Elinor Nauen

I have been stocking up on music via the NY Public Library's Freegal service. I get 3 free songs a week, which I've used to choose musicians that I don't often know much about. That's how I got turned on to Elizabeth Cook, for example, who's now one of my favorites.

This weekend I also shelled out cold cash for:
* Rosanne Cash's latest, The River and the Thread. The deluxe edition, at that, since I love that Jesse Winchester song "Biloxi."
* A compilation called Hard Times Come Again No More: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships. I love the eponymous Stephen Foster song & every once in a while I check if there's a version of that song that I don't have. That's how I found this album. It has a bunch of people I already knew, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Barbecue Bob, along with some songs I haven't heard for years: "Starving to Death on a Government Claim" and "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live."

* A Dixon Brothers comp, How Can a Broke Man Be Happy?. They're a South Carolina duo of mill workers, Dorsey & Howard. Dixon wrote "Wreck on the Highway," which Roy Acuff stole (& paid up later). Not sure if he wrote a song I used to play: "Sales Tax on the Women," which is on this record. The chorus: "1 cent, 2 cent tax, that's how my money goes a'spending. Take off my hat & hit me with a bat if they put a sales tax on the women."

"What should I write my blog about today?"

"The effect of summer solstice on the psyche. The contradictory notion that the days are now getting shorter and the weather is now getting warmer."

"And why is it called MIDsummer's night, when it's the FIRST night?"

"And then you can extrapolate that into 1 million different philosophical and rabbinic teachings."

"Oy."

"Okay, just checking how much you are hanging out with that synagogue crowd." Read More 

I had never heard of this Japanese store until a wonderful Facebook thread. The poet Joseph Massey asked what notebooks people write in, & being writers, we had our opinions. Several mentioned Muji, & one branch turned out to be just a couple of blocks away, on Cooper Square near the Carl Fischer music store (that is something else now). I went over this afternoon.

Didn't love the notebooks, mostly because I prefer lines, but I did buy a pocket one ($2.25). I sat on a bench & inaugurated it with a little poem. The best things I got were a key ring/notebook (99c) and a bookmark/pen holder ($4.75).

Update: I went back a couple of days later & bought more of everything plus pens. Lost the little key ring notebook, however.

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I wish.

The other day I (selfishly, I know) said it was someone else's turn.

It was.

But it's still mine.

I've memorized a lot of poems. It makes me appreciate their music & meaning, keeps their rhythm in my nerves, and—not least—because I want to be sure that I have something to do in prison. You know, just in case. My dad escaped Nazi Germany & it's never far from my mind that Something Could Happen.

I don't talk about this a lot, but it came up in a casual conversation with a friend. "That's how you're preparing for prison, memorizing poems?" he asked. "Not by learning how to turn a toothbrush into a shiv? Anyway, they  Read More 

Had dinner a few nights ago with several lovely young women, roughly ages 30 to 35.

* Jen just had a baby.
* Lisa just opened her own pilates studio in Brooklyn.
* Christine is headed in the fall to the U of Michigan to get a combined MBA and master's in public health.
* Adrienne is off to Hong Kong  Read More 

I recognize this as being my handwriting from decades ago. I recognize the addresses as being from either Denver or Boulder (Harney & Saddle Creek are most definitely Colorado streets), where I lived in 1972.

But I don't remember what was behind this note, nor can I imagine how it managed to surface this week on my kitchen table.  Read More 

Even after close to three decades, I still have a hard time with this (OK! pseudo-)holiday.

Because I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that my dad isn't around.

Not a day goes by that he isn't in my thoughts.

Our family isn't a matriarchy or (god forbid) a patriarchy: it's a cousin-archy, and the First Cousin was Sue—elegant Sue, with Elspeth's sweet-gravel voice, California by way of Wales—who loved us all so much and with such grace, beauty, wonder & interest. Now she moves from our outside life to inside (to quote Ted Berrigan), where we will always hold her close.

Margit wrote: "A tribe of cousins....a big tribe and we've lost the chief." She's so right. Our cousins are a tribe, a welcoming & inclusive club. This—Sue's death—is so wrong. No one wants to leave. No one is supposed to leave.  Read More 

I woke up so happy to have reconnected with one of my friends from the House after many years (decades!). In my head I had half a meditation written on old friends, formative years, another stab at trying to explain just what was so important about that time & place, how fantastically great it is to talk to Mike  Read More 

The reason I won't let the young folks carry my packages up the stairs (OK, one offered, once) is because I need to stay in shape to be a 90-year-old who goes up & down 4 flights.

