To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Resolved: Shippy adventure tales about space pilots can only be improved by inclusion of references to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Seriously, though, doesn't part of "Renascence" remind you of a rocket launch? Specifically this part:

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ’most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast...

O Flist, I've found myself watching some Northern Exposure episodes of late, and I'm contemplating a complete (well, complete through the first six episodes of S6, anyway) rewatch. Anyone feel like joining me? (P.S. If you like quirky, charming, intelligent, unexpectedly moving dramedies, now would be an EXCELLENT time to discover this one!) I've given a thought to making a rewatch comm, although I only lasted until the end of S4 on the recent B5 rewatch. Then again, NX only had fifteen episodes total for the first two seasons, so it wouldn't be quite as long as five seasons with a show that had 20+ episodes each year.

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In other news, JMS is trying to re-acquire the rights to B5. What for, no one's sure.

My first reaction is OMG REBOOT REBOOT REBOOT!!!!, but I'm not sure how one would change the story significantly enough to make it worth it.

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Finally, a poem I recently read and loved:

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

All right, gamesiplay wrote this epic post about "perfect" poems, and now I have to navel-gaze about that for a while. A perfect poem is different from a "favorite" or "best" poem, though for me there's significant overlap. The working definition that she came up with is that "it has to do with some kind of intersection between an idea that affects me viscerally and a structure/progression/formulation that mirrors the way my mind works." I'm defining it as a poem (or section of a poem, if it's long) that you get and understand down in your soul. Of all the possible ways to put whatever it is that the poet has written into words, this is the one that makes the most sense to you, and you can't imagine it working as well in any other formulation.

(I'm stealing the Alan Bennett quotation gamesiplay used as well: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.")

To be honest, any number of Millay poems could be included here, because I think of all the poets I've read, her verse works most similarly to the way my mind works--very odd since she so often wrote in sonnets and other forms and I hate writing like that, but I guess it speaks to a certain organization of thought that functions similarly to my own. In the interest of brevity, I will limit myself to four: "Recuerdo," "Journey," "Renascence," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."

Others: "The Wild Swans at Coole" and perhaps "The Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), "The More Loving One" (Auden), "Patchwork" (Boland), "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), Sonnet 73/"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Shakespeare), "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (Heaney), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), "Horses and Men in the Rain" (Sandburg), the untitled poem that begins In Search of England (Morton), the last twenty-one lines of "Little Gidding" and possibly also part I of "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), maybe "Nostalgia" (Collins), maybe "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray), and perhaps "Church Going" (Larkin).

Yes, fully 75% of them were written between 1910 and 1963, WHAT OF IT. Modernism and its close successors ~speak to me~. And yeah, a few are cliches; I'm gonna say it just speaks to how perfect they are, how not a word is out of place, and so they're recognized as such by many people.

( Further analysis )

What are yours?

( Very possibly my new favorite Boland poem )


Okay, so I know much of her thing is that she is both a woman and poet. That's what 250+ pages of prose in Object Lessons boils down to, as do many, many poems. And yet I think I only understood that intellectually, because the aspects of womanhood she most often writes about are sexuality, motherhood, and domestic chores related to raising children. She writes about various activities that aren't necessarily gender-coded, either by biology or social convention, as well, but the poems that are most obviously about her identity as a female tend to cluster around those three areas. None of which, as you might guess, I can really relate to all that well, although I think she treats them beautfully.

And then there's this. Quilting is not biologically restricted only to females, true, but it's very socially coded as a feminine activity. And here I can see her, quite vividly, sitting cross-legged on a dining room floor, sorting patches of fabric. I can see myself doing that. (Okay, I don't quilt, but I have in the past done artsy-crafty things like quilting that required laying out materials on a floor.) And suddenly I go, "Oh. She is like me. We share this. We can make those same motions and see those same patterns." She had written about my experience of being human, of being a writer, of being interested in poetry; until now, I had not run into a poem where she captured part of my experience of being female.

I don't know if that makes sense as written. But I hope this little epiphany translates into some progress on the thesis...

Fifteen books (and/or plays) you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (also Ulysses)
2. Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
3. Bujold, Barrayar (also perhaps Shards of Honor and A Civil Campaign)
4. Steinbeck, East of Eden
5. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
6. Dahl, The Witches
7. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
8. Helprin, The Winter's Tale
9. Byatt, Possession
10. Sewell, Black Beauty
11. Russell, The Sparrow
12. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
13. Tolkien, LOTR
14. Wilder, Our Town
15. Stoppard, Arcadia

Fifteen Twenty poems:

1. Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Song of Wandering Aengus," "The Wild Swans at Coole," and "Sailing to Byzantium"
5. Boland, "That the Science of Cartography is Limited" and "Mise Eire"
7. Parker, "Resume"
8. Millay, "Renascence," "Spring," "Recuerdo," and "Journey"
12. Heaney, "Digging" and "A Kite for Michael and Christopher"
13. Collins, "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July," "Nostalgia," and "Lying in Bed in the Dark, I Silently Address the Birds of Arizona"
17. Longfellow, "Woods in Winter"
18. Donne, "Song" (aka "Go and catch a falling star")
19. Coleridge, "The Nightingale"
20. Anonymous, "The Seafarer"

I just sat down with the version of Candide I've had out from the library for more than a week now. I opened it, only to realize that it was in the original French.

Sigh.

I suppose I could try and use my rapidly-atrophying Spanish skills to puzzle it out (and if I find myself with writer's block and nothing better to do tomorrow, I may very well do so), and yet...so much easier to get the English version on Sunday.

And I was looking forward to something witty and amusing after finishing The Diamond Age this evening--Stephenson has some awesome ideas about what society with nanotech could/will be like, and can write some decent action scenes, but the extraneous orgies really killed the mood, as did ending things with more of a whimper than a bang. Er, plotwise. I assume the orgies went off okay. I mostly skimmed those parts.

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I just recced Billy Collins to alto2, and in doing so, I found this ad-and-popup-riddled site which, despite being horrifying to navigate, nevertheless has 40-odd of his poems up there. If you haven't run across Collins before, treat yourself to any of them. (Although my personal favorites out of what's there are "Flames," "Nostalgia," "On Turning Ten," "Litany," and "Walking Across the Atlantic.") He's fabulous, and very funny to boot. ("Flames" has an awesomely hilarious punchline.)