Kairos

I have never followed or for the most part particularly liked the music produced at Def Jam records, but I’m finding Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being to be a calming, Buddhist approach to living an imaginative life. It’s the kind of book I can read in short bits at a time; frankly, having studied creativity and Buddhism and the arts for many years, nothing in it is exactly new to me. Yet the book acts as reminder and affirmation, for which I’m grateful.

Reminder that with a little objective space between me and my life sometimes, I can be reminded of my perspective and think more kindly about others’ perspectives. Reminder that whatever my readers take from my work, however they interpret it, however they critique it, whatever does or does not resonate with them–the work remains my own expression. It’s the best I could do at the time.

Reminder that the work of creativity doesn’t have an end point. Well–death, I suppose, ends the individual body’s ability to create; but if there is work out there in the world (music, poems, novels, films, paintings, sculpture, and so on), the creative acts of the past can continue. They continue to offer perspective. They continue to invite interpretation and expression.

This sort of reminder is good when I’m involved in making an ephemeral and very limited set of objects, a poem series made into an artist book. It’s so minor in the scheme of US culture in the 21st century, and so very much an expression of my own thinking, about which a limited number of people can possibly care. Rubin says that doesn’t matter–the culture, the popularity, the quantity. [Interesting, coming from a guy who has clearly made considerable money, and helped musicians earn considerable fortunes as well, and who hangs out in Tuscany much of the year.] But I don’t discount his words. Certainly, if I had been writing to make an impact on culture, to be popular, or to make money, I’d have stopped long ago. So I keep working, all in the fullness of time.

~

We never can know what will last, or why. Or why not. This weekend, we cut down a pair of “friends,” two pear trees that I planted over twenty years ago. We’ve had bountiful years and sparse years, years for pear butter, poached pears, and pear tarts, and years of drought and times the squirrels snagged fruits or wasps bored into them or deer leaned their long necks up to sample something sweet and juicy. Orioles loved the trees, and bees pollinated them. White petals carpeted the lawn after rainfall in spring. But fire blight found them and did its swift, fatal damage so rapidly the arborist told us to take them down and burn them.

Kairos: καιρός, an ancient Greek word meaning “the exact or critical time,” is a word I first learned through New Testament theology, though I now understand its use in science and philosophy. I suppose this autumn is the kairos for sawing down the blighted trees, just as it took me a few years to learn the kairos of when exactly I should harvest the pears. I’m sorry when I look out my kitchen window and don’t see them anymore, but I know fire blight spreads and could harm apples and cherries in the neighboring area (we have to burn the cuttings). So–it was time, as the saying goes. The pear trees’ work of making new seeds within sweet pears is over, but who knows what other work continues underground or what creativity will arise as a result? Possibly a poem. All in the fullness of time.

a case of fire blight

Why poetry?

Taking my stroll today, I found myself thinking about poems–not my own, but other people’s–and about poetry in general. Some questions came to mind: Why don’t I get tired of poetry? Why, after all these years, do I continue to read it, to write it, to think about it, to read what other people say about it, to talk of it with willing friends?

I find I will get tired of hearing (or reading) even excellent interviews, articles, and podcasts about politics or movies or social commentary or numerous other things that interest me. And while it’s true I’m sometimes not in the mood, or haven’t the energy, to listen to poetry readings, I’d say that in general–aside from my physical fatigue–a good poetry reading in-person or virtual, and any poetry discussion, does interest me. Why is that? When so few people find poetry fascinating.

But then, I don’t get tired of going to art museums and art galleries, either (and I’m not an artist).

One poetry-related space I’ve been enjoying is going on a poetry hike with Grant Clauser via YouTube. Also, thanks to Dave Bonta‘s compendium of poetry-related blogs, I’m intrigued as Brian Turner shares with his readers the process he takes to make and revise poems. The way he composes turns out to be not un-similar to my own way of writing poetry, starting with hand-written notes and crossings-out and arrows and re-writings, though I don’t use a notebook much these days. Some of us remain old school! But I also find myself engrossed by seeing the methods other writers use–younger poets, or people with disabilities that keep them from the handwritten draft–to start and the develop their poems. One of my former students uses voice-to-text and simple recordings/playbacks to write, for example. I’d find that awkward, but for her it enables marvels for expression.

