'll ever not be one
even when the dozen grays sprouting
from my temple take hold and spread
like a sterling fungus across my scalp,
even when the skin on my hands is loose
as a duvet, draped across my knuckles,
even when i know everything there is to know
about heartbreak or envy or the mortality
of my parents, i think, even then i'll want
to be called girl, no matter the mouth
it comes from or how they mean it,
girl, the curling smoke after a sparkler
spatters into the dark, girl, sweet spoon of crystal sugar
at the bottom of my coffee, girl, whole mouth
of whipped cream at the birthday party, say girl,
i think, i'll never die, i'll never stop running
through sprinklers or climbing out of open windows
i'll never pass up a jar of free dum dums
i'll never stop riping out the hangnail with my teeth
i'm a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl
girl next door sunbathing in the driveway
i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be
all the girls i've ever loved,
mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls,
all of us angry on our porches,
rolled tobacco resting on our bottom lips
our bodies are the only things we own,
leave our kids with nothing when we die
we'll still be girls then too, we'll still be pretty,
still be loved, still be soft to the touch
pink lip and powdered nose in the casket
a dozen sobbing men in stiff suits
yes, even then, we are girls
especially then, we are girls
silent and dead and still
the life of the party.



**********



And here is Ms Gatwood reading Girl, and more, from her terrific book, Life of the Party.

Black Birthday Cake

Dear Baking,

For Emily Dickenson's birthday today, bake this cake:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/emily-dickinsons-black-cake

a fruitcake.

If you don't want to mix 22 eggs (and why not?  Will you go to your grave a 'small batch only' kind of baker??!) then you can read this poem by Ms. Dickinson instead:

       How happy is the little stone
       That rambles in the road alone,
       And doesn't care about careers,
       And exigencies never fears:
       Whose coat of elemental brown
       A passing universe put on;
       And independent as the sun,
       Associates or glows alone,
       Fulfilling absolute decree
       In casual simplicity.




In choosing this particular poem, I read a great many from my big Collected volume of Dickinson, and every first line is stellar, and some of the second lines are too.  I loved the first lines clipped from their remainders, and strung together randomly.  I like them this way so much I typed them up on thin, translucent paper, and then sewed them onto vaporous dollops of ink

I love very much the idea of Emily Dickinson; so much that I visited her house, the place she spent her 'recluse' days.  It was a fine pilgrimage.  I object somewhat to the word recluse which is always associated with her- It smacks of a belittling tendency towards female poets of any age. 

Still, I love the idea of her holing up and writing from her windowsill, and I will revere that notion of her for a while longer.  I expect Emily Dickinson's lack of interest in certain things would come under this writer's definition of resistance (explicated in this excellent article) which she calls 'just not.'

O! Dear!

Dear Friends,

O!  I haven't enough time to convince you of the imperative of abstraction in art, and you simply must jump in the water without preparation.  At my job, I have been trying to convince a group of people of this very thing, and all I can do is heap up visual evidence, because when I try to speak of these things, they become flat, stale, and didactic. 

The author here, in this article, suffers similarly, but the images!  O, o!!  O!

Patched & Repaired.

 

Hello World,

I have been thinking of you, as always, and I have written a bit more than you see here:  Enough, now, to put a little pile of pages together.  I invite you to take a look here.  It's the Dodo's first publishing effort and we hope, should you acquire a copy, that you will enjoy it!  It's been a very exciting project around here for the last 9 months, and we are opening a special bottle of pink Champagne to celebrate its completion!  Cheers!