Peg Duthie's Blog, page 15

"not a word I wrote was going to last"

I was drawn into Christian Wiman's "He Held Radical Light" excerpt at Poetry Daily earlier today because I became curious about where he was going after calling a good chunk of another writer's body of work "flavorless as old oatmeal." But the part where I sat up straight was when my own dour mutterings about eventual nothingness ("Look, I'm not going to get wound up about not getting anywhere with x when humans are going to be extinct within a few hundred years...") suddenly showed up on my screen like a mirror:

Nothing survives, I suddenly realized. Dante, Virgil, even sweet Shakespeare, whose lines will last as long as there are eyes to read him, will one day find that there are no eyes to read him. As a species, we are a microscopic speck of existence, which, I have full faith, will one day thrive without us.

Still, abstract oblivion is a small shock as shocks go. When over lunch one day my friend and then poet laureate Donald Hall turned his Camel-blasted eighty-year-old Yeti decrepitude to me and said as casually as he bit into his burger, "I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last," I felt a galactic chill, as if my soul had chewed tinfoil. I was thirty-eight. It was the very inverse of a calling, an ex post facto feeling of innocence, death's echo. In a flash I knew it was true, for both of us (this is no doubt part of what he was telling me), and yet the shock was not in that fact but in the nearly fifty years of further writings Don had piled on top of that revelation. "Poetry abandoned me," he writes in his little masterrpiece Essays After Eighty, the compensatory prose of which is so spare and clear it seems inscribed on solitude itself. If there were any justice in the world, this book would be read by my great-great-great-granddaughter as she gets ready to die. But of course there is no justice in the world.

I submitted two new poems today. I filed a rejection for four others, and made notes about a handful more to craft by the end of the month if mind and fingers and electronics cooperate. And, like quite a few other locals, I could not resist whisking out my phone yesterday when I saw this from the parking lot at work:





My being in the parking lot at that point was a compromise -- because of bloody honking deadlines needing to be met, I stayed at the office past the point of getting to the dance lesson on time, but I did go to the lesson, which ended up being a fine time -- the group was practicing "St. Margaret's Hill" when I arrived, and there was enough room in the studio for me to walk through the figures on my own. The rep for the rest of the evening included "Miss De Jersey's Memorial" (the dance of the month), "Kelsterne Gardens" (as a 4-couple dance), "Key to the Cellar" and several others in Scottish sets, "The Introduction" (which I requested after we collectively struggled with right and left diagonals during "The Weevil"), "The Young Widow" (which I requested when given three dances to choose from because it was the one I hadn't done yet), and "Bonny Cuckoo." We talked about regional differences/practices, including "the Philadelphia rule," which is when you're not the caller of the dance, shut up and don't "correct" the person who is leading the dance if no one is about to get hurt. Very sensible people, those Philadelphians.

I am too tired at the moment to be sensible, so while I knew full well that I needed to sit tail in chair and fingers to laptop to get to bed earlier, I went ahead with baking a cake (along with chicken that needed to be roasted sooner than later) and scrubbing this and that. Pacing will out. Anyhow, there are worse fates than snacking on chicken skins and listening to Monteverdi while editing docs on Italian art...

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running around like a clown on purpose

[Today's subject line is from Mika's We Are Golden."]

Work out. Decide against buying fancy soap on sale. (Points to me.) Work. Swear at VPN fail. Clean. Correspond. Cook beef shanks with chicken and jasmine rice and assorted spices and frozen spinach. More cleaning. Extended chat with service provider over billing/cancellation issue. More correspondence...

Sleep for 11 hours. Fry pancakes. Clean. Card-writing. Log receipts. More birddogging of provider, this time on the phone. Recognize two of the musicians in Dark Carnival (guest band in "Says You" rerun) as members of Bare Necessities (renowned English country dance ensemble). Begin loading car to escape neighborhood before game traffic ties up outbound routes. Swear at drippy remnants of lunch leftovers I'd forgotten to take in. Clean up gross drippiness and line surfaces with tote bags. Load rest of things to shlep.

