A full house at the Bellaire (MI) library, family on the front row.
We’re finally at the lake: children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces stacked up in the big cottage, Jerry and I blissfully ensconced in the little cottage. The Amish call it the Grossdaddi cottage, where the old ones get to escape, or are cast out. Saturday I had the pleasure of reading at the Bellaire Library with six of the aforementioned kiddies and parents in attendance. I think family often has no clue what it is that you do unless they hear you read.
Poetry falls out of the mainstream of anything. It’s peculiar. You don’t make a living with it usually. People don’t often ask you about it because they’re not sure what to ask. Of course that’s poetry’s advantage. It slips around the edges of language, right to the inarticulate center.
The little cottage.
Sensations are inarticulate. We have these words to sneak up as close as we can get. Saturday at the library I read part of the final essay in Mortality, with Friends, the essay about living with ghosts at the lake, the history here. It reminded me again how much writing-energy I get from those ghosts. It’s the worn parts, what’s come loose, the tarnished, the rutted. It’s in Leonard Cohen’s glorious song, “Anthem”: “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
I have this hip pain. Bursitis, plus some nerve issues, I think. Geez, just when I’m primed to swim. I tried, but it hurt too much. I’m forced to mostly sit until my appointment at the end of this month where I trust the doctor will figure out what’s going on. I can tell her right now. What’s going on is age. I could say more, but that about covers it. I even bought a cane, which helps a little. It’s pretty funny to see Jerry with his cane and me with mine. I’m remembering my poem about both of us (briefly) using walkers after a surgery I had. So there you have it, the calling forth of the inexplicable, the inarticulate, from the broken part.
If you think about it, even the most splendid love poem goes straight for the cracks in the surface, for the fear of loss. Anything precious can only be precious in contrast to the potential loss of it. That’s what makes it precious.
I have a new (old) project. I’ve put together a book, the diary I told you about a while back about moving into a retirement community. I finally convinced myself it was worth publishing. I’m thinking that will be out next spring. I’ll talk more about that later.
I was surprised by 14 family members at my birthday dinner at the Torch Lake Cafe!
It’s amazing that at the end of my career, I’m doing so much work. I don’t know where the impetus comes from. In any case, it’s making me happy. It seems I have an endless supply of material, all these years’ worth.
And, quoting Ed Simon in a recent LitHub, “I’ve always understood writing as the prescription to existence, as a way of organizing my understanding about the world; indeed for me composition is equivalent to thought, for often it feels like I haven’t really read something (or certainly comprehended it) until I’ve written about it, that perhaps my experience of the world must be mediated through the word processor.”
I’m glad I’ve given myself the task of writing this blog every other week. Plus writing a monthly column for the newspaper. These deadlines (self-imposed and newspaper-imposed) often pull out of me what I didn’t know was there. I never know what’s there until I start typing, actually. I would like to write by hand, especially the poems, but I have arthritis in my thumb area and just can’t do it anymore. Supposedly, what travels down the hand from the brain is richer, more thoughtful, than what travels to the keys of the computer. There’s a whole list of reasons. Look it up. AI will tell you, bless its insidious soul. I hope I hand-wrote long enough to have a backlog in my brain.
I’m getting excited about the October release of The End of the Clockwork Universe. Carnegie Mellon tells me I already have a couple dozen pre-orders! I’ll give you the flyer here again. https://press.uchicago.edu/.../distrib.../E/bo257336693.html .
If I can settle this hip pain down, I’ll be on the road again, metaphorically, doing as many readings as I can manage without flying all over the place. When I read aloud, my own work wakes up in my mind again. It sends out its feelers, looking to connect.
“What?” my little sister writes when I say I’m giving a reading. “They haven’t learned to read yet?” Ha Ha.