I love where I live, on First Avenue between First & Second Streets. For its variety of buildings, people, & trees, Robert Jay Kaufman, author of Blockology: An Offbeat Walking Guide to Lower Manhattan, called my block his favorite—after walking all 1,544 of them below 14th Street.

I moved here, in 1977, because my apartment was cheap ($115/month). I had come to New York for the first time a few months earlier & was hit by a bolt of lightning-love: I knew that I was going to move here as soon as possible, live here for the rest of my life, & always feel the same way as I did in that first minute. It was the first time in my life that I knew something about myself that clearly.

I've always felt lucky that I found my place. Perhaps not surprising: my parents were both from large European cities (Berlin & Liverpool), even if they did live in South Dakota for 40 years & raise their family there. Don't get me wrong: I love South Dakota, I ache for South Dakota, the air smells better & more right there than anywhere else in the world. South Dakota is profoundly my home, but New York is where they let this "hick from the sticks" (something an old boyfriend called me) make a life.

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Johnny believes I have been 86ed from every laundromat in Manhattan & must be doing my laundry in Brooklyn. It's not quite true. There's a few I haven't been to yet.

The one on 1st Ave & 2nd St is disgustingly dirty & the ladies there are crabby, plus they never open on time. The only good  Read More 

South Dakota gal that I am, or was, whenever it rains I can't help but murmur: Good for the farmers. I'm homesick all the time for the prairie, but also for New York City, even though I live here & appreciate it every day. I sometimes feel like there are several me's, who are full-tilt into poetry, karate, Judaism, this friend & that one, this place & that. Wherever I am, there I am—and there I am not. Read More 

Did a little work (mostly putting source material in folders), did a lot of to-dos (mostly sending emails), then hung out in Tompkins Square Park with my family: Johnny (husband), Tara (daughter), Celeste (granddaughter) & her boyfriend Bryce. We had ice cream at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream on Avenue A,  Read More 

He was waiting to cross at Third Ave & 10th St.

"Hey! Where'd you get that shirt?" I demanded.

"In London." He was English, a student at NYU.

"I'm from there!"

He looked at his shirt, not sure what "there" I meant. "I just liked it." Was it from a rack full of "Tyre & Auto" t-shirts? Mongolia Tyre & Auto. Austin Tyre & Auto. Managua Tyre & Auto.

"Can I take your picture?"  Read More 

I have second-generation Englishness, the way that so many Irish-Americans have Irish longing. Hence (in part) my love for Kipling, & Orwell's distaste for him. He's not a fascist, Orwell says, but he did not understand the economics underlying empire, thus didn't get why, after the "greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before."

There's an aside, in this 1942 essay, criticizing "left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries," which are, he says, "at bottom a sham" because they have "internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic

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I am getting a late start this year, but will make up for it. Today threw out a nice pair of Smith & Hawken gardening shoes (put them outside for the gleaners, in actual fact), a large stack of books (most of which are going to Mike Topp), a chess set, some cherry tomatoes (down the hatch) & 2 business cards. I met Smith (or was it Hawken) once up in the Adirondacks, a willowy blonde from Australia (as I recall), with the vague look people have when they know you know who they are but are in a social setting where you can't gawk.

Well! It seems  Read More 

Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works. I can't stay with a poet I don't love, & a hundred pages in, I'm already reluctant to get to the end.

A selection of A. R. Ammons' North Carolina poems, an irresistible book I bought at City Lights books in Sylva, NC. Call me if you want me to read "Alligator Holes Down Along about Old Dock" to you.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray, which I found in the Okefenokee  Read More 

I was hanging out with my sister at her hotel last night. She turned the TV on and there was the final (on ESPN, no less) of the spelling bee. Gripping. The only word I spelled right was the championship word (& I was a regional spelling champ way back when), not that I could  Read More 

I like this one of his too, but then, I like most of 'em. Even the ones I'm not so struck by are an important part of the continuum.

This is a "tornado warned supercell outside of Big Springs, Texas," chased by landscape photographer Kelly DeLay in his Clouds 365 Project: "Photographic experiment shooting clouds everyday, 1792 days and counting." Each & every of his daily photographs is worth a look. They add up to: What? What's important here? The beauty of the clouds? His eye for them? His consistency? Having a body of work? Any given photo? The doing of it, whether or not anything comes of it? Thinking of oneself as an artist? Not thinking of oneself as an artist but as a craftsman, an observer, a wonderer, a person who has stepped outside of daily obviousness?  Read More 

Ron and I graduated from high school together in Sioux Falls. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in decades and weren’t even really friends back then, when we saw each other in San Francisco, we quickly fell into the school shorthand: I wanted to be a better artist than a certain fellow gradiate, he said, and I knew every shade of meaning in that sentence. That kid was handsome, athletic and from a well-to-do family. Beating someone like that at anything validated your own existence.

