The places I go are never there

[sovay]

My poem "Spirit Photography" has been accepted by Through the Gate. The magazine is a new market; the poem is the direct result of one of those dreams that hybridize figures from waking life with history and random brainstem spatters, in this case a theater tour of Faerie and the never-recovered camera carried up Everest by George Mallory in 1924. There is an entire genre of dreams I can never figure out what to do with, so I'm glad this one turned into something.

(I feel as if I am developing a subgenre of ghost poems: Lucan, Christopher Morcom/Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Andrews, George Mallory; the eponym of "Ovid's Two Nightmares" is not a ghost in the poem, but he certainly isn't alive now. It must have started in 2003 when I wrote about Young Vilna for strange_selkie, but it seems to be accelerating in recent months. There are ways in which I suppose it's not all that different from writing about myths and gods. It feels like something else: it requires more research, but it also requires more responsibility. Everybody and their cousin has a Persephone poem and I accept that not all of them are going to fall within my ideas of reasonable interpretation. (I reserve the right to be cranky as death about it, though. There are maybe four authors who don't annoy me on Norse myth and two of them are on this friendlist?) Stories throw out variants like many-worlds quantum mechanics: it's what they do. A god has a different face for everyone from the moment it's described. There are parameters on lives, on history. I don't want to get them wrong. The dead have enough troubles; they don't need me misrepresenting them. What I should really pay attention to is: why these ghosts. There are others I would have expected. Maybe they'll come along.)

I don't think there's been anything particularly memorial about it, but it's been a good weekend so far. Friday was marked by a visit to the home of two of derspatchel's friends: it is a former boarding house once occupied by the composer of "Jingle Bells" and deserves its name, being full of odd little corners of rooms and roof-slants and second kitchens where you don't expect them. We were taught the correct way to do vodka shots. (It turns out to involve black bread, pickled olives, and smoked whitefish. You don't get a hangover and you're all set for visiting a deli for the next few days.) We did not play, but were duly impressed by the antique board game—discovered in the barn—where the various trading countries are things like "Servia" and "Sarawak" and on the other side a race between electric and gas-powered cars includes penalty squares like "Shot by Man You Ran Over, -10 Points." There were hours of conversation. I have a new translation of The Master and Margarita to look for. Saturday, I crashed early in the evening: listened to an episode of The Mask of Inanna, watched some YouTube fragments of a BBC Play of the Week, read a book of poems by Medbh McGuckian, and managed to stay asleep for nearly ten hours. Today, Rob and I tried Café Algiers (where I'd had mint iced chocolate with Dean on Friday) for dinner and were rewarded by really good hummus, falafel and merguez respectively, and tamarind soda where you pour the seltzer into the syrup yourself; we saw A Day at the Races (1937) at the Brattle Theatre and I have no plans for tomorrow.

The Economist gave its obituary to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Comments

[sovay]

Haaaah, too true.

Hey, there was a good one by Mary O'Malley in the above-mentioned Anthology of Irish Poetry (which I have here to hand, so I don't mind copying it out):

Ceres in Caherlistrane

Somewhere near forty-second street,
a girl, copper-haired, sings for a hawk-eyed man.
He tastes, in the lark's pillar of sound
honey and turf-fires. A tinker's curse rings out:

This is the voice of Ireland, of what we were.
He approves. Her hair gleams. There is a vow.
Later, she skips into the graffiti-sprayed subway.
At the edge of hearing, a laugh, a man's death cry,

a woman's love call are carried out of the tunnel's
round mouth caught in the snatch of a tune.
She has no idea these underriver walls
are shored up with Irish bones, black men's bodies.

She thinks all the buskers in New York are down
here tonight like cats. She hears them—a keen,
a skein of blues. They speed her passage. She hums,
picking up the echoes in her river-run.

In Galway, her stooked hair ripens that Summer.
At Hallowe'en there are wineapples. A seed caught
in her teeth will keep the cleft between this world
and the next open, the all souls' chorus a filter

for certain songs that rise from a cold source.
Brandy and honey notes replace spring water—
the gift price to sing an octave deeper
than sweet, tuned to a buried watercourse.

Her, I'd look for in used book stores. She has a poem that calls back to Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" and to the coffin ships:

down to where the black water is
and the little open-mouthed bone-harp sings
not of the names for things you cannot say
but the long round call of the thing itself.

[selidor]

Ooh, I like that one. Nice seeing a different take on the ubiquitous Persephone-poem (surprised noone's done an anthology, honestly).

[sovay]

Nice seeing a different take on the ubiquitous Persephone-poem (surprised noone's done an anthology, honestly).

I was actually contacted by a pair of editors in April about reprinting "Persephone in Hel" for exactly that kind of project, but I haven't heard anything from them since.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

The working title for "Wallpaper" was "Another Goddamn Persephone Poem."

[sovay]

The working title for "Wallpaper" was "Another Goddamn Persephone Poem."

The non-working title is better. It recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among other things.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I'd hoped as much. Apropos of Gilman, I went to talk to negothick's students about poetry a couple of months ago, and was happy to find that a lot of them had read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in high school. Someone's raising these kids right.