Elinor Nauen

The women of America fought back & the world of elected officials looks a lot different than it did a year ago.... I finished a book.... I got a cellphone..... Something big that I can't talk about yet....

What Home Is
for & with Ginevra Kirkland

I’ve lived so many places I don’t know where I’m from. Everywhere seems like the town I could have lived & died in, & maybe I did.

I was there in the POW camp with the German soldier who only wanted to get back to his herring, beer, & fraulein. I was in Otis, Colorado, a town so peaceful the only bar was on the second floor of an old hotel. I was a Mainer, or Mainiac, & lived 3 years in its white, bright, unmoving postcard.  Read More 

If anything, there's more at stake in today's election than in last year's, at least in the sense that we are now activated. It's fair to say we dropped the ball last time, but I don't want that to be said tomorrow.

I have to admit, it's fun to say "my band" & it's fun to be in a band, even a half-assed poets' band, where I can't really play an instrument or sing. Annabel Lee & I mostly match poems to familiar tunes and sing them accompanied by her on guitar, me on various amusing rhythm instruments  Read More 

So an object—asteroid? lump? comet? spaceship?—from outside our solar system, but inside the Milky Way, one of many galaxies, recently zipped past the sun & only 15 millions from us. Astronomers can tell it's from away because of its orbit. But how is that they know it's from our galaxy & not from even farther away? And how is it possible that, as the astronomers assert, it's the "first interstellar object known to have visited Earth’s neighborhood," according to The Economist Espresso. Is this a big deal? Why? And to whom?  Read More 

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
—Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace

I've always loved this. Such a good correction to that immature longing for the "bad" that so many of us fall for when young, & I guess usually outgrow.  Read More 

My tale of woe & redemption begins with my office phone going out. Verizon (boo) sends a repairguy. He reluctantly & slowly tries a couple of fixes then basically tells me to fuck off. I know that Verizon (hiss) has no real interest in fixing copper wires/landlines—they're expensive to maintain & fewer & fewer people have 'em.

He leaves, promising to come back the next day.

Verizon (jeer) also tells me to fuck off: the next available appointment is actually more than a week away. They act like they are my friend.

I go up the block, & an hour later my office number has been converted to a cell, & I am the owner of an iPhone. I guess that means putting my little workhorse 10-year-old flip phone to rest, eh?

Welcome to the future! I mean the past! I have a smartphone! Call me!  Read More 

The suave & witty poet Tony Towle read last week at the Poetry Project. As he gets older, he gets mellower but without losing his smart language.

My favorite of his books remains Autobiography but his new book, Noir, is pretty darn good. Unfortunately, I can't lay my hands on either one but here's the beginning of "Lines for the New Year":

The first day of January is the first day
of the New Year. In the north
there is snow and ice and the forest rings
with the sound of the ax.
So this is really a game of tag. Run across it
as if it were a cake, and you were a knife
cutting it right through the middle. At other times
the clouds seem to be pillows. My target
is a cool, tax-free million. I am very calm about it.
I could end up making a good deal more. Read More 

On a lamppost, 3rd Street & First Ave.

Our 14-year-old grandson from New Jersey thought it was the funniest thing ever.

Happy Halloween.

Because of my visit not long ago, & because of my dear friend & native barcelonina Mercè, I have been following the Catalan independence saga closely. Nonetheless, I don't know the ins & outs enough to have a firm opinion, but it seems part & parcel of what's going on in so many places: people rocking their pretty comfortable boat for an idea, & seem sure to be worse off no matter how things play out.

One instinct is to rush to visit before it becomes impossible (war?!?!), the other is to stay far, far away & not risk getting trapped in any trouble. I mostly don't think anything will happen but....  Read More 

I love that someone (the Cornell Ornithology Lab) had the idea—and figured out a way—to see how birds ranked at bird feeders. Who holds their place, who gets pushed aside?

Aside from the obvious—turkeys are the largest, so they never get kicked off feeders, & vice versa for sparrows—the researchers found:

It turns out that doves, buntings, and grosbeaks are less dominant than we would expect based on their body size, whereas crows, jays, woodpeckers, and blackbirds are more dominant than we would expect based on their size. These findings mean our intuitions weren’t so far off: doves really are peaceful, and jays really are feisty.
 Read More 

I am happy to have come up with a new wrinkle on my blogging. I've felt a little bogged down this week, what with all the work & social events. None of it seemed important to write about in the face of the horrors. I try not to be overwhelmed but occasionally it gets to me, the monster in the White House & how easy it's been for him to co-opt so many. I'm glad I've never wanted power or money or really anything that would lead me to act like that. (I would have done it for poetry if I had had any idea how.)  Read More 

The things of the eye are done.
—Robert Lowell
"Myopia : a Night"

love exists, love exists,
your hand a baby bird so obliviously tucked
into mine, and death impossible to remember
—Inger Christensen
alphabet

He loved this country for the run of its hills, the shape of its elm trees, and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens.
—Ford Madox Ford
Parade's End

The unconscious is that which we know, or have experienced, but for which we do not have a name.
—Walker Percy
The Message in the Bottle

Wonderful day with my sister on Friday, going up in a friend's 4-passenger Cessna. O Manhattan how I love thee. Late night.