Head to suburb to pick up lantern (for winter paddling, after sundown). Stop at JVI Secret Gardens to pick up more soil (no one at the till, because a baby duck had shown up. This is not so usual for Dickerson Pike...). I also grin at the car I parked next to, which is plastered in humanitarian stickers (including the same Amnesty International decal I have on mine) ... and one of "Basic Snape," which makes me laugh my ass off (and order copies for friends as soon as I get home).

Head to lake. Car-powered pump fails to work -- Kaylen at Nashville Paddle to the rescue. She's whom I went out specifically to see in any case, since today I am dressed for quality time in as well as on the water (unlike the kayak lesson I had with her earlier this month, which was sandwiched between work and rehearsal, with heavy rain less than a mile away):



The timing is perfect -- the other women in the group are more interested in photographing one another and chilling in the cove, which means Kaylen is free to demo the two self-rescue moves, and then to sympathize as I struggle through them. After smashing my chest against the edge of the kayak several times, I swear to get serious about building arm strength. But I do ungracefully manage to complete each one, and Kaylen and I then joke about how it's going to look when I next borrow a yak and try practicing them 30x (i.e., dealing with passers-by who don't realize I'm messing around on purpose, the better to deal with messy situations on real trips).

A family on the bank plays a bunch of Latin tunes, and I dance-bounce to them. Kids in a kayak shout, "Nice moves!"

I cannot resist hacking at some weeds, the better to harvest more peppers and take in one of the Julia Child roses:



Clean. Cook (flounder and corn with leftover rice and the first of the peppers). Clean. This has been a summer of finding weird stuff left in books and binders: Two TBI ID cards from a couple of decades ago. (Irony: I bought the book for a friend hospitalized for an illness exacerbated by government issues. Cue grim jokes about how government has a way of exacerbating things even at the best of times, which are most certainly not these.*) A phone message slip, possibly from before I was born. Four postcards pasted onto two sheets of notebook paper: Edinburgh Castle's Stone of Destiny, Minnesota Boundary Waters, Hotel Viktoria Hasliberg, and Brough of Birsay.

Ahead: Tea. Work. A rose I shall sniff from time to time. Sleep.

* Related story -- last year I had a biopsy done for some mysteriously inflamed tissue, and I reported to a friend the results: "In a nutshell: it's not cancer. They don't know what specifically caused it, but my body has a history of overreacting to irritants, and that is basically what's been going on." The friend promptly responded, "Since last november we're all reacting to one very large irritant, so it's no surprise."

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zirconium @ 2018-09-15T10:22:00

Here in Nashville, when someone says, "You look familiar," it's usually because they've seen me at First Unitarian Universalist Church or because I resemble a woman on NPT (one of these years I'll find out her name). At Wednesday's ballet reception, though (Bearded Iris beer and pimento cheese before a rehearsal for Swan Lake), it turned out the woman had seen me at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, and that she and her companion were avid kayakers. That was a fun chat.

Working long hours, coping with a heel injury, and chasing after money owed. But also...

writing Postcards to Voters in Texas...



harvesting the first Prairie Fire pepper of the year

transplanting some of the seedlings I saved when thinning them out -- plenty still occupying wineglasses, yogurt tubs, and Cheerwine bottles

enjoying the roses

shrugging at the caterpillar-ravaged hollyhocks

eating salads, including this one from a new local cafe (D'Andrews):



Hope this finds you well, my dears.

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inventory

1 heirloom tomato bigger than my phone



1 rose stem tied to a stake

some of the rosebushes pruned

countless falls into the pool (Glidefit bootcamp. Just in case I thought I knew how to stay on a board...)

1 hour on a kayak

around 4 hours on a paddleboard

2 premature attempts to leave the shore (third time = charm. aka hand-pumping to 15 psi. gonna have Popeye arms by next summer.)

