finishing the manuscript

from the holiday card we never sent.  i love the colors, and these two finished manuscripts.

i started this project the gentian weaves & her fringes, a collection of poems using material from emily dickinson, in 2008.  it seems to take five years for me to finish a larger project--and not because i'm not spending enough time on it daily, but i need that much time for conscious and unconscious forces to do their work.

like other projects i've finished of this same scale, i thought it was finished after two years, but it really, really wasn't.

i need a lot of time away from things to figure out what they need to do.  it really doesn't seem like it's up to me. it really doesn't seem that, if i had worked on nothing but this project for a year,  crammed all five years of work into a single year, it would have had the same outcome.  at all.

so, so, so   ::::    i think i'm really done!  i'm sure i'll do a few more tweaks.  but for now, i'm gonna do as my dear husband recommends and freeze the design.

finding a publisher for a work like this is at least another year's worth of work. 

now i can move on to something new.

yay!

as (one of) my (many) therapist(s) said: you love beginnings.  you need to learn to make middles more fun.  it's true!  what i just did was a middle of sort.  it won't really be done until the book is published, and i feel proud for getting through the stills.

i need to celebrate.  this is the first completed new year's resolution of 2013.

what should i do?

here's the table of contents.  i think it  looks pretty cool, and will look even cooler in a real book:

 

a sudden (((bright coin)))........ 8

ambuscade of clover........ 9

angels babble........ 10

beetle’s ordination........ 13

buttercups rannunculae........ 15

chartered (((from my otter’s window)))........ 17

(((daffodils))) :: (((my blondines)))::........ 19

declined day—phantom’s bare & groping feet........ 20

((dim)) & unsuspected tenderness........ 21

eyes—little trees—........ 24

& favorite tints........ 26

gaunt swimmers ransomed........ 29

globe—bashful—humming........ 30

(((green cartiers)))—........ 31

*(((hoard of gems)))........ 33

(((   i died)))........ 35

i gather idle (((bumble-bees)))........ 36

jointed—........ 38

king’s fork........ 40

lost—the stolid bee........ 42

my tree........ 44

(((moth-star dropt))) last night &........ 45

night hid her throes:........ 47

(((o))) heart-sodden &........ 49

our antiquary ransacks august........ 50

pare this apple........ 52

& pauper’s slit &........ 53

(((parceled))) in yellow tulle—........ 54

peeps onto that sleeping egg........ 55

quivering—........ 57

ragged phoebes (((tremor)))........ 59

rapt: morning::........ 60

:: rouge november—........ 61

september’s escutcheon........ 63

snow falls april (across the altar)........ 64

the child is a small ear........ 67

the (((timbral))) flickers—........ 69

this (((broily))) day........ 70

***throng of acorns........ 71

unfrequented & august........ 73

vane turns in zephyret........ 75

we have slendered ourselves........ 77

window’s anodyne does not fail—........ 78

extacy &&&&&........ 80

yclept........ 82

zinnia?........ 84

forgive me, dear

emily d.

i neglected to observe your birth anniversary on december 10 (you would have been 182 years old).

thank you for being my daily companion, spectre, spirit, subversive stitcher, maker of little things that got bigger, then bigger, against all hope.

thank you for this poem, as well,

for today, on this bleak & slanted december afternoon:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – 
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes – 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – 
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are – 

None may teach it – Any – 
'Tis the Seal Despair – 
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air – 

When it comes, the Landscape listens – 
Shadows – hold their breath – 
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death – 

also, here are four poems (look up candland in the archive) and commentary i wrote in conjunction with my own daily emily dickinson reading practice.

detritus, hand-sewn, interference, & the lyric

celebrating for a brief moment a brief accomplishment

today i completed the final draft of my exam lists.  see that smile above?  yeah.  that's how happy i am about it.

tomorrow, as i begin to read bataille, re-read foucault for the hundreth time, i may be weeping* .  but for today, a hurdle was crossed.  

i have a few months to go before i start serious study, but couldn't help but read one text today i was really curious about, from dickinson's misery by virgina jackson:

Suppose you are sorting through the effects of a woman who has just died and you find in her bedroom a locked wooden box. You open the box and discover hundreds of folded sheets of stationery stitched together with string. Other papers in the bureau drawer are loose, or torn into small pieces, occasionally pinned together; there is writing on a guarantee issued by the German Student Lamp Co., on memo paper advertising THE HOME INSURANCE CO. NEW YORK (“Cash Assets, over SIX MILLION DOLLARS”), on many split-open envelopes, on a single strip three-quarters of an inch wide by twenty-one inches long, on thin bits of butcher paper, on a page inscribed “Specimen of Penmanship” (which is then crossed out) (fig. 1). There is writing clustered around a three-cent postage stamp of a steam engine turned on its side, which secures two magazine clippings bearing the names “GEORGE SAND” and “Mauprat.” Suppose that you recognize the twined pages as sets of poems; you decide that the other pages may contain poems as well. Now you wish you had kept the bundles of letters you burned upon the poet’s (for it was a poet’s) death. What remains, you decide, must be published.

