“He who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind.” —Herman Melville
I do remember where I took this picture: in Iran, in 2008, when we were there for my brother-in-law’s wedding.
Another flower, from I also don’t remember where:
A flower from I don’t remember where:
This is somewhere in Sweden, but I don’t remember where:
More from the L Line in New York City:
The cover of my first book, The Silence of Men and the painting that Peter Cusak, who was designing CavanKerry Press' books at the time, did in response to the poems. I am happy to have the painting hanging above the piano in my dining room.
In a station on the L line of the New York City subway system.
Writing, Ambition, and Language
The beginning of James Wood’s essay on Melville (The Broken Estate, 26) got me thinking about what my ambition is as a writer. This is what Wood wrote:
When it comes to language, all writers want to be be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. (26)
I read that and I thought, “Really?” It feels more like what someone who is not a writer would think about writers than what a writer would say about her or his own desire. What resonates more with me is the idea of fully inhabiting the language, and I wonder now if that is something poets say more than prose writers. Certainly I feel like I have read that exact wording or something like that wording in the prose of poets writing about the craft, but even though I intuit what the word inhabit means there, I have a hard time articulating it precisely.
Still, I do not experience myself as wanting to command the language. Somehow, whenever I consciously try to do that, whatever it is that I am writing fails. I suppose my ambition as a writer feels more like a desire to be open to language, to find a current I can swim in and then swim, and this is true even in revision. Though maybe path/road is the better metaphor here, because revisions, when I make then, when they are substantial/substantive often feel like I am either correcting a wrong turn or bushwhacking a clear path through a thicket.
Wood’s metaphor is very obviously capitalist and very much about power, and I just don’t buy it.
I went through a period where I was taking pictures of flowers. These are from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in 2013.
Yesterday, I received an SASE rejeciton. Took me back to when there was no Submittable, no email submissions. Maybe this is the rosey lens of nostalgia, but the process seemed so much less fraught back then, if only because there was so much less of the process to track.
My most recent book buying binge. Trying hard to read books I already own first, but when “found money” comes my way, my first impulse is to buy books. Sometimes I can resist; this time not.
I’m reading White Lung, by Kimberly O’Connor. For me, what’s most interesting are the lessons to be learned from where the poems dealing with whiteness fail. I’ve written about race and antisemitism in prose, but I’ve not taken on whiteness, which means my own complicated relationship to whiteness as a white-presenting Jew, in poetry. I’m learning from reading O’Connor’s work, and I haven’t felt like I’ve really learned something from reading a book of poetry in a very long time. It’s a nice feeling.
“According to a report by the RAND Corporation last year, ‘nearly one in four teachers overall, and almost half of Black teachers in particular, said that they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020-2021 school year.’” Worth reading: www.nytimes.com
Currently reading: White Lung by Kimberly O’Connor 📚
If you’re in academia, you should read this thread regarding sexual harassment in Harvard’s anthropology department.
Given what coverage in the USA is like, and the embarrassing paucity of literary translation here, it’s good to hear voices like these: New Poetry in Translation: Fadi Azzam’s ‘If You Are Syrian These Days …’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
Currently reading: Basic Needs by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb 📚
Metaphors have their own internal logic and if you follow the logic of the metaphor, you will always end up somewhere other than where you entered the metaphor.
Took this in 2016 when I was in Edinburgh with my wife and son. The same place I ate at when I was there in 1985 and studying 20th century Scottish literature as part of the Scottish University International Summer School. Sadly, in 2106, I didn’t get the chance to eat there.
I am happy the Popular Cultural Association made this explicit statement against antisemitism. There may be others, but it’s the only on I’ve seen from a professional organization.
