Dublin

I got into Trinity College, Dublin, for the whole year. I know, this isn't the expressed purpose of this blog. But seeing as how only two other people check it and those two have asked me repeatedly, I thought I'd share.

Snedding and all that it entails

This poem should have been here a long time ago. One of my favorite from the summer.

The Turnip-Snedder by Seamus Heaney

For Hughie O'Donoghue

In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,

the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double flywheeled water-pump,

it dug its heels in among wooden tubs
and troughs of slops,

hotter than body heat
in summertime, cold in winter

as winter's body armour,
a barrel-chested breast-plate

standing guard
on four braced greaves.

"This is the way that God sees life,"
it said, "from seedling-braird to snedder,"

as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades,
"This is the turnip-cycle,"

as it dropped its raw sliced mess,
bucketful by glistering bucketful.


The first poem from Seamus Heaney's new (2006) collection "District and Circle." Read it aloud. With an Irish accent, preferably. Especially "from seedling-braird to snedder."

not a poem, but one of the shortest short stories in the world:

"El Dinosaurio" por Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003)
Cuando despertó el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.


the translation
"El Dinosaurio" by Augusto Monterroso
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.



Um, I'm a little irked by the fact that people can get away with writing one-sentence stories. Am I allowed to do that? That aside, I suppose the point of this story is to get the reader to imagine. That's what my Spanish prof says, anyway. What immediately comes to my mind: A purple (a majestic purple, not a Barney purple) dinosaur resembling a dragon, which sleeps protectively next to the narrator.... I guess I'm not in one of my cynical moods right now.

I heart coffeehouses

I read this poem, along with T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," at our dorm Fair Trade coffee house last night. I don't think there will ever be a day when I read something by Margaret Atwood and say, "Hmm, she could have done better." This poem is no exception:

IN THE SECULAR NIGHT

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.
It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

In a Station of the Metro

Once I realized that there are a lot of long poems here, I thought maybe a short one would be fun.

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So, the first line just runs, skipping and iambic. The second just drops, stagnant. One is motion, the other is stagnation. Of all the times I've looked at this poem, this last time is the first time I saw that. Just a reminder to read everything twice. Or, like, three hundred times.

On Rain and Nothingness

Sorry for the absence, no excuses will be made. Just to let you all know that I value your participation highly, read everything you post at least three times, but that all I read right now is Jorie Graham and her corresponding philosophers, and I've decided to spare you that part of my life.

Anyway, it rained here today and so I was infinitely productive. I thought how I really am content to just sit and live in my mind without really taking care of my body (aside from now-sustained vegetarianism) and then I got to thinking about this Wallace Stevens poem, The Snow Man. I also saw some ducks poking at the ground with their faces looking for worms in the rain and thought it was a nice metaphor how they were grasping at things unseen and uncertain; yet, their instincts told them that if they could not penetrate the earth in its moment of weakness they would starve. See how I slipped that in there? Been reading too much theology lately.

Wallace Stevens:
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

We talked about this one in class, as it pertains to a state of the mind. It really praises nothingness, as in, one must fully enter into a mind of winter in order to appreciate what others may find misery in.

It's still cold here, though. I won't go so far as to condone the cold. Just saying, as a coping mechanism, it's nice to sit inside the library and read poems.

And now, for another

Living In Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
No dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
The panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
Stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
Had been her vision when he pleaded "Come."
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
Under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
So coldly would delineate the scraps
Of the last night's cheese and blank sepulchral bottles;
The on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
A pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
Envoy from some black village in the mouldings...
Meanwhile her night's companion, with a yawn
Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
Declared it out of tune, inspected whistling
A twelve hours' beard, went out for cigarettes;
While she, contending with a woman's demons,
Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
A fallen towel to dust the table-top,
And wondered how it was a man could wake
From night to day and take the day for granted.
By evening she was back in love again,
Though not so wholly but throughout the night
She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
Like a relentless milkman up the stairs

-Adrienne Rich

This poem is from my American Lit class last spring, and re-reading it made me love it even more than I remember. Even though I have to read it pretty carefully, I like that it's not broken up at all, except for the plethera of punctuation. I also loved the opposing night and day imagery, and how this woman's ideal is so well contrasted to the reality of the situation. The title is also interesting to me, and sets up the religious language throughout the poem.