Currently reading:: The Midnight, Maximum Gaga


This weekend I’m trying to wrap up the final loose ends on the second chapter of my dissertation—a piece on Susan Howe’s The Midnight. When I first discovered it in 2005, The Midnight struck me, and still strikes me now, as a remarkable book. It has all the usual bells and whistles that I like (which is to say that it’s difficult to categorize in terms of genre, and is by turns both abstract and lyric). It appeals so broadly to the sense—an intense pleasure to read. I’m glad for the chance to have my say on it finally.

In recent months, I’ve been pushing myself without rest on applications for fellowships, postdocs, and assistant professorships, and on submissions of poems, essays, and book manuscripts for publication. I’ve been in Ithaca and at Cornell for so long; it is too strange to think of anywhere else. One of the books I’m working on now, May Days, is in part a tribute to Ithaca, and the countless anonymous others who have walked its streets and fields before me. The major strategy in many of the poems is ekphrasis, drawn from local, vintage photographs. This one is titled “C96”:

Shoulders hitched, her frame

hangs in the garden on a mass

of verdigris foliage; her breasts drape

with her dress and jacket (black

with white piping at collar and cuff)—

toes rounded in black patent maryjanes

lift off from the lawn, graze the blades.

The contours of her body grow indecipherable,

dark torso giving way to darkening

leaves, as a figure in a Vuillard

It is her head, three-quarter bust of marbled

white skin and hair pinned in a knot, that emerges,

only the eyes dusked over, trained

on an unknowable other, an otherwise

or elsewhere beyond

the frame.



I originally began these poems as a way of getting to know Ithaca, and already, they have become a form of farewell.


Note to self: read Stevens again.