Browsed by
Category: writing

“Realms of Gold”

“Realms of Gold”

Comments 0 Comment

Today is Halloween and the birthday of the English poet John Keats, who described autumn as a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”

After two stormy days that were much closer to Percy Shelley’s depiction of the season —”O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” — I slip back into Keats’s quiet vision. Autumn as a time of reflection and poetry, of observation and even of revelation.

Here is my favorite Keats poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told          5
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;   10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Anniversary

Anniversary

Comments 0 Comment

On October 12, 2004, I went to work as a writer/editor for a university alumni magazine, ending a 17-year freelance-only career. I can still recall the strangeness of that day, the sound of high heels on the hard floor as a designer dropped off page proofs for me to read, the lunch I shared with two new colleagues. I even remember the outfit I wore, which included sandals because I hadn’t yet gotten around to buying “work shoes.”

Though I’ve long since grown used to the routine, some days it still seems slightly surreal to trade sweatpants and slipper socks for a skirt and flats, to travel elsewhere to do what I do at home all the time anyway.  But the routine has enlarged me, has given me plenty to think and write about, has helped me feel closer to the place I live.

Writing will never be just a job to me. But for many of my waking hours these days, that’s exactly what it is.

Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea

Comments 0 Comment

I spent the early morning hours (the fruits of insomnia) copying out passages from a book that must go back to the library today. It’s a posthumous collection of the letters and diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Against Wind and Tide.

I read the book before I went to the beach, and I was delighted to find in it the seeds of her Gift from the Sea, a favorite of mine that Against Wind and Tide prompted me to re-read. How illuminating to come across her original thoughts — thoughts she would later hone into the book that sold three million copies — on solitude, relationships and what it means to be a woman and a writer.

On that topic,  Lindbergh quotes a nineteenth-century writer who says that a woman writer is “rowing against wind and tide” — hence the title of this collection.

As I push against a steady current of my own, I’m happy to row for a few moments with Lindbergh’s words, words like these: “I feel a hunger now — a real hunger  — for letting the pool still itself and seeing the reflections. I feel a hunger for the kind of writing that I feel is truly mine: observation plus reflection.”

There were many passages like this one. My fingers are sore from typing them. But my mind is dancing with thoughts and images.

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

Leaf, Blossom, Bole

Comments 0 Comment

The crepe myrtle blooms when other foliage withers. It adds springtime hues to a late-summer palate. It does all of this and more.

But only if you have sunlight to sustain it.

Our two crepe myrtles have decided this is not the case. So we have the leaves and in one case even the buds, but not the flowers.

But what is the essence of the plant?

For some reason I think of Yeats, who speaks of that and so much more:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

Paper Cut

Paper Cut

Comments 0 Comment

Injuries incurred while meeting deadline:

Eye strain

Neck pain

Paper cut

Yeah, I know, the last one sounds silly. But, as I said to myself when I sliced my hand (and right on the life line, wouldn’t you know),  paper cuts don’t happen in a digital world. Carpal tunnel syndrome maybe, or some other repetitive stress injury, but not paper cuts.

They are, then, a dying malady. A problem that will (it’s safe to say) plague us less in the future.

Say what you will about the printed word, that it’s being eclipsed by tablets and smart phones and bottom-line bosses — it can still make us weep and make us bleed. At least for now, we continue to live in a tangible, touchable, tactile world.

Waking Up

Waking Up

Comments 0 Comment

Up and out early. Moisture fills the air and glows in the lamplight. I play some Gabrielli but it’s too loud for this delicate time of day. I try Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning.” Ahhh; that’s better.

I consider turning off the music entirely and listening to the birds. They’re waking up and singing lustily. But the music is good, too. In fact, it sounds a lot like the birds, has the same gradual crescendo.

There are few cars on the street at this time of day, and the ones I see drive sleepily, as if they, too, are just waking up. The day seems to be holding its breath.

On the main road, cars are more numerous and faster. I ease into a trot. The tall grass is wet as I brush by it. Time now for louder music. “Day by Day,” a sung prayer.  I’m fully awake now. Ready to come home, touch the keyboard, write.

Birds Take Flight

Birds Take Flight

Comments 0 Comment

“Every day,  I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady.”

This is from Terry Tempest Williams’ new book When Women Were Birds. A few pages later, Williams writes: “I am a writer about place who is never home.”

I link these two passages. The walking and the writing about place.  Each essential to the other. One to prime the pump, the other to fill the jug with cold, clean water.

So where do the birds come in? Williams meets her husband at a bookstore, as he’s buying a bird guide. Williams finds her voice through a special teacher who reads to her about the winter owl. A peregrine falcon once slit the corner of Williams’ eye. Another time, Williams sees a painted bunting that arrived in a wintry Maine on the cusp of a fierce winter storm.

“When dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue and green. … I have not dreamed of white birds since.”

When I finished Williams’ book I flipped through the pages with my thumb — and saw the birds that illustrate the outer edge of each page fly back and forth as if alive.

Birds take flight. So do words.

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

Comments 2 comments

When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way back from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove into a tunnel and out and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights and it seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

 Photo by Peter Tooker 2010 All Rights Reserved. From the blog Open Windows.

Lee’s Place

Lee’s Place

Comments 0 Comment

Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, who was born in 1926 and still lives in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. She has written one book,  To Kill a Mockingbird; it won the Pulitzer and has sold more than 300 million copies. 

“I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it,” Lee said in a 2006 issue of Oprah magazine.

The Monroe County Public Library, I wonder, is that the library she searches? Or the library of Alabama Southern Community College, located in Monroeville? I scan the college website and find a notice for the 15th annual Alabama Writer’s Symposium, with its topic “Write Out of Place,” being held (yes) this weekend.

Here’s how the symposium is advertised, first with this quotation from Katherine Mansfield: “How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.”

And then with the following: “When Mansfield wrote those lines, she could have been describing the way that Alabama authors often find themselves in relation to their home. Whether they set stories lovingly in Alabama, loathingly in Alabama, or deliberately not in Alabama, place becomes a part of who they are. …  The 2012 Alabama Writers Symposium explores the ways in which Alabama writers are affected by their ‘placehood,’  the ways in which Alabama as a place informs their literary efforts.”

Lee lived in New York for a while, and she spent time away in college and when she was helping her childhood friend, Truman Capote (another native of Monroeville), research In Cold Blood in Kansas. But she has spent most of her life in Monroeville. She has not escaped from her place; she doesn’t seem to have wanted to.


Symposium

Symposium

Comments 0 Comment

Less than 24 hours in New York City, a quick trip up for my journalism school reunion. I almost didn’t go; I didn’t know if I wanted to tell people what I was doing. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my career; it’s a decent one by most standards. But my classmates are an impressive group of journalists. I wasn’t sure they would understand that what matters to me now is not the daily chase for plum assignments or the satisfaction of putting a magazine to bed. Instead, it’s reading and thinking and working on the ever-elusive next book.

What I discovered is that many of them are in a similar place. They too are switching gears, writing poetry, starting blogs. They are still an impressive bunch — but impressive as human beings, most of all.

This is where we held our party. Symposium: Plato’s work on the nature of love, the Greek word for drinking party and a funky little restaurant on 113th Street.