Ron is a serious artist, who gets better with every painting. His command of color and composition is remarkable. He’s not trendy, an Impressionist not someone making groundbreaking or startling art. Up close, "Docking Boats" is almost abstract; only from a distance is the picture clear (my photo by no means does it justice). This painting lets me go out on the Bay, gives me a summer day in my basement office. That’s as good as art needs to get for me.

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It's 87°! It's summer!

I feel like I earned my keep today with the realization that by adding me, Elinor/El, to the Word, you create the World. Or maybe this means I no longer have to earn my keep. I just Am.

Other than that, I lay around, bought grapes, ran into Jadina, sat in the park with Niedecker.

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Because we weren't listened to. We are poets to say the things that should have been, and should be, heard.

Being a poet is the important part. Writing the poems comes after we have the thoughts, after we pay attention.

To be a poet, that is, someone who sees & thinks about the world, or not, that is, someone who lives in the world without having to see every damn thing.

This is from & because of today's / lifetime conversation with Eileen Myles.  Read More 

When Sandy Berrigan suddenly turned up, Liza was "viciously jealous." It's rained every Thursday this month. Sandy thinks David needs a girlfriend who will stay home and cook & clean for him. She thinks women stay married because they're afraid to live on their own. Those pesky drain flies are still flying into my eyes, despite having been sprayed & fogged. Willie McTell just asked the ticket agent to tell him the train she's on. The garden on 9th & C is circled by daisies made of soda cans. I have to run to the library & return a book: Island by Alistair MacLeod, the island being Nova Scotia. Just got my bike fixed & now it has a flat tire. It's cold! It's raining!  Read More 

While South Carolina is in the running for the last state to approve marriage equality, much has improved over the years. You can be out & not get killed. Steve's friend who preached on Sunday said he used to be racist, homophobic, antisemitic and a Republican. He's proud to have put that behind him.

Not everyone has, of course. I saw an awful lot of gun & ammo shops, & some Bible-thumping. And a Confederate bar, just a couple of miles from where my friends live.

But people in SC — & everywhere — have seen the world even if from afar on the internet or television. Nowhere is as isolated as it once was, whether it's South Carolina, South Dakota, or even the East Village. (We have Republicans now.)

Even tho I'm back (as of this morning), I have more to say about Spartanburg.

Yesterday we went kayaking on the Pacolet River, just a couple of miles from the house. Is it too late for me to become a nature girl? I jumped & screamed every time anything moved. I saw turtles, Canada geese, a squirming wasp larva, a guy fishing.

We ate at Wade's, where a 4-item vegetable plate costs $6.94; you can choose from turnip greens, macaroni & cheese, sweet potato soufflé, creamed corn, and

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Still not sure you can tell how tiny these bluebird eggs are. (I didn't touch them, by the way—that's the angle of the photo.)

Nature here not so much red in tooth & claw as indolent in lunch & dinner. I need a nap, & it's not even 90°. There's not a minute when I'm not amazed to be here, not a tree or vista that isn't satisfying, not a breath I draw that doesn't quiet me. Steve's art is to sponsor unobtrusive beauty. (Not that he laid the bluebird eggs.)

He found a dirt dauber's  Read More 

Steve's friend and neighbor was invited to preach at this church in Spartanburg & I was delighted to go. The warmest welcome you could hope for, exuberant clapping & singing, a sermon emphasizing justice not hellfire, and lunch after for the guest and his guests: mac'n'cheese (a vegetable in the deep South), green beans, apple pie, sweet tea (also chicken & ham, which I skipped). Except for mentions of Jesus, there was very little that wouldn't have been familiar in my synagogue: the emphasis on God's power over our lives, our obligation to gratitude, community, banter, blessings.  Read More 

Steve & Wayne's indoor garden has worms and frogs, as well as several dozen plants. I've been coming to this spot for more than 4 decades. I just watched a frog eat a worm. Slurp, slurp, burp. I have loved this place since the first day I was ever here, which I suppose was my first day in the deep South. I floated on the lake and was so happy I wouldn't have mind dying right then & there. I had never been happier or calmer. Steve is eating a bowl of cereal. We're going up to the mountains of western North Carolina in a little while. Wayne is eating a bowl of cereal. Mason, a 60-pound basset hound, thinks he's a lapdog. Last night I went to a program at the library, and one of the speakers turned out to be Judy Goldman, a poet I published in both of my anthologies. Spartanburg reminds me of Sioux Falls, a small untouristed city. If we weren't taking off soon, I would try to make this add up to something. I ate a bowl of cereal.

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