Saturday was a Seido party, another late night.

Today a birthday brunch with a dozen smart, interesting, kind, talkative women.

There's a poetry reading in an hour but I don't think I can motivate over there. Fading here....  Read More 

By tomorrow I'll have reliable wifi in my office, after several months of intermittent service. Then I'll be able to work more attentively & write better. I'll be taller too & better looking.

It's exciting to get a new passport, because for the last couple of weeks, when it was about to expire & then when I'd sent it off, I felt grounded, not that I had any plans for international travel. But now! A couple of years ago I made a vow to leave the country every year & so far I  Read More 

Diet of Worms

When I
become a
mugger
I’ll get
up
early

Flying back to NYC this afternoon. Will try to substitute a real post for this, but if not ...

Relaxing drive to Osseo, home of the Norske Nook. Altogether we ordered 7 slices of pie, although we couldn't even finish one, & 3 we didn't touch at all. Fall colors, Grant Wood-y hummocks, little towns with handsome brick houses, a historic courthouse with a hexagonal cupola in Ellsworth, a man who said JFK was "eliminated" because he talked too much about aliens (the outer space kind), & a million laughs with my sister.  Read More 

This happened quite a few years back.

I was in a pretty empty car on the F train, writing in my little notebook. Without looking up, I was aware that a man was standing too near me, given how few people were on the train. I assumed, with my poet's brain, that he was  Read More 

Through the magic of internet time travel, I can be writing this note now (thursday, October 12, 2017, 8:00 a.m. on the nose) & it will appear on my page sometime tomorrow without my further intervention.

I'm headed to Minnesota, may or may not get a chance to update the blog before I'm back late Tuesday.

Very happy to note that Eileen Myles's book about her late pitbull Rosie is now out. She read from Afterglow last night at the Poetry Project, along with 3 other dog memoirists/writers. I read it in galleys & told her it's the best thing she ever wrote. I love to see an artist getting better & better throughout her life.  Read More 

Dang it, great title & I ended up having to delete every word of the poem, after I had combined 2 disparate poems with an idea that I could fool myself into believing that 2 bad halves somehow would make a tasty whole. I was going to post it & hope it wasn't a failed poem but it is. It was a real poem, though, & sometimes failed poems aren't even poems.

The least egregious lines: Read More 

Semi-out of the blue, an old friend—since junior high—called me this afternoon. We haven't spoken in many years.

We reminisced a lot about our 4 years of Latin together. He passed because he did Miss Skaff's banking & bought her cigarettes.

What?! He was brilliant so I'm sure that's not the whole story.

Coppock always said he got through because  Read More 

Pretty much whenever I don't feel like enough is going on to blog about (or too much: cf Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Donald, & more), I think about how much I love living in the East Village. It really is a village—there's the pleasures of running into people, of seeing the brand-new and the familiar, of being a thread in the fabric of the neighborhood. There's not a day that goes by that I'm not grateful to be here. To have found a place that's mine, among people I like & landscape that appeals to my eye.  Read More 

Had breakfast this morning with my college roommate—we hadn't seen each other since we were 19, when we left for the summer after freshman year & didn't come back, or not for long. We lost touch, as people did in those days. But we refound each other, as people do, and we started right up with just as much laughing & seriousness as ever.

My favorite thing Pam said was telling me about hitchhiking several hundred miles, by herself, to visit some boy whose name she could no longer remember. That seemed like the ultimate '70s sentence, so emblematic of what those times were like, especially for young women. The vast networks that mattered then scattered. The independence & willingness to step out of line. The way we figured out how to have thrilling lives despite the strictures.  Read More 

Doing my work, sitting on a bench reading my favorite book, running into Carmine, Stu, & Hettie, having good conversations with each, working on my manuscript & not hating my poems, maple yogurt, olive bread from Eataly, getting bowed to as a sandan, anticipating an evening with my darlings Sylvie & June, finally getting my passport sent off  Read More