Journal, Day Four

By Olena Kalytiak Davis

all this thinking is not giving me a chance to think!

things to consider doing (in) here:

make corrections: add k.w. to mix list, nirvana unplugged.
clarify, i.e. say something, um, coherent about the living a different life thing.
more lowell letter stuff: jarell in a taxi, historians learning by writing. x being “almost as bad as being a poet, life for it’s possessor, but something too real and occupying to be exactly desired.”
idea for poem: PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN THIS POEM
make poetry mix
enough already: (when i was driving the deleted contents of yesterday’s ur-blog gingerly through anchorage i kept thinking, relax, it’s all in your head you thought it all thru already by writing it and it will be easy to get it back and down. not at all true. the most interesting/subtle thinking was and, duh, always is, in the writing itself, not in anything i could ever re-think-cover myself in a car.)

and outside the blog:

i.s writes: You both give the reader, the friend, the blog, the unmediated you and the willful theater of the unmediated you. They’re not separate people, they’re entangled, the poet you and the person public-private you. Working out which is which, how they’re inextricably liked, is what (each in our own way) we poets always do.

i love how that linked became liked! (but now that i reread it doesn’t that mean by each other? by selfsame? ) cause, yes, i worry (so insecure!) about my friends not liking me after reading the stupid blog!

fear of orphic sparagmos!

i.s.: the anxiety of influenza

is it the “writing” that makes me do it? because it’s “writing” some dumb need to inhabit it fully?

and another thing about personal correspondence: who writes in their “writing style” and who does not.

and i will also tell you a secret i tell everyone (really?): allen grossman’s tapes called “poetry, an introduction” that he made for the teaching company a while back (he’s kidding in the title) is truly the most amazing reading of poetry (i mean, both a loud and exegesis) that i have ever heard. unfortunately, have never heard him live. he and jeff tweedy both blew me off when i asked them to contribute to this issue of alaska quarterly review i just edited.

and continuing with the poetry readings/putting the poets on a plane thing: i wrote w.c. back saying the only great reading i had ever heard in my real life was belle waring in a trance one afternoon in florida like 12 or 13 years ago.

and w.c. just now back:

O, have been trying to think of any reading I’ve been to that actually did it for me. Oh! Shit! My god, this is lengthy but worth it: when I was a kid (16 yrs old) I was in a band with my best friend and we got picked to be in this insane end of the year cabaret-type thing–best ‘out there’ (name of monthly series) acts in Mpls/St. Paul (and our pictures were in the paper because we were the youngest ever, and we were two little dudes playing guitar and drums and weird jazz fusion things we wrote ourselves). Anyway. At the one we were in, one of the acts was this guy and girl taking turns reading a poem that interwove with itself. It was about: love and also: sadness. As the poem got further in/on (best line ever, which I of course remember: “How many ways can you spell loneliness? Six. Seven counting your name”), while the guy was standing there next to the girl as she was reading (and they were both wearing like really ‘nice’ dress-up clothes, nothing sexy, just solid) HE WOULD PLUCK AND EAT PETALS FROM A TULIP THAT HE WAS HOLDING. Fuck, haven’t thought of that in years.

which, after another freak, is a great lead in to the nontrans(or a)ggressive thursday reader’s digest children’s portion of my blog:

somewhere during kate’s and michael’s blog someone talked about dean saying he didn’t write better poems then his classmates in kindergarten and gradeschool and highschool, he just kept writing them. this reminded me of the really good beginning of this article vivian gornick wrote on mary wollstonecraft in the nation a while ago (same issue where camille paglia’s break blow burn was reviewed, cause that’s why someone gave it to me). (no comment.) gornick: “many, if not most children exhibit an early talent for art or science, even intellection; but we can never accurately predict the one whose youthful giftedness will blossom not into a pastime but into a driving need: the kind that determines the course of one’s life…in creative work, the driving need occurs when the talent is exercised, the possessor of it finds that she or he is struck to the heart (not a thing that happens simply because one has talent) and a sense of expressive existence flares into bright life. that experience is incomparable. it induces a conviction of inner clarity that quickly becomes the very thing one can no longer do without. if it can be done without, it usually is…It is to this clarity of inner being that the radical–like the artist, the scientist, the philosopher–becomes attached, even addicted.”

