Paris, Thursday 8 February, 2024
Note to self: quiet time is necessary and space to be alone. A busy agenda - beware! Sleep therapist: put the day to bed early, keep time and space to wind down. Do not try to sleep, allow sleep to come.
Paris, 31 January 2024
Tomorrow I should send my manuscript to the publisher.
There is nothing better than reading while eating. Or vice versa.
The best way to read is with your feet up (Calvino).
I’ve just opened Dwight Garner’s book (FSG 2023) The Upstairs Delicatessen: Eating, Reading…
He’s talking about how he made the food not run out before he had finished the reading material he had amassed after school on the living room carpet before he headed to the kitchen for the food: sandwich w/mayo, lots of it, potato chips/crisps, pretzels, a cold drink made with red powder. I haven’t got to what happens to the carpet yet.
Reading at table was verboten where I grew up, but still engaged in if one was alone, and yes, anything would do as reading material, whatever magazines were lying around…well broken-in novels (they would lie flat on the table) from another generation of childhoods (Little Women…), cereal boxes.
I still thinking heaven is reading and eating at the same time.
Dwight Garner is a New York Times book critic. I feel I’m going to gobble his book up.
Paris, Friday 26 January
Did I say the weather had warmed up and turned rainy. Rain shines on the zinc roofs across the street this morning. When I was a child, and especially a teen, I didn’t like Vancouver’s wetness because it made my hair frizz, really frizz, and nothing kept it straight when I went out. Then I taught school in Ghana for a couple years and damp heat wasn’t great either. Then I made peace with my curly hair… . What I love is the sound of rain coming down; in fact, this morning I am sitting with the window open so there’s no glass between the rain’s sssh sssh and me.
And now to a translation and more rewriting - tweaking - of ‘the book’ poems.
Paris, Thursday 18 January
Snow overnight. It must be cold outside, but the sun is casting angular shadows across the zinc roof of the church opposite.
Soon I must send the ‘final’ manuscript of Apples Thieves off to the publisher, Carcanet. Then the in-press details, copy editing, jacket design (a tough one and not entirely my decision), publication on 29 August (so precise already!). MostIy I am tweaking poems, but one, about a sewing machine, I made big changes to this week, more of a problem, since now I am too close to the poem to see what needs to be improved. Need to step back, step away but hard when the deadline looms!
Working on the bed, looking out at the snow. The kite (in lieu of curtains) is chilly.
Paris, Monday 15 January
The zinc roofs of the buildings and church are damp this morning: it rained overnight, which means the temperatures, below freezing, must have gone up a notch or two. Pigeons are splashing in the gutters.
I’m still working - fussing? - with the Jaccottet translation I began last week, a recently-discovered poem in his 1946-67 Poésies (Gallimard). It is a short, apparently simple poem about sitting in room in the morning: ‘Silence enters like a servant come to tidy up.’ The via negativa… .
And so here I am sitting in my own quiet room, waiting…
Paris, 12 January 2024
Over jetlag, oof! This morning I’m working on a translation of Philippe Jaccott’s poem, ‘L’ignorant,’ a title I have provisionally translated as ‘The Know Nothing.’ I did a quick draft yesterday, working as I often do, on/in bed, looking out the window at the pigeons living on the side wall of the church across the street (What happened to the crows? I’m wondering). Today I have moved back to the couch in the study/guest room, where I have at last finished putting my poetry books back on the shelves that were painted this past autumn, my desk opposite, the church obliquely now to my right, filled bookshelves to my left. Bliss.
It’s a wonderful poem and I’ve just found a commentary on it on Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s website, which I must explore further. Now back to the translation, then some tweaking of my own manuscript, Apple Thieves, which I must let go of, soon.
Me, the Know Nothing.
Paris, 5 January 2024
So here we are in Paris. All night I tried to sleep with airplane roar still in my ears and belly. Right now I re-making a New Year 2024 resolution to never reread a blog post after it’s been posted, no matter how much I am tempted to delay putting new words on the page by reading old posts. Instead I read some new poems by D.A Powell on the Poetry Foundation website and was cheered. It’s hard to believe one can change what’s out the window so drastically by sitting on a plane for 10 hours. It was still pitch black at 7 am; I wondered if the clocks were wrong, but I looked at a watch, ipad and got up to check the clock on the stove and yes, it was not yet 8 o’clock: no street noise, no lights on in other apartments. I made myself a hot water bottle and went back to my airplane noise.
December 28, Palo Alto
Just back from a week in Friday Harbour, St Juan Island, in the state of Washington. Never easy making plane-small island-hopper-plane / ferry. Our plane to Seattle was several hours late taking off, so the 4-hour wait between arrival in Seattle got whittled down to nothing: we missed the island-hopper plane by about half an hour. Second option was a car to the ferry in Anacortes, scheduled for 8 pm, which actually left with us aboard around 9 pm. But we made it - and smoothly-connected flights back to St José yesterday.
Now for Paris on Tuesday! Looking forward. Meanwhile I’m making last-minute corrections to my poetry manuscript, due soon at the publisher, Carcanet, for August publication. I need to forget the poems for a while, then try and see them with fresh (ie, more objective) eyes. My two poetry groups, Berkeley and Stanza France are great for that, too, nothing like showing them to other poets to make you sit up and see them anew. Also good, is reading other peoples’ poems: at the moment David Ferry, another poet-translator, a recent discovery of mine.