1 party attended. And the BYM remembered to warn me to wear pants ("parking sucks" = getting there by motorcycle) hours in advance. The hosts got married in Italy a few weeks ago, so there were an array of spritzers (amaretto, aperol, strawberry limoncello, and negroni) and tasty bites. Oh, and moonshine.

3 temporary tattoos applied

4 actual tattoos discussed

2 mosquito bites

1 unexpected farewell message

1 new person to ping when I next get to New York

2 library books skimmed (one, a trilingual survey on Julius Shulman's oeuvre; the other, Jerrelle Guy's Black Girl Baking)

1/4 blackberry-cherry pie left

1 tanka published

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unmapped

During this afternoon's driving around, I caught part of the TED radio hour's rerun of a feature on a boiling river that didn't appear on any maps before a Texas grad student's aunt connected him to a shaman who has allowed him repeated access to it.

On a far more mundane level, my cabin at Splashdance didn't appear on the map. Finding it -- while hauling a tub and duffel with my weekend bedding and clothing -- was an adventure; I've never been so happy to wear a headlamp (originally purchased for night padddling) in my life.

The weekend was a blast. I would have liked to have arrived much sooner and much more rested (having been warned that the camp was off the grid, and wanting 48 hours away from redlines and deadlines anyhow, I worked more than 45 hours while fitting 14 hours of driving prior to reaching Flat Rock). But I had energy enough for exhilarating waltzes and frisky contras (with a bit of blues and some squares in the mix, along with my beloved English country figures), and I snuck in naps on the bleachers, on a paddleboard, and in a hammock (heartfelt thanks and apologies to Cameron, who was very gracious about my mistaking her hang for community property -- it was a revelation to snooze between and beneath the pines, and I've since added "camping hammock" to my wishlist). The 6 a.m. breakfast prep assignment was a perfect fit for me, as I spent half of the shift cracking dozens of eggs while chatting with a whitewater guide, and the other half scrambling them eggs. I loved getting dipped by Shep (a carpenter I first danced with at an Orange Peel waltz night a few years ago), and grinning at Bill every time he soulfully yet wholly unseriously clasped my hand between his palms, and enjoying a few more turns with Dan, one of my favorite partners during the July workshop at Brasstown we'd attended. I'm not yet much of a lead, but that workshop gave me enough confidence to ask more women to waltz, which resulted in some memorable conversations as well.


Posing in the photobooth during the Saturday night dance

It is fun to be a more confident dancer in general. I screwed up plenty of times, but there were also plenty of smiles and compliments. One I'm still glowing about: one partner's pleased murmur about how people were actually dancing to "Sapphire Sea," not merely walking their way through it.

The rest of the week was even more "wait-what-whoa-JESUS" than usual, although I managed to avoid bellowing "Sonnnnnn!" at anyone (which happened last week when a particularly hapless Carolina driver veered into my way. Sometimes the South just leaps from my mouth...). Though some of my Congresscritters (TM Marissa) and other so-called representatives need to be deluged with more than mere exasperated hollerin', but that's a rant for another time/venue.



Today's moment of culinary inspiration: making aioli with leftover anchovy oil. (That's galangal sprinkled onto the sauce. It didn't add much, but hey, points to me for experimenting.)

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I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

[Today's subject line is from Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke with You, which I encountered via a marvelous introduction by the keeper of the Read A Little Poetry blog.]

I hadn't planned on writing any full poems today -- the reasons I worked a nonstop 12-hour stretch yesterday are not yet dispatched to the land of Done -- but I do have one soon-closing-market's guidelines stored on my bookmarks bar, and when I clicked on it earlier this morning (largely in a Please Let Some Fun Prompt Park in My Head To Amuse Me While I De-skank My Kitchen Floor instead of Brain Hamster-Wheeling Ad Pointlessium Through All the Things I Have to Crank Through Tres Vite), some conversations that took place the past two days tilted into the brainpan and twined-extended-curled themselves into a new story. Eventually.