my kids, avgustyn 6 (augie, gobi, gogobee, goose, deck) and olyana 41/2 (lyana, lyalya, lyalyabee, little bean, lulu, lyali, lollipop) yes, hi! i really am a mother, (and/but/so IS NOTHING SACRED TO YOU? IS EVERYTHING BLOGABLE????) are still in that first amazing stage. olyana recently drew this picture of a caterpillar (drinking wine she said, but it looks like smoking a bowl) and sitting (with his pizza she said but it looks like a remote control) watching a lady and her penguin (looks pretty much like a lady and her penguin) on tv and not hearing that his friends, a butterfly and a beetle (who kinda looks like a spider), are knocking on his door! lovely green polka dot rug underneath it all.

she can also recite to be or not to be (she puts on satin slippers for the delivery) all the way to perchance to dream, while changing the first letter of every word to “p”. how great is that?

and today: so, the parasaurolophus was doing her blog and she heard someone scream!

my son, wept, (wept!), the first time he heard neil young’s “four strong winds”. “if the good times are all gone then i’ll be moving on….” need i say more?

no, but i will:

we were just discussing noah and his arc and augie was floored that everyone else except noah and those specific pairs of animals was fucked. (glad about the sea creatures, though, his old favorites.) finally after thinking about the whole goddam disaster he said: “you know, god is just like winnie the pooh, sometimes he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

and finally, i’ve been recently experiencing my year of horrible aging (it’s a real phrase in french, does anyone know it?) (said the blogger to the void) and so i got, you guessed it: eye cream. my daughter was, like, what are you doing?????? the first time she saw me putting it on. i’m, like, oh this is so you don’t look old. the second time she stood there watching and after i was finished she said: “mama, you still look old!”

so, anyway, i have kids.

they, too, like music (most recently johnny cash: “i’m going to jackson.” “mama, why are they going to jackson?”) way more than poetry, o.

p.s. netflix queue:

1. scenes from a marriage
2. the beat my heart skipped
3. mysterious skin
4. the holy girl
5. kings and queens
6. saraband
7. junebug
8. nobody knows
9. gunner palace
10. head-on (but i now think i already saw this. thought it was good.)

there should be some cassavetes on there, whom i love and haven’t watched in a while. a new bio of him was just reviewed by philip lopate in the nytbr. of course: during his lifetime his work was often dismissed as confused and self-indulgent. and did you know pauline kael hated him cause she felt his movies showed contempt for the audience’s desire to be entertained?

p.p.s. yes, it’s as hokey as i get:

IN PRAISE OF MY CHILDREN

i sing my children’s’ lovely dirty blonde heads
i sing their hands, their fingers, their widely spaced teeth
i sing their limber limbs, their fish white rumps

i sing their complicated lives
i sing their simple feet:

once a pants a time
my grandpa had a tree
and ants ate out its heart

i sing their knowledge of marine mammals
i sing their knowledge of the dinosaur and bat
i sing of their enlightenment; of their having lighted on
the spider and the many eyed fly

the wings of nymphs and butterflies
the mating of the octopi

i sing their love of sugar
and, of love

glory be for the ability to laugh and one second later cry
glory be to those that hate and love their brother
want to pinch and poke him in the eye
glory be to those that suffer their sister

i praise their sorrys, their beg-a-pardons, their ‘kooz me, ‘lank you
and their mama, please
i praise their growing slowly up
and their lying reluctantly down…
their imitation of sleep:

ah speepy speepy speepy
ah speepy speepy speepy….

somebody take that apple off my son’s head
the arrow from my daughter’s bow

o alate, though their shoulders bare be
o fucked up, though without a fucking care

2006-02-02

Posted in Journals on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 by Olena Kalytiak Davis.