They Don't Call it Brotherly Love for Nothing

About an hour ago Mark and I pulled into Philadelphia where the afternoon thunderstorms power-washed the streets for a good half hour. We're literally drying out in our hotel room. In the morning we're headed across the river to Camden. Some time at the Walt Whitman house, then a drive over to Harleigh Cemetery to stop at his grave, which we've never seen.




--Driving into the storm on the Ben Franklin Bridge
--Downpour in the parking garage
--Looking across Rodman Street from the parking garage
--Billy Penn from the window of the hotel room

On Nights Like This

Midsummer
by Louise Glück

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last
      summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.

The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.

On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were
      dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were
      after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep
      watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be
      them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would
      change,
fate would be a different fate.

At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights
      we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.

And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.

And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the
      morning,
eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.

And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows
      lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.

Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.
And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending
      messages:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though
you can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.

Pink Fish Bones

Still coming back to myself after five days of my Fairfield residency. In the meantime, I thought I'd pass on yesterday's homage to Flannery O'Connor on the National Book Foundation blog, which includes statements from Alice Elliott Dark, Deb Caletti, Anna Clark, Matthew Pitt, and me. My section follows. To read the full piece click here.

*****

"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children."

"Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog."

If you've read Flannery O'Connor, I can't imagine that those lines aren’t part of your imagination.

And her images. The chained monkey biting each flea "as if it were a delicacy." Mary Grace’s thumbprints over Mrs. Turpin's windpipe: "pink fish bones." The hat of Hulga's suitor! "Toast-colored with a red and white band around it...slightly too large for him."

How does she do it? Even separated from narrative, these lines and pictures bore into us. Who hasn't felt like Mary Grace when confronting a crude, entitled person? Or wished that the Mrs. Turpins of the world (and in ourselves) were capable of inner confrontation and awe.

When I teach these stories, it's hard not to be stirred by them. Sometimes they untrap lost parts of me. My students look worried: the frank, open intensity on their faces! After all, could these stories be read without some of the theology they refract and revise? Shouldn’t these engines of confrontation and grace be distrusted? Yes or no, saved or not, right or wrong: mean, murderous binaries. And yet “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” invites us to blur the boundary between self-charmed Christian woman and serial killer. The Misfit kills the grandmother, and that’s devastating, but his ache, his Job-like wail, his desperate line of questioning before he raises his gun... None of that can be diminished. And what do we do with that?

And there’s her vividness on the page, the sense of irreverence, the sense of raucous play. Tonal slipperiness—and control. Her ability to turn the most low-down things into shining things. Bravery. Some of my favorite writers—Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill—would not be who they are without her. In truth, I'm not sure American literature post-1972 would be what it is without her.

And here she was, a girl afraid to open her mouth in workshop.


Glowing mushroom on the lawn outside my workshop classroom.

F Minor

From Joy Williams' spectacular essay "Hawk," which we're talking about in class this morning...

*****

Glenn Gould bathed his hands in wax and then they felt new. He didn't like to eat in public. He was personally gracious. He was knowledgeable about drugs. He loved animals. In his will, he directed that half his money be given to the Toronto Humane Society. He hated daylight and bright colours. His piano chair was fourteen inches high. His music was used to score Slaughterhouse Five, a book he did not like. After he suffered his fatal stroke, his father waited a day to turn off the respirator because he didn't want him to die on his stepmother's birthday. When Glenn Gould wrote cheques he signed them Glen Gould because he was afraid that by writing the second n he would make too many squiggles. He took prodigious amounts of Valium and used make-up. He was once arrested in Sarasota, Florida, for sitting on a park bench in an overcoat, gloves and muffler. He was a prodigy, a genius. He had dirty hair. He had boring dreams. He probably believed in God.

My mind said You read about Glenn Gould and listen to Glenn Gould constantly but you don't know anything about music. If he were alive you wouldn't have anything you could say to him...

A composer acquaintance of mine dismissed Glenn as a performer.

Glenn Gould loved the idea of the Arctic but he had a great fear of the cold. He was a virtuoso. To be a virtuoso you must have an absolutely fearless attitude toward everything but Glenn was, in fact, worried, frightened and phobic. The dogs of his youth were named Nick and Banquo. As a baby, he never cried but hummed. He thought that the key of F minor expressed his personality.