~

This week, I’ve paused on my artist book while I wait for some paper that I ordered to show up at the art store. Next, I have decided that I need to start practicing paper-cutting. I used to be a fairly deft hand with an exacto knife, but that was 45 years ago, and I’m not as steady-handed as I once was. Once I have some samples cut to size, I might be ready to experiment with a digital printer.

One thing at a time.

Meanwhile, the October we’ve had in our region this year has been extraordinarily mild, sunny, and dry. So I have been able to work on yard/garden/outdoor home maintenance projects and the indoor work of book-making can wait a bit longer. Right?

P. S. I do not have an answer for this question. Maybe you do? Why poetry?

Heading into November…

Decisions, revisions

Currently, I’m deeply immersed reading two very different new books of poetry. First, the late Harry Humes’ new and selected, Going across the Water, is out from Ohio University Press–a lovely, large collection that includes some biography and commentary, as well as some never-collected new poems (Harry’s former student and long-time friend, Daniel Donaghy, edited and co-compiled the selections). Some of the poems are a re-read for me, as I have most of Harry’s books in my own library, but they’re poems well worth many reads. And the work I’m less familiar with is rewarding. He was so good. The other collection I’m perusing at present is Daisy Fried’s brand-new My Destination, which could hardly be less like Humes’ in terms of topic, content, style, you-name-it. Katie Peterson writes that Fried’s book succeeds because of “the poet’s unapologetic curiosity about experience, and her remorseless hunger for the right words to know her moment…” I’ll concur, though I am only part-way through the collection. It’s fascinating to find myself enjoying the work of two such dissimilar writers at the same time; and I find they do have “things to say to one another,” at least through me as intermediary. Strongly evocative and well-observed poems in both cases.

~

And today I spent awhile obtaining a more complete idea of how much time and effort I’ll have to put in to my own artist book endeavor. So many new things I’ll have to learn to do, and how I’ll have to be much more finicky and careful than I usually am, if I want this book to be worthy of its story. Any project of value is liable to take energy, time, resources of one kind or another, and will require at least some revision, however. That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.

I have the layout almost correct: a few minor revisions should do it. The choice of paper? Check, except for the cover stock, still deciding on that. Of course, I have to do some math to figure out how much paper to buy and then get it cut to size. Do-able. Not a huge challenge, right? I spent an hour with my knowledgeable “consultant,” MaryAnn Miller, deciding on a cover image and learning what the steps of actually manufacturing (ha) a book will be. I was afraid my amateurish artwork wouldn’t be appropriate; but she thought that it might be best with something not so polished, something I could use without getting copyright for, something a bit–er–primitive. I experimented with linocut, something I haven’t done in decades, and with watercolor (in my class at Blue Church Arts), based upon a photograph I’d researched. It’s one of the craggy, cold mountains in western North Korea not far from the Yalu River.

I’ve no way of knowing whether this particular peak is near where prisoner Camp 5 was located, but it gave off the kind of forbidding vibes I was looking for. Trying to capture it with my rusty and limited skills kept me occupied for many hours.

This was exciting, working with something that isn’t words, wrestling with the materials, trying several techniques. Deciding, revising!

So, the process continues.

Paper

A handmade book is generally made of paper (I’m sure there are imaginative exceptions). So I went looking at paper for the cover of my chapbook-to-be [previous blog will explain]. Even at my local art supplies store in a suburban region, I felt a bit overwhelmed by options. But after my initial excitement about the marvelous diversity available, I settled down to think about the book, its content, its context. Color. And the feel of a chapbook in one’s hand: all of those things should rightly affect design choices, I believe.

