This is why I'm being paid for it.

[philena]

I must say, the new job I'm doing is much, much less interesting, more stressful, and less fun than my internship. Making travel arrangements isn't so bad, but I have to clear everything with three different people before I can do anything, and by the time that's done I discover that the only managers who were capable of booking 13 hotel rooms for 22 people on the necessary nights are out to lunch/on vacation/not returning calls/abducted by aliens. I felt a physical sense of relief when I finally decided that at 4:00 everyone was going to be gone for the day anyway and left my phone, which I had been keeping a vigil over all day in case anyone decided to return my calls (no one did, of course). I walked down the hall from the lonely office where I do the travel coordination stuff and was greeted with a hearty "Welcome back" by everyone in the cubicles surrounding mine, after which I was invited to sit in on a meeting which before I would have been barred from. It was very boring, but genial and I got to learn a little more about the various organization of stuff around me. See, my intern stuff is technically not at all related to the desks that surround mine, but because of the location, the people in the surrounding department, known as Coordination, give me things to do. So I feel like a member of it already, complete with colleagues, and it's much nicer than sitting in my own lonely office in Rusops ( "Russian Operations"; the office-mate should be back by tomorrow, but I barely know him, so that might just make things more uncomfortable) and waiting for the phone to ring. Ideally I would borrow a picture from the lovely ducksarepeople2, and make a few adjustments so that the already magnificent piece of artwork more accurately describes my situation. The picture I am thinking of compares a staid looking professor at a computer, under a label reading "Syntax," with a girl in a bikini, a dinosaur, some balloons, party hats, champagne, etc., under label reading "phonology." That characterization is timeless, certainly, but as mean ducksarepeople2 has apparently taken down the picture with no thought for posterity, I must ask you simply to visualize it from my description, substituting only "Rusops" for "syntax" and "Coordination" for "phonology." The dinosaur, balloons, etc. should remain as is.

Let me give you a bit of poetry for today. My mother drew Daniel's and my attention to this months ago, and we just now decided to reread it amidst other readings of Billy Collins that cropped up this evening. (This is not by Billy Collins, however, but rather by Elizabeth Bishop.):

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marble Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Magnificent. I've become much more enamored recently of poetry of a more structured nature. Daniel just bought us a few weeks ago a beautiful, beautiful book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (the author of "Bluebeard," which I posted here a while ago, and the letter to the Poetry magazine, demanding money, which I posted here a longer while ago.) "Bluebeard" is still one of my absolute, all-time favorite poems, but her other sonnets are likewise magnificent. "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!" is a particularly good one, which I now remember I analyzed for a high school project, and her more beautiful depressing ones, like "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" I don't want to degrade with mere praise. But even her non-sonnets are shiver-inducing. For example, here is what she has to say about there being time to sleep when you're dead:

Midnight Oil

Cut if you will, with Sleep's dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend--
The years that Time takes off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!

Or this, which reminds me a bit of the song from "A Mighty Wind," about the man who never did no wandering after all:

The Unexplorer

There was a road ran past our house
Too lovely to explore.
I asked my mother once--she said
That if you followed where it led
It brought you to the milk-man's door.
(That's why I have not travelled more.)

Really, I just can't give only the highlights. Read her sonnets if you want to be romantically bitter and depressed, and read her shorter poems for slightly lighter tones, but she is too wonderful not to know. Good poetry is exactly what I need to make me do calligraphy again. Earlier it was "The Second Coming" (whose author I can't ever remember; Daniel says it's Yeats). I think now it's time to move onto these sonnets.

Comments

[newredshoes]

Oh, wow. That's one reason I've never been able to write poetry -- I just cannot get the forms to work, not to mention that it's just Not My Medium, as great as it is.

I found one today, though, in an unlikely sort of place -- The New Republic. I usually skip over their poetry, but this one caught my eye:

The Invention of Song, by Bruce Bond

Not the face, the human face,
floating in its crippled spoon;
not the needle where it drinks
night after night; neither the watch,
the blood, nor the gold in hock,
the world liquefied to small bills
passed under the broker's jail;
no little crime of sweat that breaks
the child's lockbox of the body;
not the courage of the dour road
where it blisters into rough stone;
or the craze of the eye regarding
itself, the obsidian crystal;
not the mockery of the beast lung
bursting through its two blue doors;
or the shriek of birds glorified
with fear; not the pitch, the rock,
the ship of deaf sailors save one
lashed to his mast; not even the gash
of stars, the song, we are told,
too sweet to bear; but something
more, always more, the moon
in the wave, the animal, they say,
running in the Siren's veins,
the squall in the breach that calls
him out, mast or no mast, that grips
the buried shield of the sternum
as if it were the world's shield,
as if the heart dropped its massive
rope to hear, there, drowned in fog,
the sudden distance of its name.

I'm going to have to spend more time with it, but it definitely hits some of my more potent brainkinks. :)

[philena.livejournal.com]

Whoa. It's twisting my brainkinks into brain coils. It's a bit too eery a feeling for me to like it, but I can see the appeal.

[parisienne.livejournal.com]

wow. Until today I'd never read Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Wow. It's odd. I always say that I don't like poetry, that the meat is in fiction. Somehow I'm allows pulled to poetry. I wrote my thesis on it. And since I saw your post I've been engrossed all day. Do you read Rilke? He's certainly one of my favorites. And I love Baudelaire, but only in French. So now I'm enjoying tea and my kitty and reading poetry. so I thank you for giving me the impetus.

[philena.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read Rilke before, although Daniel adores one of his poems about the torso of Apollo, which ends with an admonishment that we must change our lives.

As for Baudelaire, I never really got into French poetry, although I did look through the books I had from 20th century French lit in preparation for the Green Fairy party chez Margaretta.

You're welcome for the impetus!