Literary Time

 I woke in the middle of the night and was thinking this:

Narrative time is elastic.  A 400 page novel can recount events of 80 years, 2 months, or a day.  It can be read in a week, a month, or two years.  Reading narrative is also an exercise in absorption.  Time stops when reading. 

Dramatic time is real time, but expanded or contracted. A play takes 2 hours to watch.  It represents events of 1 day or so, but each scene is in real time, so to speak.  Dramatic time can imitate narrative time, with 10 years between acts, etc...  "Jumping oer times/ Turning the accomplishments of many years / into an hourglass." Going to the theater means going there, sitting for a while, and being absorbed in the spectacle.  

Lyric time is time stopped, a single moment of time. The poem is short, and does not narrate any significant length of time. The time of reading is ruminative. The poem is read once, or twice, perhaps memorized, returned to over and over again.  There is a different kind of absorption.  

This is obviously an oversimplification. There are several variables: how long the action of the work takes, how long it takes to read / watch to work / the kind of absorption involved.  

Decolonial

 I heard a talk and a question was asked: "how is your work 'decolonial'." The answer was that the researcher asked the indigenous people she was working with whether they preferred to talk in Spanish or in their own language. That seems like a good practice. But it seems also like a small-ish thing, on which to hook a larger claim.  

Vaughan

On tv yeasterday, there was heartbreakingly beautiful video of a Sarah Vaughan performance from the 50s. She sang:

Over the rainbow

Who's got the last laugh now

 Lover Man

Cherokee

Sometimes I'm happy 

Everything was perfect: intonation, phrasing, and diction, musicality, and her demeanor.  It felt effortless. Everything that later would become a mannerism was there, but it wasn't a mannerism yet. 

Then they showed a performance from the 60s. It was also great, but already more mannered and show-offy.  The song choice was good, but not consistently great: I'm not fond of the"Baubles, bangles and beads," with its stupid lyric about a woman who likes jewels.  

There are later performances of hers that I also like quite a bit. There's just something about the early Sarah Vaughan that is perfection itself. 

Poems of February

I decided to put together a selection of my poems written in various years in the month of February.  Maybe I'll self publish it.  

FEBRUARY

 It was your hatred for February that first endeared you to me, old friend

What you called its "impertinent brevity," its indecisiveness and squalor

Though the heart of winter, it lacked all conviction  

Now it is February again and I wonder if you were speaking in earnest 

Perhaps there was something else under your skin that you couldn't openly confess 

Something colder even than the biting wind of that month you despised 

CROWS

 The crows think they run this town

Who could blame them?

They caw loudly and fly around wherever they want

The hawks are larger, but they don't mess with the crows

The people dread the cold and cower inside

POEM WITH A FEW COMMAS

I can't fathom those Rilkean distances,

hierarchies of shouting matches

I must take my sublimities in other shapes

compresssed and obdurate drinking song

botanicals, mineral resistance 

A perfumer's nose, but with the soul of a weightlifter 

WASH ME!

You can write

in dust

by taking away

the dust

POET 

Poet, do you wash your clothes by hand?

Poet, do you hang them up to dry?

Poet, have your poems seen the wind?

Poet, have your poems seen the light of day?

Where did you learn that you weren't a poet

and what do you do to become one after all?

HAIKU

I told myself a story

It had a sad ending

like February 

 

"Mayhew, alert as a caterpillar..."

 I found this phrase in Kevin Killian's review of my book on amazon.  It is in the new book of Killian's selected amazon reviews. He single handedly made amazon a place for serious book reviews. It's too bad other people have not followed that precedent. Anyway, it brought a smile to my face.  

I FOUND one of the worst scholarly articles ever published:

 https://jaa.thebrpi.org/journals/jaa/Vol_12_2024/2.pdf