Friday reflections (Planet)
Notebooks: December 6th-12th (2015, 2021)
Hey all,
A nice thing has happened – in no small part due to the practice of tending this newsletter – which is that I’ve started both writing and reading poetry again, quite a bit of it.
Some recent favorites include my dear friend Dan Poppick’s Fear of Description, and Maggie Milner’s Couplets (coincidentally, in surfing for links to attach to this sentence, I just discovered an interview between the two of them here!)
This is a good reminder that, even when I’m not writing, I can use this format to simply promote the things I’m enjoying reading, and the efforts of friends. Go check out these books!
Along with this, my orientation toward sharing my own work is shifting; specifically, I’m feeling newly compelled to send poems out to journals and other places where they might be read a bit more widely than here. I’m still really enjoying the immediacy of Substack – as fallen as I fear (know?) these platforms are – but it feels collaborative and risky and public and good to be submitting again to journals. I’ll keep you updated on how that all is going.
For now, I’m planning to still use Substack to share a) old pieces of writing and notebook entries that are not as “publishable” but that I think surface something interesting about my process (of writing, of being a person in the world, of sorting through some tough dynamic or other while organizing), and b) new things — some poems, some reflections on current events, etc. — wandering my way through and having this as a venue that, at the very least, forces me to write and forces me to make my writing visible, even if just to a small cadre of you all. It still feels intimate in a way I like.
Finally, and connected to all of this: I’m beginning to sense that I might want or need a new title soon, to fit how this space is evolving. For it (“Box Out The Right”) to lead so unilaterally with the political feels just a bit off — especially since these are the subjects that flow out of me anyway (and pretty relentlessly).
Then again, maybe I’ll keep it. We’ll see.
Here are a couple old notebooks entries, as usual tracing my way back through the current season.
December 6th, 2021
Instead of attacking, we might paradoxically thank the right-wing cultural body — the police, the military, the judgmental and hating evangelical, the change/other-fearing — in order to convince it that it is, finally, able to hang back; as with a behavior or trait that no longer serves a survivor of childhood trauma…they must be seen as valuable protectors, who are, maybe, no longer needed in that role…
December 7th, 2015
PLANET The thing that pulls light in – behind the sun – was where I put my love when it was done. The orbit broke – I saw it fall and drift apart in pieces held my breath. Next Our planet caved – there still was time and space expressed what void it could, but A thickened clot of seraphim came pouring out … (what happens when a galaxy is nearing death...) I’ve never felt this cold, she said. & meant what people mean when they have ever left. I leave what words I’ve sent. I send myself ahead.