Elinor Nauen

So many interesting things have crossed my field of vision lately but I haven't managed to write them down. That in itself is interesting to me: Why? Why not? But not very interesting to write about.

But that seems to be the best I can do today.

How did people lounge before there were cars to lean on? Maybe the problems in the world today stem from the fact that there are computers inside our automobiles instead of engines (so to speak). Instead of pondering & fooling around & scratching our heads, our cars are sent for diagnostics. Nothing there we can fix.

We used to have leisure built into our lives: We had to wait on line, we had to wait  Read More 

Johnny and I are rereading McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend. In our 25 or more years of reading long poems out loud to each other, we've never repeated till now. We are blown away just as much this time. McGrath (1916–90) is from North Dakota and is as good as Willa Cather  Read More 

I got my first-ever flu shot today.

The houses in Butte could be new or a hundred years old, but the cars are unmistakably long-ago.

I bored my new doctor because nothing is wrong with me.

Even so, something is waiting. All expectations lead to the dump.

But until then, I'll jump up & down.  Read More 

It's our local park, along with lots of little gardens that we float through in the neighborhood. I love that nothing (everything) has changed in a hundred years.

It's hard for me to get even things that will make my life easier. If I lived in the country, I'd probably shovel snow with a dustpan wired to a broomstick. I admire people who identify the tools they need & get them.

I don't think it's about indecisiveness: this shredder or that? I'm not cheap (look at my shelf of shoes if you don't believe that).

Today I bought  Read More 

Maybe I like roofs so much because my secret place to read when I was a kid was the roof of our garage. You went through the backyard, behind the garage and the yards of the houses behind us, climbed a wall & a tree, and then you were out of sight, but close enough that you could hear if you were yelled for, and calibrate exactly when you had to appear. As the middle kid in a big family in a small house, that's where I spent many of the happiest moments of my childhood.  Read More 

Hey wow. Once again, I put it out there & the universe responds.

I say far & wide that I am studying Norwegian, and my Finnish friend Heli shows up with two Norwegian friends. Who spoke to me in slow but not mutant-slow Norwegian, & I frigging understood them. And I constructed sentences in response—not Read More 

It's odd & wonderful that my old friend is now an important and beloved public figure. I knew it was coming on—she's been famous for years—but recently there's been a burst of acclaim. No one has worked harder, no one deserves this more. Even the people I know who begrudge everyone everything—including what they don't even want—are happy for her.

The Poetry Project hosted a great night, homage to Eileen & her two recent books—the reprinted Chelsea Girls and a new and selected poems. As she said, it's great to have the memorial while the poet is still alive.

I was pleased to be one of the readers, along with (here's the whole list) Sam Ace, Jen Benka, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Boyer, Alexander Chee, Cathy de la Cruz, r. erica doyle, Megan Fernandes, Adam Fitzgerald (too late to read), Emily Gould, Patricia Spears Jones, erica kaufman, Porochista Khakpour, Nate Lippens, Ben Lerner, Trace Peterson, Ariana Reines, Jill Soloway, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Waldman, Joe Westmoreland, and Simone White.

In the spirit of Eileen's adventurousness, I read a poem of hers that I translated into Norwegian:  Read More 

Once again I was off on Monday & Tuesday for the end of the fall holidays.

Today I was getting ready to be part of Eileen Myles' book party by translating a poem into Norwegian. She's always trying something new & risky, so I figured I would too.

I'll post it tomorrow if I don't get tomatoed off the stage when I read it.  Read More 

October 1: the earliest that anyone hqw said to me "aren't you cold?" because we were dressed for different seasons, me in a tee-shirt, him in a coat heavier than my winter jacket. It was maybe 60°. This happens all winter. I like being warm indoors and cold out.

My super let me go up on the roof with him this afternoon, something I've always wanted to do (because I always want to go up on any roof) (possibly because I was once a roofer?) (& didn't realize that my basement key opens the building's door as well). Such a different view than from my home building, even though it's just a couple of blocks away. I like this photo because it feels like a medieval Spanish alleyway more than an East Village rooftop.  Read More 

It felt like we were away, and it was just one subway stop into Brooklyn. It made me wish I'd been a pioneer here, but when I moved to the East Village, there was no Brooklyn, so to speak. By which I mean, in the late '70s, Brooklyn was where you went to raise a family not be a poet.

I try to look at the world around my home, & I feel surprised & delighted often. But it's not the same as going somewhere else.

Even if that's Brooklyn.

(And I mostly looked across the East River at Manhattan.) Read More 

We're midway through the holiday of Sukkot, "the season of our joy," where it's traditional to eat even live in temporary shelters. In the synagogue we read the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). This year, in my shul, we're reading it over 4 days of the holiday, with 4 different people offering brief intros. This was mine:

 Read More 

Back on Wednesday

My other husband, Derek Jeter, that is. My friend Danny Peary put together a terrific book, Baseball Immortal: Derek Jeter: Career in Quotes. The worst thing about it is that there are 3 colons in the title (because it's part of a series). The best is that it's entertaining & insightful. Given Jeter's reputation for only saying the blandest bromides, you'll be surprised how much he really has shared over the years. The caption links to a funny review that mentions my 10,000-page poem about Jeter's ass.  Read More 

Yogi.