Fancy, decorated papers are appealing, but they won’t work for this project. It’s not a cheery story. Perhaps colors of the North Korean flag? Um, no; the colors of the DPRK are…red, white, and blue! (Though a deep red is an intriguing possibility). MaryAnn Miller showed me a lovely black paper she has used for artist books, but I have decided that isn’t quite what I want, either. Anyway, aside from color, there’s also the paper’s texture to consider, and whether digital printing will work on it.

So many decisions!

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

New project

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

When she learned I had long ago been in the graphic design industry as a typesetter, proofreader, and small press publisher during the time of the dinosaurs, MaryAnn reminded me to draw upon my past skills. Sure, the technology has changed, but I found that I do recall how to use a mockup for a pamphlet. I can figure pagination and signatures, and I have done quite a bit of proofreading on the computer.

However, for most of the time I was employed in academia, I did not have much opportunity to keep such techniques up to date. The first couple of years I was employed, I put together a booklet of student-written and student-illustrated work for an umbrella program through which my department was partially funded, but that part of my job ended long ago. After that, I had little reason to employ my out-of-date graphics skill set. Now, I have to recall what I know and also learn how to use it with more “advanced” software.

And that’s where I began as of this weekend (a day of pouring rain meant I felt fine about sitting at the laptop for a couple of hours). I’m starting with the text itself, with its indentations and italics and footnotes because, yes, this poem has footnotes. Figuring out how many pages of 8 x 10 Somerset Book Wove paper I’ll need per book and how the text will “sit” on each page. Thinking about cover art.

There’s much more involved, and it’s exciting. To me, at least. On next week’s blog post: more on this project and what I’ve been learning. Or else more on the garden as I put it to bed.

Who can tell?

Perspective, again

My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses in Australia, and caring for the health and well-being of small domestic animals at veterinary centers in North Carolina, Portugal, and New Mexico. She was briefly here in Pennsylvania, recently, to participate in my mother’s memorial gathering, and one morning at breakfast I mentioned that I have been buying amazingly good sheep-milk yogurt at our local farmer’s market. “It’s so expensive, though,” I told her, “Ten dollars a quart!”

“I don’t know, that sounds a fair price, actually,” she said. “Have you ever tried to milk a sheep? It isn’t easy!”

Well, no. I hadn’t given sheep-milking a second thought. And now that I’ve looked at a few YouTube videos…let’s just say that sheep-milk yogurt is a splurge for me, but certainly a good value for the price.

Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com

It’s little times like these–moments that could be so mundane–that keep me from becoming too blasé. My daughter inadvertently reminded me that I need to stay curious and not take things for granted, that while looking deeper into a topic may complicate my understanding, complexity and depth are good results! Her worldview varies from mine in interesting ways, and I always gain information from her; sometimes, what I learn finds its way into a poem (see my poem “Drought and Blood” in Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis). But aside from so-called poetic inspiration, what I cherish are those opportunities to look at experiences, places, and people from another perspective.

That’s why I love reading. I read books about history, geology, the cosmos, physics, biology, botany, philosophy, theology, economics, even entomology. It’s also one of the main purposes that people should read fiction and memoir: to get a view into how someone else thinks, lives, experiences the world.

And, of course, it’s why I enjoy poetry.

~

Here’s an excerpt from James Wright’s poem “Sheep in the Rain.” [You can read the whole poem here.]

Sheep eat everything
All the way down to the roots
And maybe that is why
These explorers of the rain
Seem so relaxed in their browsing.
Someone has freed them only a little while
Into the fields, and they have a good life of it
While it lasts.

Poetry online

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Header image for Canary Literary Journal

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

While I hope there are legions of people who read poems online, I suppose readership of literary journals tends to be niche. I hereby encourage you to Google “online poetry journals” and browse a bit. Look at their archives. Google a new poet whose work you admired. Keep reading!

