Today the temperature is supposed to hurtle into the mid-80s, and to celebrate Tom and I are going to a baseball game after work. In the meantime, I'll be teaching, working on Frost Place stuff, waiting for editing instructions, planting a sage seedling, and opening all the windows.
I've been copying out Akhmatova's poem cycle "Requiem," which is a brutal delineation of how it felt to be the mother of a son imprisoned during Stalin's terrors. I've been reading Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which is an epic set in the chaos of Vietnam. Somehow my reading has been co-opted by dread. Yet I'm drafting my own quiet poem about ghosts. It feels watered-down, immaterial, to be a writer without a tragic subject. It feels like an accidental stroke of fate to be a living, un-terrified body.
4 comments:
“It feels like an accidental stroke of fate to be a living, un-terrified body.” True and yet, we are all living in the miasma of a political and social cyclone.
Happy gardening and ball game!
Wondering about reading Akhmatova in combination with Koestler's Darkness At Noon. Whether it'd be even more profound. Or just too overwhelming.
You should try it and see, David.
"Alrighty then!" - Ace Ventura, Pet Detective
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