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988/Aria - Glenn Gould

Ospreys, Slave Burial Grounds, Orient Point

Workshop starts in minutes--yes, even on a Sunday morning in low-residency land--but for now I thought I'd pass on a few pictures from Friday's three-ferry trip to Mystic. Class flew along yesterday. Part of the time was spent talking about openings from David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Sherman Alexie, and Cheryl Strayed, and we all had a good and lively time thinking about so many conventions smashed. (A startling discovery: it turns out that the father of one of my students was my middle school art teacher in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, all the way back in the 70s-- And here I thought life wasn't supposed to be symmetrical.)

For anyone who's in Eastern Connecticut or Rhode Island... I'm reading with Rick Moody tonight at 7:00 PM in the St. Edmunds Chapel on Enders Island in Mystic. Flash floods and severe thunderstorms in the forecast, so watch out.

Streaked, Variegated

This has to be one of my favorite passages in literature. From "Street Haunting," which I'm preparing to teach in a few days. (Greetings, by the way, from Mystic, Connecticut--Enders Island, to be precise, where the Fairfield MFA residency takes place twice a year, December and July. I've been here all of four hours, and I'm starting to sink into my monkish cell of the next five nights. Photos tomorrow, but tonight, class prep to attend to. Thus, no time to be a nomad, mystic, debauchee, soldier, etc.)

from "Street Haunting"
Virginia Woolf

...Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colors have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience' sake a man must be whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

They Don't Call it Fire to Fire for Nothing

A volunteer sunflower in the backyard. And bees. Bees.

Rynn Williams, In Memory

Another gifted poet: I just found out about Rynn Williams's death through her Facebook page. I'd never met her, but Mark did, and we both loved her work. And I remember a very sweet email exchange we had last summer....

The Forest at the Edge of the World
Rynn Williams
from Adonis Garage

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
"Nothing to do but roll it," he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. "You can smell the forest,"
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment--
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence--
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself--
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest--trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs--
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see the world through branches to the sun--I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

How to Keep Up w/ the Spirit World?

1. Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' account of racial profiling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, has been much on my mind over the last week. It seems all the more timely given the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in Cambridge last Thursday. The book doesn't really lend itself to excerpts, but the paragraph below will at least give you a sense of the man at the center of things, whose likable, generous character is at such odds with the injustices and degradations he's subject to. I could not put this book down.

from Zeitoun
Dave Eggers

Zeitoun went outside, the air humid and gusty. He tied the canoe to the back porch. The water was whispering through through the cracks in the back fence, rising up. It was flowing into his yard at an astonishing rate. As he stood, it swallowed his ankles and crawled up his shins.

Back inside, he continued to move everything of value upward. As he did, he watched the water erase the floor and climb the walls. In another hour there was three feet of water indoors. And his house was three feet above sea level.

But the water was clean. It was translucent, almost green in tint. He watched it fill his dining room, momentarily struck by the beauty of the sight. It brought forth a vague memory of a storm on Arwad Island, when he was just a boy, when the Mediterranean rose up and swallowed the lower-sitting homes, the blue-green sea sitting inside living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens. The water breached and dodged the Phoenician stones surrounding the island without any difficulty at all.

At the moment, Zeitoun had an idea. He knew the fish in his tank wouldn't survive without filtration or food, so he reached inside and liberated them. He dropped them in the water that filled the house. It was the best chance they had. They swam down and away.

**********

2. Something from Brenda Hillman's brand new Practical Water. I read it before I went to bed last night, and lay awake for a while, thinking about it, listening to the rain on the roof. I love it as much as anything I've read in a long time. I'll just let it stand for itself here.

The Covenant
from Practical Water
Brenda Hillman

Having stopped using dolphins to locate explosions in the Cold War
they had 30 leftover dolphin.

An officer noted that to move them to open waters would endanger them.

One dolphin taking part in all this smiles like a Boy Scout counting knives--

(how do they smell explosives under the sea)

(who had once taken souls to the beyond)

Before the second marriage I greeted middle age;
should I wear reading glasses at the wedding?