I love books, but certain aspects of the world wide web enable us to find art, music, writing, dance, and so forth that we might overlook otherwise. I’m reminded of how I used to (still do, actually) enjoy dictionaries and encyclopedias when those were the simplest, most accessible forms of compiled and aggregated information for the layperson. I’d open the tome to look something up, and then find something intriguing or distracting, and read about that, which would get me interested in finding out more about something else…or, I’d look for one bit of information and discover a background far more fascinating or that I was unaware of; yes, the old down-the-rabbit-hole effect has been around since long before we had Wikipedia and its ilk.

And that network of educating ourselves, of defining our terms, trying to satisfy our curiosity, questioning our assumptions–that goes far back into human history. The technology behind the technology is cerebral.



Re-reading, re-learning

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away. And I love her observations and the occasional aside that seems to break the fourth wall:

...Once a squirrel
dropped through the chimney into the whole
ruined civilization of the basement. Here,
I'm taking the squirrel's viewpoint.

That’s from “Small Hours.” How terrific is that–the ruined civilization of basements? And the little comment that suggests indeed, the squirrel has a viewpoint. This poem ends 8 or 9 lines later with the sense of “being swept up/and contained in my bed” but the image she chooses is that of a child on a bicycle, which (to this reader) evokes memory and those hours we find ourselves in the somewhere-else of sleep and remembrance. No statement. No whole-poem metaphor. How did she come to those closing lines? Why do they work so well?

I want to learn that.

~

Brian Turner’s book The Goodbye World Poem is another re-read and feels utterly appropriate for a time of personal losses and deep reflection. And thankfully, it’s also a reminder of joy. These poems were written after the deaths of Turner’s wife (poet Ilyse Kusnetz), his father, and his best friend–truly, how does one find the means to say anything at such times? Yet somehow, Turner produced a trilogy of poetry books: The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, all published in one year (2023). Exploring what grief feels like has a long history among poets, and Turner’s work reminds me, in topic, of such collections as Donald Hall’s books Without and The Painted Bed, among others; Turner’s poetry is quite different from Hall’s, but the pain of loss and the gratitude for memories of the loved one are similar. And his work differs a lot from Terranova’s.

What do I want to learn from Turner’s poems, what is it he can do in these works that I would like to learn how to do? I love that I learn things in his work, information about whales, jellyfish, swamps, science. His work is usually narrative, doesn’t pretend to be anything but personal and memoir-based. Use of the first-person in poems doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is the writer’s experience or even her own memory/story, but it’s difficult to imagine Turner’s poems as being a stand-in persona. The imagery may offer metaphor but sure feels like “I saw this, I observed that.” Real stuff. Real life. That can get old in poems–but Turner keeps these observations new. Again, there’s reflection in the work that takes us past the surface words, tries to get the reader to find a way in to this grief, this loss, this mix of human feelings.

I think what I like in this work is how Turner acknowledges and presents the mix of human emotions and the movement toward compassion for the sufferer, whether the person suffering is a dying loved one or one’s own distraught and agonized self, whether the sufferer is an animal or a place (environment, region, biosphere). His poem “Fallen Giants” just gets to me each time I read it. It can be read almost as non-fiction prose, though it is lineated–long lines–and uses rhythm and repetition carefully. But, in fact, the poet is describing what whale fall might be like as the huge carcass descends through the silent ocean. And knows that whales are intelligent and can grieve:

...They fall into a hunger they cannot imagine,
with the sound of loved ones in their ears, calling to them, sonorous
and mournful, the pathos undeniable, and mournful because called out
for love's sake, the fluid world a conduit for the voices of these giants,
who sound themselves across the globe, across generations, speaking
to their loved ones...

This poem closes with the image of whales’ huge lungs, how they hold their breaths until they ascend “to the surface/ with a terrific blast of exhalation, a kind of announcement to the universe/that they were here, on planet Earth, a presence in this world, alive.” Compassion for whales that feels like compassion for human beings, for the earth, for the universe. I want my poems to acknowledge and evoke compassion in readers, remind them that the world is complex, beautiful, though often sad. And that it is good to be alive in the world, if only for awhile.

