Ah the things that spoke to me at 16. Sometimes I think I haven’t moved past them at all, but then I realize, no, I have.
indie and tripod the iguana, way back when tripod was still alive and i was in ms. folks’s class.
an Elizabeth
Watching the video brings to mind my in-college realization (after lapsing out in Modern Poetry class, certain I was going insane when Prof Leibovitz started to describe/analyze/exegisize Questions of Travel seeing as I did not recognize anything of Bishop in his words; after accidentally on purpose missing the rest of our class sessions that semester, and passive-aggressively in a fit of self-preservation decided to read only Marianne Moore and EB //collected correspondences, biographies, poetries, interviews essays etc.// even though the semester final would be a sweep of the modern canon; after all this, writing an essay about The Moose and having to deliver it by cab to my prof’s apartment (an event of which all I remember is the building had a lovely wrought iron door like in Buenos Aires)), the shock of clarity the revelation when I receiving pencilled comments suggesting the need to account and explain EB’s queer constructions for the ear and eye. Which I could not do! because I had not realized and still cannot see how they are strange! to me her writing just seems normal, and the rest of us affected.
Funny she is known for writing about traumatic experiences, loss and the importance of memory, how hard it is to be an individuated being; also for her perfectionistic revision and “unusual and interesting way of looking at the world” oh and that at first she was thought of as a miniaturist.
- identified—because of my childhood—with the collection of visual/cyclical themes in her poems, and so did not realize these as particulars. again, overgeneralization from the shape of my experience making it hard to tell when something is different, or what it is that attracts me in the first place.
- the interviewee wishy-washy listing these things of EB’s as such, they seem dumb and just words not lived humanness. signs w/ o referent, so expect they’re gonna show up in all poetry and are not a special or specific feature of any poet.
- the bare fact is comparative or umbrella-concept words that can apply to her poetry or even the process won’t call to mind the sensation of it at all, of why or when you would pick her Collected from the shelf instead of someone else’s.
- articulate people like the interviewee find there’s nothing even close they can say which catches hold of bishop, and so dwindle down to biography or read-aloud mode (or failing those two, personal history and zoo anecdotes).
- all our efforts amount to is “EB was unusually good describing things as only she could. I tried to savor to tell of it and / experience the meal twice, but ay the meal was her telling of it and oh no cook’s gone home”
Coney Island that perfect summer before college
Just realized my most elaborate, (hand-made, multi-part) gifts to boyfriends have all almost immediately preceded the breakup. Example 1 (high school): set of diet-specific cookbooks so he could learn to cook in his new apartment, each book’s pages interleaved with bookmarks on which I’d drawn some of its representative recipes or ingredients. The decision-making process for this one was particularly anguished, and my mother played a large part in helping me through it. We initially brought home what we called a car-blanket; a lovely red-and-white quilt with a star pattern and ticking stripe on the reverse. Not sure what my mother thought we would do with this delicious bedding. In my mind it would live in the trunk of his car, and be unfurled occasionally. I quizzed my friends: a queen-size blanket is the ideal accessory for (fairly-chaste), late-night assignations on the waterfront, right? Yup,the quilting would protect us from Coco’s splintering dock. But then I chickened out and gave him the cookbooks instead, and our relationship splintered and fell apart in the days that followed.
Denton McKay liked plans and he liked to change plans. He called meetings of the staff, which were then canceled. He send around a memo asking each staff member to state the project he or she was working on, but this effort at refining operations was then rescinded. Most of his time appeared to be spend bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own. This offered him some minimal contact with the staff. His deputy was Roy Borden, a pale man who wore pale pink glasses and kept in his office photographs of the golden retrievers bred by his wife. A great deal of hearty laughter between Roy Borden and Denton McKay covered an essential hatred.
Laurie Colwin,
Happy All the Time. Bosses! (via
elsam)
Couples infographic by Rae, senior year of high school.
High school boyfriend, my junior prom. He is a Jehova’s Witness and we are in love. Here he is sleepy, not stoned.
Rae’s good-luck drawings. Test-day essentials.
You can tell it spoke to us by the tasteful rickracky matting.