(& : how to keep up w/ the spirit world-- whose figures
        seemed distant, cool--)

These bodies we'll know only a few more decades
    have become a series of yeses;    yes to capillaries & leg veins' h's,
        to x's on hands bathed in aloe & sweet peppermint,

yes to face lines so western--

When the officer shows concern by squinting,
one especially tame dolphin puts its nose-- what looks like a child's knee--
        into the officer's hand.

Rainier: Two Views

Text later today. We're back in NYC, but my senses still insist it's 5:12 AM.

I took these from the deck of the Bainbridge Island Ferry on Saturday. The heat of the day only made the sight of the floating snowy mountain that much stranger. Exactly a week before I was bemoaning the fact that I hadn't brought a parka. A week later I was out on the deck in bare arms, bare head, and bare legs, acquiring the makings of a Pacific Northwest sunburn.

Once the ferry pulled out into Puget Sound, dozens of people raised cellphones and cameras south-ward toward the mountain. The mountain, bay, and boat collectively cried, Beauty! Purity! Look at me! I suspect there are fifty concurrent versions of the top shot, none of which say very much about the photographer. But a sight like that is hard to resist, even if you know it's sentimental, even if you know that the perfected version can be found on the rack at the downtown Walgreen's. Nearer to Seattle, the signs of industry came into view: lifts, ships, cranes, containers. By then everyone had turned away from the mountain, looking ahead to the skyscrapers, the piers, the Space Needle. No one around me lifted her camera. A puppy shook terribly at the blast of the horn. Later, when I showed the second shot to Mark, he said, that's the one.

Varieties of Disturbance

1. I sprang out of bed this morning at 5:45 AM. My back cried, Enough! Enough of being patient all week with a saggy, dangerous maniac that dared to call itself a mattress!

2. Or maybe I was already re-setting my clock. A need to be back inside the parameters of the home time zone.

3. In the dilated time that is residency time, all the usual waking-up anxieties disperse: the missing of dead people, the shock of frittering away one’s time, the minor terrors of the social world, etc. etc. Perhaps people travel in order to feel something like this.

4. At the same time, the unrelenting single-mindedness of it all provokes in one a ceaseless desire for more air, i.e., a need for full-bodied yawns at the dinner table. Who would expect to miss pushing the lawnmower up the hill, or walking down the basement steps with a heap of musty laundry on the arms?

5. Upon waking up, I felt for glasses in the usual space where I keep them: on the floor, just inside the mattress frame, on my side—the left side--of the bed. I did not find my glasses immediately, but instead found my copy of Varieties of Disturbance, which I’d thought I’d left in the seat-pocket ahead of me on the plane. So glad was I to have my book back, I lay back on the killing mattress with the book on top of my chest, grateful for its modest weight on me.

6. Yes, there is the occasional palm in coastal Washington state. We applaud their fortitude.

I Spring From the Boulders Like a Papa Lion

Inside 1972’s For the Roses, Joni Mitchell stands buck naked, back to the camera, atop a rock in a blue-green bay near her British Columbia house. The photo’s more sweet than sexual. Apparently, Joni had wanted it to be the cover shot until Elliott Roberts, her then manager, convinced her she wouldn’t want to walk into a record department and find a discount sticker pasted over her ass.

We’ve been thinking about Joni a lot, especially now that the sun’s out, and especially because her house is just a couple of hours north. (Thank God the sun is out—on our first few days I thought, who could put up with this gluey cold?) On Wednesday’s drive west, we tuned into a couple of radio stations from Victoria, thinking about the commercials, the announcers, a whole other world transpiring just a few miles into the fog, across the Strait. Every so often one of us ends up singing a spontaneous stray line from “Banquet,” “See You Sometime,” or “Lesson in Survival”—any of the songs written in that house. They seem to me the sonic equivalents to the nuanced landscape: all that motion, vitality, tonal complexity, wit. I keep threatening to mimic that photograph every time I see a boulder just a few feet off the shoreline, but so far I’ve been keeping the pants on. That water is probably cold enough to burn.

