#reading instructions

[whatithinkaboutdarkshadows]

Episode 71: The place where they cut the heads off the fish

Episode 71: The place where they cut the heads off the fish

Friday’s episode ended, not with a cliffhanger, but with a visitation from the supernatural, as we saw the ghost of Josette Collins descend from her portrait and pirouette around the columns of the mansion she haunts. Today, Roger and Vicki sit in the diner, where he gives her a lecture about the sardine-packing business. The apparition of Josette was the climax of an episode featuring more…

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[whatithinkaboutdarkshadows]

Episode 1078: Everyone Must Leave This House at Once

“I remember the first sensation I had from him in the future.” “Do you feel his presence?” Barnabas asks. “Yes,” Julia shudders, “but not as strongly as be…

In which I watch characters on Dark Shadows while they watch another version of Dark Shadows and form opinions of their own about what the characters on it should do. 

[aliceunderskies]

On Falling (Blue Spruce)

Reading instructions:  STOP. No, really, don’t scroll. Don’t let your eyes touch this poem unless you are alone, or at least in a place where you feel comfortable reading outloud. 

You must be reading this poem outloud the first time you experience it. Or you must hear it from someone. Perhaps go to my source, the sadly-silent podcast All Up in Your Ears, and listen to episode two and hear it read to you. Please don’t read it before you speak it or hear it. Not this one. 

That’s the proper way to approach most poetry, of course, and you know this, of course. But who hews to best practices at all times? Not me:  I read poems on the bus with headphones in but not on; I read them on the quiet floor of the university library because, unjustly, that is also the poetry floor; I read them in class when the light from outside fails to mix with the overhead fluorescence and I can’t listen or speak because the feeling of it is like the sound of walking through broken glass in a parking lot. I get it. I read new poems silently all the time and it’s fine, of course, and you know this, of course, because the only real rule of reading poetry is that you should need it. 

So disregard my instructions, if you need to. I only give them because I want you to have the experience that I had when I first heard this poem: that sharp physical wrench of beauty when a line or a stanza catches you. By surprise, yes, but also and or: catches your breath, catches you out of the air out of a soar or a fall, catches you like a fish or a cold or a trap. This poem did that for me, several times. 

Maybe it won’t do this for you. There isn’t any universal to this. But I hope it does. “I picked it out just because I find it consoling,” said the voice who read it to me, as introduction. Me too. 

On Falling (Blue Spruce)

Dusk fell every night. Things fall. Why should I have been surprised.

Before it was possible to imagine my life without it, the winds

arrived, shattering air and pulling the tree so far back its roots,

ninety years, ripped and sprung. I think as it fell it became

unknowable. Every day of my life now I cannot understand. The force

of dual winds lifting ninety years of stillness as if it were nothing,

as if it hadn’t held every crow and fog, emptying night from its branches.

The needles fell. The pinecones dropped every hour on my porch, a constant

irritation. It is enough that we crave objects, that we are always

looking for a way out of pain. What is beyond task and future sits right

before us, endlessly worthy. I have planted a linden, with its delicate

clean angles, on a plot one tenth the size. Some change is too great.

Somewhere there is a field, white and quiet, where a tree like this one stands,

made entirely of hovering. Nothing will hold me up like that again.

-Joanna Klink

[aliceunderskies]

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all. Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time. Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage, your gaze always fixed on the same point in space, forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers. Truth, please don’t pay me so much attention. Dignity, please be magnanimous. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train. Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then. My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man. I know I won’t be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

-Wyslawa Szymborska

Reading instructions: Before you begin, sit for a minute and summon a place that you love, that you will never see again. Populate it with your dead. Once they are ringed around you, call on everyone else’s. Invite the survivors. Let your mind drift over the horrors of this sick, sad world, and our representations of it: the photographs, the videos, the sentences, the predictable greek chorus that cocoons them all. Spool in the distance that you keep between yourself and this world until it’s no more, until everything feels close enough to touch, to hold. Hold it. Think of the whales, the bees, the gorillas; if they don’t move you, think of your childhood pet, how she looked at you with trust and love, and how she died uncomprehending; think of the shock of a dead bird on the patio, of eggs crushed on sidewalks; think of fish, whitebellied-up in poisoned water, the smell of their bloat. Whatever it takes, think of it, but don’t let the others go. Spool them all in, hold them all in your mind. How does it feel, the simultaneity of it? Do you feel rage, grief? Grasp that sensation and braid it together with self-pity and self-excoriation and a bright sharp wire of self-mocking humor. 