Let this exercise in supposing stand as some indication of what now, more than a century after the scene in which you have just been asked to place yourself, can and cannot be imagined about reading Emily Dickinson. What we cannot do is to return to a moment before Dickinson’s work became literature, to discover within the everyday remnants of a literate life the destiny of print. Yet we are still faced with discerning, within the mass of print that has issued from that moment, what it was that Dickinson wrote.

i love the idea of dickinson being, not a writer of books, but a creator of zines, or of the art of the trunk, collecting images and words and detritus and saving it in something bigger than a book, because a book is too tame, too trim, too regular, too hermetic,  to contain her.  so what was it she was writing, and how did the world, that never wrote back to her, come to constrain her corpus of words into the thing we call literature?

this trunk of hers,  flotsam & jetsam, scraps and threads and dried petals, begins to touch the reason i'm obsessed with dickinson ( i and a bunch of other nerdy fuddy-duddies.)

legwear:  black lace leggings

inspiration:  a trunk full of hand-sewn, hand-written chapbooks

looking forward:  seeing a lot of water next week in seattle

*here's what natanya ann pulley, one of our fabulous guest bloggers, wrote on facebook today about studying for her exams:

My method is to just try everything. It's chaotic (I want to say disaster but will try not to judge). I have notes in six different programs. My books go from extreme post-it noting to color coded tabs to highlighted and underlined sections.... I read in the morning, afternoon, evening, night, really really late night. I've scheduled by theme, by taste, by chronology, by whim, by goal. It's messy. I suppose that is my way, but it's going on for over a year now. Usually I try different methods, but the deadline on a project is sooner and so I don't see so much switching, swapping and lolly-gagging. You know, my therapist told me that part of the process is the emotional process. Like it's built in the marathon of it all. And to appreciate that side of it. I told her no. (I'm a fabulous patient). I said I wanted it task-oriented and rather robotic. Bah ha ha. Anyway, she's right. It's about pacing emotionally as well as mentally and physically (at least for me). And spiritually (I would argue). But anyway. Right now, it's like book/note-taking/study session bombs have dropped in every room in our house (well, our bedroom, my den, the kitchen table and the front reading room and throughout my brain). Four months to go ...

list of spring: e.e. cummings--goblin valley--the anti-sonnet

we go to goblin valley every winter when it's just about spring

i'm in list mode.

lists seem very spring-like to me, when sustained thought becomes suddenly

uncontrollably

difficult,

and the schizophrenia of the season is reflected in the skipping from thought to thought, the move from thick grey tights covered in over the knee stockings and boots (what i wore last night to a friend's snowy cabin in provo canyon)

to bare legs and a skirt (what i wore yesterday afternoon)

to tights and sandals and a dress (what i wore to church this morning)

within one twenty four hour period--

here are ten things that mean spring's coming in utah:

1)  a day trip to goblin valley

2) teaching my two-week locavore cooking class at walden--here's a post from our blog from march 2010

3) e.e. cummings ((the very anti-sonnet of him))

(speaking of sonnets, read this hilarious onion article on the n.e.a.'s funding of the 1.3 million dollar sonnet)

4) eggs, asparagus, and strawberries

5) planning our annual spring break trip to visit my peeps in arizona

6) last year i planted a garden for the first time--so maybe gardening will become a permanent feature of spring? i'm not so good at this, but maybe i'll become?

7) writing more--i get feverish with ideas this time of year

8) sandals--i start looking at sandals obsessively--my favorite footwear--so glad we can wear them with tights these days--a perfect hybrid of seasons--and the girls in locavore always start busting them out during our two-week march inter-session--

9) snowy mountains/sunny valley--i love a sunny day over a white mountain

10) shedding punctuation--trying to avoid the closure of the period in favor of the freedom of the dickinsonian dash, the cummingsesque airy spaces -- the freedom of the bare leg at last--

                    --something like     

                                                  this    cummings   here:

[in Just-]

[in Just-]

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

legwear:  charcoal tights, black wedge sandals

inspirations:  dashes and air

looking forward:  after church road trip to some small utah town

stitchery

today's theme is needlework, and a response to julie's thoughts on balance.