Lesson In Survival (LP Version) - Joni Mitchell

See You Sometime (LP Version) - Joni Mitchell

*****

The Strait of Juan

The Port Townsend fog's already burned off (along with that trapped smell of paper mill) but in the last two days, we've gotten up to sound of at least three foghorns, which I've come to think of as the clarinet, the bassoon, and the tuba. The third of these is the wonder; I could listen to it all morning, all day. Every time it lows, you feel it down into the chest, the backbone. Imagine the blast of an ocean liner, gentled, with some nuance in it. The sound reminds you that you're a body--or in a body. At the same time it takes you completely out of yourself. It tells you, on the animal, physical level, that there are other worlds going on near you, right next to you. The best thing is that I never get used to it, or bored by it, or annoyed. I imagine it must come at prescribed intervals--thirty seconds? sixty seconds?--depending on the density of the moisture. But somehow I'd rather not count. I like the surprise of its muzzy address, until I forget the delight of the surprise, until I feel it into my body all over again.

Mark mentioned that it's unusual to take in a warning that has an aura of pleasure about it. I think that's true, even though I also think of the horn of the train to Montauk as the sound travels across woods and moraine and water. That's its own occasion of delight. Still, the train's more melancholy than sublime. If sound could be an animal, the foghorn would be the whale, the largest whale of the species, far from the coastline, in ice water. If the sound could be a color, it would be darkest purple, tinged with brown and deep green and black. It might have some dust in it. It's as vast as a glacier and has the quality of making one feel both contained and anonymous at the same time.

*****

Some local names I've noticed on the map:

Useless Bay
Baby Island Heights
Crybaby Mountain
Egg & I Road
Kitchen-Dick Road

*****
Click here for Mark’s take on the madrone and the Centrum Writers' Exchange.

*****
Some shots of our ride to Sequim, Dungeness, and Port Angeles, towns west of us on the Olympic Peninsula. Sunshine insisted it was time to get out, in spite of work to do. That green water is Strait of Juan de Fuca water, which has become terribly corrupted in our personal South Park-Beavis and Butthead like fashion.

The Mother Sits Down on the Bed

Hello from the Port Townsend (Washington) Writers Conference, where I’m Mark and I are working this week. I’m lucky enough to have the lightest possible teaching load, though in an hour I’m up with my craft class on prose style, which I’ve done so many times over the years that I could probably say it backwards. Still, the sparks of hot nerves--well, at least it's better than it used to be. Later today, I think I’ll be fully able to take in where we are: the ridge of Whidbey Island across the channel, the kelp, the smell of cold, deep water. In the meantime, a few pictures. And something I read at my reading last night, which came from my challenge of last week.





The Mother Sits Down on the Bed

The mother sits down on the bed. She has just come back from checking on the sons whose throats were stuck with thoughts of her. They seemed to her in constant motion, one laying down cork, another practicing an English horn, a third trying and failing to write of her, as if by capturing her walk, or the wobble of her hello, he’d be doing a little something to bring her back. But she should talk. It is hard work to be dead. She should have been in training for this, instead of putting her feet up in front of the TV, eating crackers.

The fields of the earth are full of nests, and when a tractor goes by the eggs in the nests crack open, as if the birds inside their shells cannot stand the rumble one more minute. They want to fly and they’re tired of being warmed. But the mother is grateful to be away from all that. The earth buzzes with noise and shoots push up through the festive green. Do not pause, my lovelies. Still, her urge to cool down their faces does not match her urge to stay where she is.

