A Public Space
Today's mail brought my inaugural copy of A Public Space, the new lit rag edited by Brigid Hughes, deposed heir-apparent to Plimpton's Paris Review empire. I tried to read a few pieces with my new glasses which seem, $642 dollars later, to be somewhat bifocal-impaired. But French and stylin', did I forget to mention that? So, all is not lost or sacrificed yet.
There was something I wanted to talk about when I started this. Has it escaped my addled brain, already, now? Today, what has been today? Driving to/from Eugene on the glasses run. That included flights of birds, llamas that babysit sheep, and water, water, everywhere in Christmas tree plantations and fields. I read an essay in an Alaska literary magazine by Jane Hirshfield, my new poetry guru. Read a bit of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice but Jan Morris in the introduction is right, the prose is a tad dense.
I walked the trail, put recycling and urine-drenched kitty litter in the back of the pickup and hauled it to the garbage can at the top of the hill. Had one, two, maybe three mini-crying jags that are all tied up with mostly my failure as a mother of an adult son but as a writer, too. Like so much, with the waning light and the rain on the roof, their urgency has since faded.
It's sometimes hard to locate what's the mettle of a single, lived-long day. There's something in what Jane H. says, that a poet, a writer comes to the page with a sense of disturbance. A burr in the saddle. A discomfort. A sense that all is not right and, from that, words flow and beg to be explored.
I wish I could surrender to such insights day in and out, blindly and blithely. Life would be so much simpler. I wouldn't be considering Prozac.
