It’s difficult to watch from afar as a problematic situation you care deeply about unfolds. You know you could help, but you also know better than to get involved, at least for now: the politics are too damned fraught and whom you’d be dealing with revels in fighting dirty.
Just saw two poets at the corner of 6th Avenue and Central Park South with a typewriter and a sign: “Pick a subject, get a poem.” And I think it was a manual typewriter, but I’m not sure!
I did not know that 68th Street near Hunter College had been named Audre Lord Way. I think that’s pretty cool.
Just went to use the bathroom in the library. No one was in the men’s room, but to get there, I had to walk past a long line of impatient and irritated women waiting for the women’s room, feelings that only seemed, quite reasonably, to increase when I breezed past them, both on the way in and on the way out. It really is unconscionable that public restrooms are arranged this way. I remember the first time I used a bathroom at a bar when I lived in South Korea. I was standing at the urinal, when a woman walked in behind me, went into one of the stalls–which were actually little rooms with doors that locked; you couldn’t see the occupants' legs–and then came out shortly after I did. I was surprised, of course, since we just don’t do things that way in the States, but after a while it just made so much sense. There was nothing even remotely sexual about it. Why can’t we just build bathrooms with enough facilities to accommodate however many people, of whatever gender, so that (except in extreme cases) you don’t end up with lines like the one I just saw winding its way down the hall in the library?
I’m at the library, starting work on a second edition of translations I published 15 years ago. I wish I’d kept better notes for why I made some of the choices I did. Now I just find them baffling.
Monday Morning Music
Roy Clark - Malagueña
Last year, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, during my brief stint as acting president of my union, I wrote this statement for the union blog on behalf of our executive committee. What I said then still rings true for me now.
I think I took this near Seneca Lake, but I am not sure.
“There is a concerted campaign afoot to delegitimize academia in the United States, one that too many people seem unwilling to acknowledge and very likely will not respond to in time.”
Worth reading: The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare - The New York Times
On Chong-no 2-ga, Seoul, in 1988.
Just because it’s a whiskey I like.
And because I am almost always reading more than one book at a time, I’m also currently reading: Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi 📚, a dystopian satire banned in China for alluding to Tiananmen Square. Translated by Shelly Bryant.
Currently reading: The Moral Judgement of Butterflies by K. Eltinaé 📚. A lovely, powerful meditation on exile, loss, love, and the self. I’m about halfway through. I highly recommend this book of poems. @keltinae
Monday Morning Music
Woody Guthrie - Union Burying Ground
“Love connects us to what is larger than us and to what is larger within us than we thought we could hold.”
First sentence of a blurb I wrote earlier today for a book of poems that I hope will get a substantial readership.
More from the arboretum.
At The Planting Fields Arboretum in Nassau County yesterday.
The same squirrel, ready to go dancing!
Just playing with portrait mode and photo editing on my iPhone.
This guy came to say hello while was sitting in the garden. I’ll take it as a sign of something. The poem I’m working on is about squirrels.
The cynicism in the right’s use of the concept of “grooming” to defend Don’t Say Gay laws should be seen as a slap in the face, if not a call to action, by every sexual assault survivor, particularly survivors of childhood sexual violence, in the United States.
The click, click, click of an essay’s logic falling into place; the ticking of the clock as the time you’ve set aside for making those revisions today gets ever shorter.
The way your ear has to shift when you move from revising poetry to revising prose.
Digging today–to prepare for submission–into an essay that unpacks the first time I spoke out publicly as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. Sends me back to the 1990s, when my agent–who eventually had no choice but to drop me–pitched the book I was writing for a year, alway with the same response: “Great writer, but men’s books don’t sell.”
I just love it when a poet–and one about whom I have, ahem, serious questions–gets in touch after years of silence in a tone that implies they deserve a featured spot in my reading series. #poetrycommunity