the subversive stitch: radical reappropriation of the domestic arts as some sort of political act/statement. for example, questioning the notion that domestic work is lower on the rungs than intellectual work--reorganizing that hierarchy, as it were, so that, at least in one's own mind, one is not privileging one over the other without at least some examaination of the reasons for said hierarchy.

this has been a theme of my month, if not my life.

ingrid wrote a paper on fiber arts and subversive stitchery, especially as used in the street art trend of yarn-bombing, often performed by female artists, an interesting, gentle twist on the more permanent changes graffiti artists, often male, make on their landscapes. she argues that yarn bombing is, among other things, a way of putting the private, domestic world out into the public sphere, as in this yarn cozy over the merrill lynch bull on wall street, done by agata olek.



eva led a discussion on tuesday, for many hours, about the possible uselessness of an academic life--the possible decadence of one person devoting one whole life to an obscure area of knowledge. in the course of this discussion, she questioned the efficacy of the academy, the justness of the system, and posited that perhaps academic pursuits should only be conducted by part-time amateurs. she got quite an earful from the tableful of academics at which we sat. i think her point, one that i've spent a lot of time pondering myself, was that it's not fair that some people get to live a life entirely of the mind while having their material needs provided by a wife, mother, servant, etc., often female, of lower class, or of color. it is indeed an important and essential question. one that i haven't come close to answering.

what has this all to do with stitchery?

nothing that other people haven't discussed more intelligently and thoroughly than i will here, but something that seems relevant to this blog and the lives that julie and i are living--and that is the degree to which we as mothers, maters, are living in the material world vs. the artistic or intellectual world. i hesitate to put the two things in a hierarchy. i'm a big fan of matter. i've been called at various times a materialist, a hedonist, a sensualist, a gourmand, and i'll accept all of those labels as fair. i'm called mater by five people. and i very much enjoy taking care of their needs.

and then i get frustrated by the lack of time available to put into the non-material world. and then i go back and argue against my frustration, thinking about how the material world is really where it's at. where we're at.

without it, the mind has nothing to do, the poet would have nothing to say.

i mean, forgive my amateur philosophizing, but,-- in response to julie's struggle to balance her laundry basket (might we read her tumble down the stairs as at least partly symbolic?) and her ten page short story in the same week?--what's the mother to do? lots of people claim that most successful female artists had no children, no spouses, or had servants, etc. there may be truth to that.

i have no idea what to do with these thoughts and this supposed dichotomy: my enjoyment in making the material provisions for the people i love as well as the enjoyment and necessity of the solitary work of writing, reading, and thinking.

dude, i have no idea.

and i'm aware that in the grand scheme of humanity, i am in a most luxurious position here.

but i put myself up against the vast works created by dickinson, or woolf.

when i was younger, i thought i could create a new paradigm, and do both, or all, things.

but now i'm just too tired and more than a little discouraged.

but a few cool things and inspiring things about needlework, anyway:



1) jen bervin's dickinson facsicles: "A series of six large scale embroidered works by Jen Bervin based on composites of the punctuation and variant markings in Emily Dickinson's poetry manuscripts." bervin scans in dickinson facsicles and stitches the incidental marks on the documents onto large scale quilts. she says of the project:

I have never doubted Dickinson’s profound precision, however private, nor that the energetic relation of these marks and variants is anything but integral to her poetics. I have come to feel that specificity of the + and – marks in relation to Dickinson’s work are aligned with a larger gesture that her poems make as they exit and exceed the known world. They go vast with her poems. They risk, double, displace, fragment, unfix, and gesture to the furthest beyond—to loss, to the infinite, to “exstasy,” to extremity.
























2) this cool thing my grandma gave me at lunch today from the bank of lehi, one hundred years ago, in 1912, that had been her mother's. it's a needle book, and some of the needles are so fine they are nearly invisible. "ladies remember," it reads, "if you need a little needle/ this will your need supply/ a needle of a dainty point /and a golden eye."



3) cecilia vicuña's "book".
























p.s.--legwear: snakeskin patterned jeans. yes my children mocked me. kinda like when my mother got new glasses, and when she came home wearing them, we asked why there was a playboy bunny logo on the earpiece, "what? these are playboy glasses? i didn't even notice! oh well, i'm sure no one will notice."

similarly, i said, "what? these jeans are snakeskin? i didn't even notice, the pattern's so subtle!"

but then my student ariel told me i looked like a model. i didn't, but thanks anyway, ariel! love you!