Status Updates From The Importance of Being Ice...

Glacier as hail

I bought this when I was going to Iceland a couple of years ago. I didn't read it there, and it sat and sat on my shelf. Glad I decided to read it now. I forgot that Eileen Myles never disappoints. Enjoyable so far, but I am barely into it.

..he's small and mean and hysterically funny and "appropriately" gay -- by "
appropriately" I mean small and mean and hysterically funny.

[He is]...touristy.

*on David Sedaris 🤡

My attachment to language attaches me to my community and my landscape and my culture..
...
In a way, the world was the poet's hand.

*realizing i don't like Myles as a writer or a thinker, but as a speaker. speech to text doesn't translate well, but their text to speech does.

None of these worries are particularly interesting or unique but I found myself in a state of endless worry. And who is this who can't turn the faucet of anxiety off with a drink or a drug. And yet I had a simple urge to preserve what I've got.

Cause I was swarming with feelings. About being a dyke. About being poor. About aging. About my inability to connect. About what a great poet I was, but what if I don't know, first what if I can't write anymore, then what if no one will publish my work.

My father didn't mean to make me watch him die. It just happened. But this next act, the living, this was conscious. This was a choice. Or that's what I grappled with for a very long time. Do I want this.
Being sober made me want to die.

Even magic is subject to communal reasoning and the glory of the poetry were looking at is that it has been made for this purpose too.

To be the last piece of awe, to be ritually unpacked, feared or enjoyed, and returned to its pattern again. Each time seeming a little different but going to that place. Like nature.

It seems to me that the time that we experience when we bathe in moonlight, or even become aware of it, is endowed with the nature of change itself.

The inside and the outside of the poem are not so separate.

The act of remembering is a repeated action that ripples in front of the reader's eye not because it's "like" life, but it is. It happens once out the window, then in your head, and like a lightbulb when you shut your eyes, it happens again. The degree to which the barks seem actual is the degree to which you're allowing the dog back in. Is the poem something outside the poet, or something he's in too.

He told me once that he would take notes right in front of a painting, and put the "prose thing" in later. His reviews were essentially poems later smoothed into prose. I'm mentioning this because what I get from his diaries is an art writer looking at nature.

*On Jimmy Schuyler