Musings: OK, I have no pictures for this one…

I am often between two different and competing places in my head.  I suppose most of us are.  I call these two mental continents, the “creator” side and the “producer” side.  And I need both to conceive of a new art or writing project, and to execute it.  It just often seems that the producer side: organized, creased pants, a small, well-groomed mustache I imagine, so much more easily sets up camp and bangs on tin pans till his crepuscular counter-part has been squarely banished.

OK, enough of my forced metaphor tonight.  Point being, it’s sometimes hard to put away the emails and “action plans,” and switch head-spaces.

I’ve always used poetry to do that.  I’ll pick up anything, usually an un-read New Yorker and skip right to the poems. In the mid 90’s, temping, depressed, just out of school, I remember a poetry campaign the NY Metro ran.  I’d look up from my commute to the air conditioned office of some VP at Sony, Miramax, The New Yorker, and find a poem between those side bar ads for dermatologists and divorce lawyers.  There was one about a spider that literally saved me.  It didn’t matter that is was maybe not amazing.  I had a professor once who said that poets are the mental gymnasts of the writing world, and it is that very flexibility and shape-shifting that I suppose I count on.  Polish poets in particular.

Tonight, in the apartment I’m staying in, I needed to step away from the email.  How could I ever get my head back into “story” mode? I pulled a book off the old bookshelf of old books.  (It’s a classic Upper West Side apartment that I’m staying in, owned upon a time by a very well read grandmother).

On the shelf I found Allison Hawthorne Deming.  I’d never heard of her, though it turns out she won the Whitman prize the same year I took my first poetry class.

Anyway, to me she is homey, yet light of foot.  Makes me think of the late Deborah Diggs, or Jorie Grahm, though less knowing, or Tess Gallagher, though more grounded.

I am opening her book, “Science and Other Poems” and choosing a few lines at random…

From “Saturday, J.’s Oyster Bar”

“…

Inside those houses women set tables

with linen, crystal and pears,

while I look in from the woods, think

there is the wilderness that can’t be tamed.”


And from “Dreamwork with Horses”

“…

I spent months trying to solve this dream,

conjuring the troubled adolescent

who raged through a stable stabbing out

the eyes of his passion

for the distortion of civilized love.

What waking does to the dream -

when what I wanted was to remain faithful to its clarity.”


And so, goodnight.

- Tanit

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