Today I also produced several batches of tomato pumpkin bao . . . .



. . . . and ran into various people from various circles in the course of wandering around my neighborhood's annual Tomato Art Fest, and inadvertently accomplished some Christmas shopping, and picked up a yard sign for my preferred vice mayor candidate (#TeamTorah) from the voter registration booth. I have also spilled sparkling wine on the gas bill, transplanted two Christmas pepper seedlings, made anchoïade (so tasty on pak choi!), boiled a potful of peanuts, and tugged at a few weeds around hollyhocks I didn't plant. (Yay for self-seeding!) I received some invitations and queries this week that have eased a bit of the ache/insecurity of not being as important to various people as I used to be (the head totally gets it -- it's not as if I stay on top of personal messages or correspondence myself -- but it has to quell the tendencies of my inner eight-year-old (and eighteen-year-old, for that matter) to grieve wholly foreseeable results and turns. I contain multitudes, and they are sometimes seriously tiresome.

But I also received a sparkly-fun six page letter from Rae today, and the BYM has been good about sending me updates from the road, and my poem "Decorating a Cake While Listening to Tennis" (text and audio) is now up at Rattle (it appeared in print earlier this summer). And, I just soaked for as long as I wanted in my tub, with the water as deep and as hot as I could make it, with a stack of magazines (mostly from my mom-in-law) and a fragrant candle (from my gal Rooo) and a box of matches with a Conan Doyle quote (from my assistant). Any one of these things would have been viewed by eight- or eighteen-year-old me as a very special treat -- and I get to enjoy them practically every day. It is wondrous to have these things, and I do not take them -- or, really, anything of comfort or convenience or connection -- for granted.

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fizzy Friday

Etch A Sketch of my name and foot by John Taylor

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John and me Etch-A-Sketch-ing at the entrance of Nick Cave: Feat. Photo by Marlow Amick.

Nashvillians, the show closes Sunday at 5:30 p.m. Get your tails over there!

And while you're in the museum... there is a sweet spot in the Gordon Contemporary Arts Gallery, to the left of the intro wall for The Presence of Your Absence Is Everywhere, about six feet back, where the light brings out the everywheres in white letters surrounding the title treatment, which happen to be invisible (absent) if you aren't standing in that spot where the light hits them just so. It is So Very Cool. I love this show so much. Come see it if you live here! (And come to An Evening of Chaos and Awe, too, which will feature music inspired by her work, along with a special dish by Maneet Chauhan.)

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gathering rosebuds while I may

Literally:



I snuck in a few minutes of gardening before night fell -- uprooting some fistfuls of weeds and lopping off the iffier branches of the rosebush. There are tiny purple flowers occupying a corner of the yard, and bright white chickweed (I think) blossoms that close up at night. Alas, the geranium from Desire did not survive the winter, and the the whirlwind anemone isn't showing any signs of life. But, I have plenty of seeds stashed in old jars and shoeboxes and the like. Some are probably as dead as the geranium and the anemone. But some . . .



I had several observations saved for the Plus Ça Change department, but the only one I can lay my hands on at the moment is an endnote in Paul F. Ramírez's forthcoming book, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason. It struck me as rather relevant to the firing of Father Conroy, in tandem with the wake-up call Bill Gates is attempting to sound regarding the "significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes":

Rather than lead to systematic, preemptive transformations in social policies by governments, sixteenth-century plagues produced a degree of elation or relief resulting from the connection drawn between disease and the elimination of poverty, commonly achieved through the elimination of the poor. [Brian] Pullan, “Plague and Perceptions of the Poor,” 121.

[rummages through bag] Oh, here's another one, from the April 22 NYT:

PHILIP GALANES: We’re living through a time right now where men in power who’ve done ugly things —

DENZEL WASHINGTON No. We’re not “living through a time right now.” It’s always been this way, from the beginning of time. Pick one: from Caesar to Caligula. Now, it’s just on the news cycle every 15 seconds.

