8:51 am I’m trying to get off twitter for a week or two so now
everything seems personally relevant. A block from the subway station, the dead
pigeon with three red tulips laid on it like it had just finished a
performance, picked from a plot a few feet away, could have something to do
with a reading I got last week, but it could just be the city reacting to an
accident. The train conductor said “shall,” which gives me a strange feeling of
optimism. The train car has one of those black star stickers on it that seem to
be there for official reasons, but are otherwise inscrutable except that they
look like the cover the last album Bowie did before he died.
10:23 am One of the things I have to do at my job today is check
the transfer of line breaks from a print book of The Tempest into an
ebook of The Tempest. As my eyes do this, I listen to a reading of an
Algernon Blackwood story on youtube. The protagonist is worried that he’s
having trouble distinguishing between dream and reality: “The hard thoughts
never come when my mind is much occupied. But they are always there waiting
and, as it were, alive.” Say that aloud a few times, and there isn’t a rhyme exactly,
but both sentences end with “I,” the same vowel in “rhyme.” These are the sort
of ghost rhymes I feel comfortable using in poems. More direct ones seem too
much like Wordsworth or limericks, too self-serious or too obviously a joke.
Not that jokes in poems aren’t fine. They’re great. Poetry and stand-up have
more in common than not sometimes.
10:37 am My browser currently has 59 tabs open, not including the
one in which I’m writing this. Here are three:
-The Wikipedia article for the Thematic Apperception Test,
which is something I heard about in a Michael Crichton novel I was listening to
on youtube.
-A recipe for Møsbrømlefse that I may never make
-The FindAGrave page for a crossroads burial in Warren County, New
Jersey.
12:47 pm (or thereabouts) On my lunch break I take the train
downtown to where I have a PO Box and on the way back up I start revising a
poem. When I first started working on this poem, I was thinking about the idea
of listening to a band I found out about on the poet Ruth Awad’s instagram
story called Mashrou’ Leila. I had been crossing under the East River at the
time (this was maybe a week ago) and also fixating on something I’d learned
earlier that day. In trying to figure out how common crossroad burials are in
the US (they were banned in the UK in the 1820s) I learned that the massive
strip of cemeteries on the Queens–Brooklyn border had 1) been made possible by
the Rural Cemetery Act of 1847, and 2) had resulted in the dead population of
Brooklyn being greater than the living one.
Revising the poem now is turning into a major reworking centering
on considerations of the reality of ghosts. I’ve certainly used the metaphor of
ghosts a lot, and there’s a part of me that’s believed in them enough to
sometimes wake up in the middle of the night very afraid, but this poem seems
to be a way of interrogating the possibility of capital-b Belief in ghosts and
the dead being more alive than simply metaphor and memory.
4:06 pm I take a short break from the work I’m doing on The Tempest
to fiddle with a poem, a different poem. I like where it’s going, this poem,
but I’ve been fixating on mycology and think maybe that could play a role. A
used mycology textbook from 1984 sits next to my work computer almost
completely unread. Its time will come soon I hope.
5:30 pm still at work, I am copying the Latin for a recipe from an
image of a book from the 1500s for a nonfiction piece I’m working on. The
recipe is for holy water.
Cooper
Wilhelm is a communist, and a witch, and the author of three books
of poetry, the longest of which is DUMBHEART/STUPIDFACE
(Siren Songs / 2017). More at CooperWilhelm.com and on twitter @CooperWilhelm.
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