One of 3 deaths on Tuesday that affected me.

Not ready to write about the others.

I guess I'm not ready to write about Yogi either.

Why are we sitting on a bale of hay?

Is he the equivalent of a Nobel laureate?

OK, Yom Kippur starts in a little more than an hour. Have I bathed? No. Have I eaten before my 27-hour (-year) fast? No. Have I apologized to all those pedestrians I terrified when they walked into the bike lane without looking or heeding my horn, & instead of politely swinging around them I yelled &  Read More 

I've been dipping into a fun anthology called State by State: A panoramic portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey. Inspired by the Federal Writers' Project that employed some 6,000 people & produced guides to each of the states, their goal was to "put together a book that captures something essential, something fundamental and distinctive about each state... something broad-minded and good-hearted... a road trip in book form."

So far so good.  Read More 

I am having a hard time thinking about much else than her, her messy life & her unmessy poetry.

Simultaneously reading poems, prose, & letters.

From a 1948 letter to Robert Lowell:
Let's publish an anthology of haunting lines, with a supplement on how to exorcise them.

I went to Becca and Lina's wedding at 8:30 this morning at the Brooklyn Municipal Building. It's amazing how quickly your life can change. One minute he or she is merely a passerby in the eyes of the state, and the next, you are permanently connected.  Read More 

This week & last I went to the 7:30 a.m. karate class. I think that's possible partly because I'm detoxing—replacing caffeine with decaf in preparation for my 27-hour fast next Wednesday, Yom Kippur, so I'm waking up a little more ready to go. I stopped making it to that class a couple of years  Read More 

Just 20 miles from here is a place absolutely inhospitable to life.

No, not New Jersey.

"Space is almost close enough to touch. Only twenty miles above our heads is an appalling, hostile environment that would freeze us, and burn us and boil us away. And yet our enfolding layers of air protect us so completely that we don't even realize the dangers." —from An Ocean of Air: Why the wind blows and other mysteries of the atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker, one of the dozen wonderful books I'm reading at the moment. (Nothing makes me happier than knowing that there will always be something wonderful to read.) Read More 

Off Monday & Tuesday for the Jewish holidays. A sweet, healthy, adventurous, attentive 5776, everybody.

I love Johnny Stanton & have for half my life, but my name is Elinor Nauen not Mrs. John Stanton. Likewise, my name is Elinor not Eleanor. People surprisingly (shockingly!) often respond to an email from me & misspell my name. "Elinor" is in my email address twice & 5 more times in the signature. It's one thing if I didn't spell it out for them but they have SEVEN chances to get it right.  Read More 

George Ortman is an artist who lives in the building where Johnny works. His work is remarkable, his constructions much more so than his drawings, in my opinion. In this show he had a large work with items like cigarettes in sand, an egg, and broken glass, about Beckett's "birth, death, and legacy," which caught the writer's mystery and pungent humor, and a piece about Detroit (where Ortman taught for 20+ years) that hit you with the life/decay/life of that city. The caption to the invitation links to a long interview in a publication called geoform, where you can see a wide sample of his art of six decades. "I have always been interested in what makes art. How is it that space, form and color painted on a flat surface can create a kind of magic?" Read More 

I finished 3 good books in the last day or 2:
= Prudence and Jane, by Barbara Pym, the great observer of English life and human foibles. I haven't decided whether I have to ration her or not. It's possible I could reread any of her novels with as much pleasure as I got the first time through.
= On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín. Short & insightful. I haven't been reading much poetry other than hers this summer, & it was great to live her work with this smart Irish novelist.
= Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. It's taken me months to finish because she sent me (back) to many of the writers she talks about: Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Joyce, & lots of others. She points out techniques that it would be easy to miss, and is undogmatic: Every time she finds herself formulating a rule, she almost immediately finds a brilliant, convincing exception.  Read More 

I didn't even know if they still existed. I remember having dinner long ago with some people who lived in the Bronx, across from the Stella D'oro bakery. So much better smelling than when I lived near the paper mill in Bucksport, Maine. I stayed with some folks in Homestead, Florida, near a fertilizer factory;  Read More 

"See, if you were here you could have told me what you think of the yellow face poetry scandal while we did a morning walk before this insane heat set in."

And I suppose I'd better send you to the great Jim Behrle if you think you need to know more about the scandal: studio360.org/story/sideshow-best-american-poetry-annotated-jim-behrle/ Read More 

I come from a Chevy family, probably because Jews notably didn't buy Fords, as ol' Henry was such an antisemite. That was the days when you stuck with a brand. I've owned a lot of Fords, since I bought whatever was cheap & ran OK: Dodges, Fords, Toyotas. "Ford" was said to stand for "fix or repair daily" but you could have said that about all my cars.  Read More