When you spoke of the seven wonders and you reached in your coat for your telescope

[sovay]

This was not a bad week. There was the wiped-flat exhaustion from Readercon that I failed to notice until Tuesday or so, but there was also my brother's birthday and Legend of Korra with gaudior and The Blues Brothers (1980) with derspatchel at midnight, which I may now consider the ideal time to start watching that movie. I have been listening to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America (2012), which is a kind of epic cycle of American myth; it's not so much that it pulls back from the archetypal scope of Hadestown (2010) as it is a different way of focusing the same body of music and stories, the stretching shadow of the Depression. Yesterday, however, was a bad day. I got a poem out of it, but it was still a very bad day.

Today, the mail arrived. I am looking at:

1. A certificate for my poem "Tapping the Vine" placing second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award.

2. Copies of Gil Adamson's The Outlander (2007) and M.R. James' Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, sent me by handful_ofdust.

3. The Alan Turing T-shirt ajodasso sent me a link to on Tuesday and which I ordered promptly, because I know a necessary item of clothing when I see it.

Okay, universe, I'm sure there's a point in here somewhere.

Have some panoramic views of Mars.

Comments

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

I'm coming here late and hope the days have improved! Congratulations on the poem award. You continue to fill the world with tactile beauty in your words.

(So strange how your poetry, and no one else's I can think of, always makes me imagine eating the images. Okay, that sounds weird, but it's like trees in fall. There is something so striking in that color that...it's not that I taste flavor, but ...what? Maybe it's a return to infancy and the suckling, the need to experience the new by putting it in our mouths? Or maybe it's that I feel I've consumed something? Your words, phrasings, images ...well, I didn't make this any less weird, did I.)

[sovay]

Congratulations on the poem award. You continue to fill the world with tactile beauty in your words.

Thank you! Yes, I think things have been improving. I just haven't been writing much about them. I should.

So strange how your poetry, and no one else's I can think of, always makes me imagine eating the images. Okay, that sounds weird, but it's like trees in fall. There is something so striking in that color that...it's not that I taste flavor, but ...what?

I am happy to be a conduit for synesthesia. It's one of the ways I think.