Alexa Mergen's Blog, page 2
August 6, 2013
Send & Attention
Do the little pastel candy Valentine hearts still have printed on some, "You send me?"
"Send" in that sense means affecting with powerful emotions, as in "The music sends me."
"Send" is an Old English word, from senden. People have been sending for a long time: we needed the word early on in our language.
With "send," we dispatch an email, a letter. I want to find the verb and its feeling behind every sending I do. A letter to a pen pal is for imparting; a card to a friend is for amusing; an email to a colleague is for informing.
If you're ever in Washington, D.C., visit the National Postal Museum. Sending has, and always will, change the course of the world, no matter the channel.
"Send" in that sense means affecting with powerful emotions, as in "The music sends me."
"Send" is an Old English word, from senden. People have been sending for a long time: we needed the word early on in our language.
With "send," we dispatch an email, a letter. I want to find the verb and its feeling behind every sending I do. A letter to a pen pal is for imparting; a card to a friend is for amusing; an email to a colleague is for informing.
If you're ever in Washington, D.C., visit the National Postal Museum. Sending has, and always will, change the course of the world, no matter the channel.
August 4, 2013
Affection & Attention
My first published poem was "Farmer's Market" in a college journal called Portfolio in the 1980s. The poem notices market patrons, the "neighbors we have never met and only saw on Saturdays."
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
August 3, 2013
Inflection & Attention
When I peruse children's books borrowed from the library, I am delighted when I find faint pencil marks by a previous reader. The marks note inflection in preparation for reading aloud. I imagine a teacher or librarian before an assembly of gathered upturned faces for whom the story lives in the reader's voice.
In a 1962 edition of "Sad Day, Glad Day," written by Vivian L. Thompson and illustrated by Lilian Obligado someone added an exclamation mark (!) after "Good idea" when Daddy agrees that Kathy should unpack her things in the apartment the family has just moved to. The reader deleted a dash (--) after "salad" to convey more smoothly "She had chicken salad on a pretty plate...."
Words to speak softly are underlined with a straight line, revelations underlined with a squiggly one; alliterative words are circled.
Reading aloud infuses a text with music. It reminds us that stories offered with delight are gifts; an audience, those who hear, are recipients and benefactors.
"Inflection" means the action of bending inward. Reading a book that others heard bows me closer to those listeners, some of whom may have since passed away, who shared in the sad day of a girl losing a friend, and the glad day of finding one again.
In a 1962 edition of "Sad Day, Glad Day," written by Vivian L. Thompson and illustrated by Lilian Obligado someone added an exclamation mark (!) after "Good idea" when Daddy agrees that Kathy should unpack her things in the apartment the family has just moved to. The reader deleted a dash (--) after "salad" to convey more smoothly "She had chicken salad on a pretty plate...."
Words to speak softly are underlined with a straight line, revelations underlined with a squiggly one; alliterative words are circled.
Reading aloud infuses a text with music. It reminds us that stories offered with delight are gifts; an audience, those who hear, are recipients and benefactors.
"Inflection" means the action of bending inward. Reading a book that others heard bows me closer to those listeners, some of whom may have since passed away, who shared in the sad day of a girl losing a friend, and the glad day of finding one again.
August 2, 2013
Beauty & Attention
"Seeing something beautiful always made me feel good."
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
Yesterday evening, I was racing against the fading daylight as I sat under the backyard elm tree finishing Betsy Byars's "The Midnight Fox." Tom comes alive when he is surprised to notice a lovely black fox living in the woods near the house where he is staying. Byars's chapter "The Search" takes the reader through the experience of watching, of paying attention.
"I stayed perfectly still--I was getting good at this--and we looked at each other."
When reading Thoreau and Emerson with high school students I taught years ago, their assigned homework was to sit outside and listen for twenty minutes. "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear unto myself . . . . and let sounds contribute toward me," Whitman said.
Tom is listening when the beauty of the fox appears. In the final chapter, "A Memory," Byars writes that the incidents with the fox seem to have happened to another boy.
"But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room....I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her."
I used to balk at the term "paying attention" as if there was a monetary transaction at stake. Now I understand: in giving our attention we make an investment, accrue experience, including images of beauty that, down the road, bring greater satisfaction than buckets of coins could.
What, in your life, is worth paying attention to?