And, today, the nerd prom take that has stayed with me, from Kara Calavera: "This #WHCD set was a career-making moment for @michelleisawolf the same was that @StephenAtHome's was for him [in 2006]. The press's reaction to hers is nearly identical to the reaction they had after his."

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counting joys like trees

Today's subject line is from Eternity, a poem by US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith that she read on Live from Here last weekend. Though what I've been replaying over and over is Gaby Moreno powerhousing through Live from Here's cover of "Techno Cumbia": La technocumbia que te traigo te dará el placer / Para que muevas tu cuerpo, de la cabeza a los pies. . . .

Lord, this month. It was already going to be complicated enough without my car getting burglarized (followed by literally dozens of subpoena calls -- because the sheriff's office uses an automated service that doesn't recognize responses from my mobile phone, and it took multiple calls to his staff to get it to stop, and oh, look, he's running for re-election. Guess whom I'm not impressed by at the moment?) and our largest exhibition having to close five weeks early and one of my car's hubcaps merrily rolling away on I-65 after being liberated by a particularly vicious pothole. Did. Not. Want.

But! the sun is shining today, and there are dozens of buds on my Sky's the Limit rosebush, and the Christmas cacti and kalanchoe are in full bloom, and I have what I need right here at home (specifically puff pastry and jams) to improvise something for a reception later today (following the ordination of my church's assistant pastor, who is moving on to serve as a hospice chaplain). My parents-in-law gave me an early birthday check that I am applying toward lifetime membership in the John Rae Society. I have to power through a ton of work this weekend, but I can do it in supercomfy leggings and ratty shirts. But I also enjoyed dressing up for Keeneland last weekend...



... where I came out ahead on my wagers, thanks to Sundress, High Fashion Star, and Ravish (trifecta) and Smart Response (show)



... and my honorary big brother and his partner spoiled me all weekend long. Treats included bourbon, bourbon-laced brownies, brownies, and a brown-butter popcorn sundae ... decadence followed by 8 a.m. hot yoga. It all balances out, right? ;)

Speaking of yoga, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily published Hot Yoga Chaff last month and A Calm, Fixed Mind earlier this week.

Batch 1 of the experimental tarts are out of the oven and, well, they wouldn't win even a second look at a state fair, let alone any ribbons, but I popped a couple into my mouth while cleaning up, and they'll do. Lord knows I love to hit things outta the park, but sometimes it's enough just to be bringing a bit of sweetness and air.

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long swirling clouds of fog

Tonight's subject line comes from the first line of a letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell on April 1, 1958. It was actually a sunny day here, but I liked seeing the phrase just now, as well as the pleasure of peeking at a letter written sixty years ago (replete with frustration about a worker stealing apples and singing awful songs, a snotty jab at my beloved Ciardi, and kinder talk of work and mental health, along with paragraphs on babies, birds, books, and cities).

It would have been nice to go singing, shopping, or simply walking/biking around in the sunshine, but my body was tired, my brain fried, and my kitchen filthy, so I put on a nightgown when I rolled out of bed and have spent the day moving slowly between chores and diversions. I wrote a postcard poem and postcards to voters:



I abandoned my plan of trying a new recipe with the chicken thighs in the fridge; instead, I tossed them into a pot with bay leaves (from my big sister), carrots (that had been in the fridge for weeks), a yam (that had been on the counter for weeks), the dregs of a jar of pasta sauce, and garlic (from Penzeys) and let it all stew for a while. Tomorrow I may add lima beans and an onion, but I may also just let it sit some more, as there will also be two services to sing in and tax paperwork to tend to. Plus I'd like to paint my nails and retouch my hair and sleep for about a week more before heading back to the office. Wishes, horses, la la la.

The timing is not right for me to sign up for The Iteration Project Partner Program, but it sure sounds cool.

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