(no subject)

No, I never move from where it's dry
Here in this wicker chair beneath the eaves.
Wet leaves, wet stabs, wet everyones blow by.
I know that in the alley there the leaves
Now make a ramp that ends three meters high.
I know the hidden door beneath receives
Such shy knocks that they'll never wake reply.
I feel the shingles, dark until they shine
And treetops that the high rains undefine.

The drier that I get the more I know.
I see the people, how and where they go.
Behind the walls, upstairs, each with a glow
That doesn't have to reach my eyes to show
The wickedness they leave half done for shame,
The love that can't remember why it came.

(no subject)

Canada's knockoff of our Thanksgiving happens six weeks earlier so they have no buffer against creeping Christmasism - the red and green stuff starts popping up right after Halloween. Kind of makes me think that we could chill out the 18+ month American presidential election season if we supplanted it with some other event, like by moving Congressional elections to odd-numbered years.

Because the presidential stuff sucks me in every time, despite there being no point in my following any of it. I guess it's entertaining, but most other forms of entertainment don't leave me feeling this awful, and thinking such awful thoughts. Example awful thoughts:

1. Go atheism and all that but I kind of wish the Pope & Co. would come around on divorce soon, not to liberalize or make Catholics less miserable, but so fewer follower types end up in the hands of the evangelicals. The priests keep those who listen to them vaguely right wing overall but the whole Catholic setup is also designed to calm thought, or anyway keep it in a pretty tight anxiety/external-soothing cycle they control. The Catholic-to-evangelical head loss was one of the more unnecessary transfers - Methodists, Episcopalians etc. were doomed to lose a third of their people to nonattendance and another third to reaction when they started modernizing, but the Catholics had, maybe still have, a real shot if they just reform very selectively. The heterosexuals just want contraception and divorce, and there's lots of them. Take too much of a stand against those and you'll lose them to the newer, shinier, savager hucksters. Pontifex, I understand you're afraid of brand leakage but even reactionaries need to read the times. Inquisite better, froggy pope.

2. I hope the last moron standing vs. Romney is a real fundamentalist, not a painted one like Cain. Because in the last ditch they will attack the Mormonism, which is presumably all they talk about behind closed doors, and that is potentially beautiful. Not that Mormons believe stupider things than Christians, but to American ears their tenets sound crazier than worshipping Yoda and the Force. For entertainment value and the prospect of a maimed Romney both, this is my golden dream.

Though maybe Cain is narcissist enough to take it there too. But I mustn't excite myself so.

(no subject)

70. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

Finally finished reading another book, except not really, and one I'd read most or all of before. It's short and clearly the editor had to be exhaustive to fill even this many pages - every newspaper write-up that involved her answering questions made it in. She gave only three or four substantive interviews, all here, and all in her last decade. The Paris Review one's probably the best, but Dana Gioia's reminiscences of taking her class at Harvard (with only four other students!) is included too, and gives you even more of a sense of her, and especially her relation to Stevens, dozens of whose poems Gioia says she'd recite from memory.

But the newspaper pieces are pretty amusing, especially the ladies' magazine-style first piece, from c. 1950, and a '60s one by a young Tom Robbins where we get a lot of Robbins and pretty much just a cameo from his ostensible subject. The articles by Brazilians are adorably respectful and ornate. Bishop was right, it's in the magazines that it's clearest we're historical.

She offers the same opinions and anecdotes over and over, as one does for these things, including touting the same poets: Whitman as the best American though temperamentally foreign to her, Edward Lear, her friend Lowell - though at one point confesses she hates confessional poetry. She identifies as the major influences on her Stevens, her mentor Moore (though she denies this was deep), and Herbert and Hopkins, the latter two for style rather than content, famous Unbeliever that she was. Though she might not have been when she discovered them in early adolescence. I'm still at sea with Moore and with few exceptions find Hopkins useless and annoying, but I think I begin to see the Herbert. Her simplicity and directness of tone are pretty astonishing - how hard that is - and I admit he's near peerless at conveying that in verse. She mentions passing through a Shelley phase, Browning phase, and brief Swinburne one in her romantic teens. Dickinson she mentions with ambivalence, perhaps because of being introduced to her in the sentimentalized and basically censored early editions, Frost not at all.