Begin. Don’t stop and correct if you find yourself shifting into sarcasm. Be sarcastic--if you are too earnest, you must start over. Ask for pardon snidely, absurdly, laughingly, helplessly. Question your need to apologize at all. 

But in the end, be genuine. If you are not, you must start over. Again and again, until the last words are an untainted plea. And then stand, give it up. What use are words, weighty or light? Move, leave. Try to do something, small and futile though it may feel. Do not, under any circumstances, apologize.

[aliceunderskies]

Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it smiling by the windows looking out in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is

“Thanks,” W. S. Merwin

How have I never posted this before? I think about this poem all of the time–especially now as the year turns–and sometimes mouth it rather breathlessly to myself and to the local ducks while trying to outrun my insomnia by the lake in the dark. It is a perfect balancing act between despair and wondering gratitude. 

[aliceunderskies]

When you see them tell them I am still here, that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams, that this is the only way, that the lies I tell them are different from the lies I tell myself, that by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon, that as the sun rises and sets I know my place, that breath is what saves me, that even the forced syllables of decline are breath, that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath, that breath is a mirror clouded by words, that breath is all that survives the cry for help as it enters the stranger’s ear and stays long after the world is gone, that breath is the beginning again, that from it all resistance falls away, as meaning falls away from life, or darkness fall from light, that breath is what I give them when I send my love.

"Breath," Mark Strand (~)

Reading instructions:  I find this one hard to read aloud. Ironically, I can't figure out where to breathe. I stammer over "that even the forced syllables of decline are breath, / if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath / that breath is a mirror clouded by words" -- the psychology of a stammer -- why do these lines tangle me? Breathing is hard for me this fall; I talk too much and when I pause, not for air but because I am overwhelmed by the fury of my own words, I feel as if my automatic functions stopped sentences ago and I am strangled and shamed. At night I wake up gasping. I am continually distracted by the sensation of blood circulating through my hands and feet. I am given books and tapes on tonglen. It is the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. I consider memorizing this poem. 

[aliceunderskies]

You don’t read poetry for the kind of truth that passes for truth in the workaday world. You don’t read a poem to find out how you get to Twenty-fourth Street. You don’t read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you’d be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were … thieves. And aren’t we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. But there is another type of poetry, in which the poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world. Wallace Stevens was the twentieth-century master of this. There’s no other poetry that sounds like a Wallace Stevens poem. But then, there’s nothing that sounds like a Frost poem, either. Or a Hardy poem. These people have created worlds of their own. Their language is so forceful and identifiable that you read them not to verify the meaning or truthfulness of your own experience of the world, but simply because you want to saturate yourself with their particular voices.

Mark Strand reveals the quintessential appeal of a certain type of poetry in Paris Review’s “The Art of Poetry no. 77”. The whole interview is very worth reading. I am glad Strand’s voice will survive him:  it is quite particular indeed.

[aliceunderskies]

Les Étiquettes Jaunes I picked up a leaf today from the sidewalk. This seems childish. Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity! You are too relaxed to answer me. I am too frightened to insist. Leaf! don't be neurotic like the small chameleon.

Frank O'Hara, from Meditations on an Emergency

Reading instructions:  write it down on whatever piece of paper is nearest--if you haven't got one just use your hand, it doesn't matter, be quick, don't let the words sink into your head too much as you write them--and go outside. Is it still autumn? has it snowed yet? what does it smell like there? You don't need to find a leaf and reenact the poem:  that would be silly. Maybe it isn't even necessary to be outside to read it or speak it but for me it is easier because O'Hara should always be read like a conversation with the world and how do you manage that when you are looking at a computer screen? Write it down. Go outside or stand up or turn to a window. Converse.