Toads

"Dmitri says of you--Ivan is a tomb! I say of you, Ivan is a riddle. You are a riddle to me even now. But I understand something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning."

"What's that?" laughed Ivan.

"You won't be angry?" Alyosha laughed too.

"Well?"

"That you are just as young as other men of three and twenty, that you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact! Now, have I insulted you dreadfully?"

"On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence," cried Ivan.

-- Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, Trans. Constance Garnett

--

Saw five old friends in four days and then slept for twelve straight hours. Ate crepes with the ones who came to Cincy, and ate at the Bonefish Grill for the first time with those who came to Dayton. Watched two movies I've seen before. Drove several hundred miles around southern Ohio, chaperoning or meeting up.

Saw a bad production of The Baker's Wife and a good production of The History of Invulnerability, which Philip Seymour Hoffman also attended that very day. (So we are told: we didn't see him in the house, so perhaps he watched in the shadowy stage manager's box, but purportedly he was wearing an orange hat. This story comes so close to being worthwhile.)

Sometimes, it's hard to find "things to do" in your own city when friends come to visit. But with some friends, you don't have to do anything; it's just enough to breathe the same air. That's what happened this weekend.

--

Reading and running effectively stopped, though. In a few hours between visits, I went to a friend's house near the University for a night of poetry readings. Small group, a very nuanced and quiet gathering. We sat on couches and brought-in chairs and commiserated and performed. We had coffee and special applesauce and many poems that ranged from the theological to the whimsical to the deathly. A stack of anthologies became a spread after a few readings--poetry geeks flipping pages hoping a touchstone verse will catch their eye--stacks becoming unstacked, books left open on the floor, some people reciting from memory, others not trusting themselves to be the sole producer of weighty words.

I got to read "The Bells," by Poe, aloud. Something I must have been subconsciously waiting for years to do, and it was a true rush. That last thirty lines or so is thrilling to speak, and as it was near the end of an evening, it was the thing to do.

I'm already putting together a playlist, as it were, for the next poetry night. Many selections are from Reist's classes, but I'd like to think it's because of the poems, not the professor. These are, as Moore would say, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

Last poetry night's playlist:
- "Departmental," by Robert Frost
- "The Revenant," by Billy Collins
- "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens
- "To a Mouse," by Robert Burns (performed in Scottish dialect)

Next poetry night's playlist (suggestions welcome):
- "Poetry," by Marianne Moore
- "Lucinda Matlock," by Edgar Lee Masters
- "Mr. Flood's Party," by Edwin Arlington Robinson
- "Theme for English B," by Langston Hughes
- "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," by Elizabeth Bishop
- "The Unknown Citizen," by W. H. Auden
- "Musee des Beaux Arts," by W. H. Auden

(among others)

I like poems that are not just good on paper, but ones that need to be read aloud. Poe's "Bells" is a perfect example--on the page, the eye wants to skip over the repeated words, but aloud, you realize the text gets frantic and horrifying because of the repetition. There's a kind of movement you can't really get on a page.

--

Also: Read this.

--

Poetry has jolted me back into literary mode. Friends have brought me back to life (or something like that).

My future is the imaginary garden right now, and my friends are real within it. (I will not call my friends "toads.") Will I seek other gardens? That's the traveler's dilemma--the people, or the path. Granted, there are people along every path, and every path leads to many people, and not everyone cares about being on your path necessarily...too abstract, sorry...but still.

Still.

It's poetry for life's sake that poets have in mind. It's one thing to read, another to speak, and another thing entirely to enact, to incarnate, what you read and speak. Lucinda would have a thing or two to say right now, and so, I imagine, would the Unknown Citizen.

However, it is Eben Flood, drinking on a hill outside of town in the middle of the night and imagining his friends to be with him, whom I fear.