Wildly and Intuitively

What makes summer feel like summer to you?

This week I’m also revisiting old notebooks, which tend to be a combination of diary entries, reading notes, and the early drafts of essays, talks and poems. I’m always on alert for usable nuggets and other forgotten material.

If you ever fear that your life has no rhyme or shape or direction, I suggest you try revisiting your notebooks, too. You will likely see, as I am seeing so clearly, that one’s obsessions and impulses and priorities remain uncannily consistent throughout a life, even in times when one feels wayward and off-course. I felt all those things 13 years ago (and more recently, too!) and yet I can draw a clear line between the books I was reading, notes I made, and what I was thinking about back then, and what I’m doing today. It’s all connected, as they say.

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A bit of what makes summer feel like summer.

Stray notes, fragments, nuggets:

Threshold: brink, dawn, doorstep, doorway, entrance, edge, gate, inception, origin, outset, sill, point of departure, verge, vestibule.

Ingress: portal, way, inlet, lobby, access, adit, foyer, gate, ingression, eve.

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“My earliest poems were derived directly from my journal work. I would write wildly and intuitively in my journal to rev up to the higher frequency of a poem.” Joy Harjo in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets

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Singe: blacken, blaze, brown, cauterize, char, cook, flame, ignite, incinerate, parch, scald, scorch, sear, toast, torch, enkindle, flame, flare, flash, glow, heat, ignite, roast.

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“Poetry persists as a result of our doubts, not in spite of them. Poetry is an act of faith rather than assertion of knowledge.” Brit Washburn, “In Praise of Perseverance”

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Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.” 
Deborah Diggs

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Sometimes I pause,
there where the air is cooler, and imagine
this is how my ghost will see the world  . . .” 
Nick Bozanic, “Departures”

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Each time,
the found world surprises
that is its nature.”
Jane Hirshfield

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It must have been February, or March.

And then August

gleaming.

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The poem was a space, a conduit, a way to enact the feelings our brief conversation evoked. It stoked further feeling.

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The poem says things that are hard to say in the harsh light of day.

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“An interesting plainness is the most difficult and precious to achieve.” Mies Van Der Rohe

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I could go on but it may mean more to you to take a little time to look at your notebook, in case there's the seed of something in there.

—Holly Wren Spaulding, July, 2023