To the Vet

from Heroic Measures
Jill Ciment

In the taxi, Alex gives the driver, an Indian man with a jackknife-size cross hanging from his rearview mirror, the hospital address, fifty-four blocks north, while Ruth looks out her window at the solid lake of traffic. Between them on the backseat, supported by the cutting board and wrapped in the blanket, Dorothy moans. The sound is too faint for Alex to discern without his hearing aids, but Ruth hears it. Despite the trumpeting horns in front and in back of them, it's the only sound she hears. She and Alex have been responsible for this life since it was eight weeks old. Alex brought Dorothy home the day Ruth retired after three decades as a public school English teacher. Those first few nights tending to Dorothy's mystifying needs and constant demands had reminded Ruth of a Victorian novel in which the husband acquires an orphan for his graying childless wife to raise. Over the years, though, the dynamics of their threesome changed. For a time, Ruth and Alex were like two exasperated parents dealing with a rebellious toddler. Then, when puppyhood was behind them and Dorothy's neediness for Ruth turned to infatuation, she and Dorothy were like best girlfriends with a staid father chaperoning. Later, when Dorothy entered middle age and became gray and dignified, but inflexible and slightly hypochondriacal, Alex used to joke that he and Ruth were like illicit lovers with a maiden aunt sleeping in bed beside them. Of late, when Ruth woke in the night and saw the familiar forms sharing her bed--one white-bearded and supine, the other tiny, white-faced, and supine--their sleeping arrangements (Alex in the middle, she and Dorothy on either side) had begun to remind her of two wives and a tired old polygamist. And now, stuck in traffic, it seems to Ruth that she and Alex are carrying the defenseless center of the marriage on a cutting board.

Two Poems (Or: Stunned by the Midsummer Day)

1. Short Talk on Walking Backwards
Anne Carson
from Short Talks

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. I don't know where she got this idea, perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards, but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out, but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

2. On Occasion
Grace Paley
from Fidelity

I forget the names of my friends
and the names of the flowers in
my garden my friends remind me
Grace       it’s us       the flowers just
stand there stunned by the mid-
summer day

A long time ago my mother said
darling       there are also wild flowers
but look       these I planted

my flowers are pink and rose and
orange      they’re sturdy       they make
new petals every day to fill in
their fat round faces

suddenly before thought I
called out ZINNIA       ZINNIA
ZINNIA       along came a sunny
summer breeze they swayed and
lightly bowed so I said Mother

Birthdaymates

1. Richard Roundtree

2. Courtney Love

I Happy Am (Or: Helpless, Naked, Piping Loud)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Courtney Love
Minor White
Jimmy Smits
Oliver Sacks
David Hockney
O.J. Simpson
Maria Flook
Richard Roundtree

And this little fellow:

Infant Sorrow
William Blake

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

*****

Infant Joy
William Blake

"I have no name:
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!

Still Life in the Sink

And a visitor to the backyard today...

Mary! I Have a Horrible Feeling I Didn't Put Out My Cigarette. Will You Take a Look? (Or: Don't Be Ridiculous. The Sun Can't Be Up. I Blew It Out.)

These images come from the January-February 1954 issue of Adult Psychology, a magazine that Mark picked up for me in Amherst. Among its many topics:

JOAN CRAWFORD'S Secret Life.
KINSEY: Can He Help Your Sex Life?
Will Your Child Take DOPE?
It's Fun, But Is It LOVE? Test Yourself.
How to Stop Worrying.

I haven't read any of these very closely, but I can already guess that mental health is the least of its concerns. A little sass and sleaze in a respectable Reader's Digest-like package--I guess that says a little something about the order of the day. You probably could have taken this to the cash register in Westport without embarrassing yourself and your children.

It was hard not to look at Example B and Example D--you probably have to embiggen these--without thinking of Lydia Davis, whose work wants to break down and play with the ongoing obsession with naming and classification. I only wish I could show these to her because I think they'd make her smile.

Lydia's work has been much on my mind, as I've given myself a challenge that she's talked of setting for herself--to write at least one one-paragraph story per day over a given period. Here she says a few things about that assignment:

"...I was to write without thinking too hard ahead of time about where the story would go, and certainly not thinking ahead to what it would mean--I have never done that. Since I was forcing myself, this produced some curious work: I was allowing my subconscious more of a role than I usually did, and it came out with some interesting themes, subjects, and images. I did not censor what came out, or even revise the paragraph radically--I worked on it only within the bounds of what it had itself established in the way of structure, tone, and imagery...." (from the back pages of Best American Poetry 2008 )

I've always assumed that forcing oneself to write would only lead to the dutiful, the willed, and it's, well, enlightening (that's a word she's made good fun of in one story) to think that that one might have access to different impulses in that condition. I'm too close to what I've written--I've done two since yesterday, onto the third tonight--to know whether they're any good or not, but I'm interested in their neutral, shell-shocked tone. And if they fail? Well, it's a relief to do some sketches this week.