~

From the late summer/early autumn garden, several beautiful reminders of what life on Earth can offer. I recognize very clearly that not everyone has the good fortune to have a life that gives them bright flowers and ripe tomatoes. So I will be grateful today.

Radio Nowhere

Some days, this, from Bruce Springsteen…

I was tryin' to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin' the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

~

You get older, you recognize that technology is changing, you grew up with the radio and now there are podcasts and streaming platforms and what-all, which are sometimes a pleasure but also not what you were used to; there are so many ways to reach out to somebody, and smaller and smaller chances that anyone is picking up on your wavelength (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSChVd3yQ_A). You’re not lying on the beach with your friends listening to your transistor radio or boombox or mixtapes or iPod. Maybe you need a little more silence and a little less popular culture in your life, maybe you need a coffee meet-up now and then with your besties, maybe you need a long walk in a quiet woods and no headphones or earbuds. Maybe no one is listening.

Maybe you’re feeling like Radio Nowhere.

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

For thousands of years, poems contained images of goats, sheep, horses, chariots, shrines, birds, hearths, wells, orchards, and other things observed in the world of those writers’ contemporaries. Surely poetry can include a far wider range of images, metaphors, content, commentary! So poetry evolves within culture; I cannot ignore the things of this world. I continue working on achieving some kind of acceptable balancing act.

Even if I can’t quite keep up.

Ellipsis…

“ellipsis(n.) 1560s, “an ellipse” in geometry, from Latin ellipsis, from Greek elleipsis “a falling short, defect, ellipse in grammar,” noun of action from elleipein “to fall short, leave out,” from en- “in” (see en- (1)) + leipein “to leave” (reconstructed to be from PIE root *leikw- “to leave”). The grammatical and rhetorical sense in English is attested by 1610s: “a figure of syntax in which a part of a sentence or phrase is used for the whole, by the omission of one or more words, leaving the full form to be understood or completed by the reader or hearer.” Earlier, in prosody, ellipsis was used of any word or term omitted but understood (1580s).”

The entry is from Etymology Online and describes, metaphorically, how I’ve been feeling lately. A bit absented from the world, full of gaps instead of (alas, that term) “content.” Missing the details, falling short, leaving out–not the same as feeling left out. I do not usually feel “writer’s block,” but…

maybe that’s what this is.

~

I’ve been thinking about a dear friend who often punctuated his letters to me with ellipses. He’d leave those three dots on the page to let me know he was thinking about more than he’d put on the paper, or that his mind was heading a direction he didn’t care to go just then, or to let me know he’d paused there and the next paragraph was likely to have been written later in the day, or on another day. An ellipsis could mean interruption, or it could indicate unfinished business. I would have to interpret.

I recall one letter that contained more ellipses than words. It was like a concrete poem, an irregular pattern of dots on the page.

Merriam-Webster says, of elliptical, a: of, relating to, or marked by ellipsis or an ellipsis; b(1): of, relating to, or marked by extreme economy of speech or writing; b(2): of or relating to deliberate obscurity (as of literary or conversational style).

I think in the case of his elliptical letter, the correct definition would be b(2). There are times people want to make connections with others or let us know they’re thinking of us, but they can’t quite make the full meaning clear, or don’t want to burden a friend with their problems, or feel they’ve nothing interesting to say. Or perhaps they deliberately obscure the reason for writing because of, who knows? Fear? Embarrassment? Pain?

But the desire to reach someone was there…

~

I want to get back to writing poems. But right now I have a few intellectual and emotional rifts that apparently I need to mend, as well as having another gallon of tomato sauce to make. My thinking is full of lacunae. Fragmentary. Not the best words in the best order, thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More like the disturbed syntactical phrases my mother-in-law and my mother produced during their aphasia. Although there might be intriguing possibilities in such elliptical language that I may eventually stitch together.

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