Okay, so I am still on the run in Central America... I will do a proper update when I am home, and not negotiating strange keyboards on a time limit. Suffice to say, I have not been captured by rebels in the Darien, nor was I in a helicopter crash. I did, however, get stuck on a very long bus ride when the Interamericana was shut today, and we were routed along dirt roads with one way bridges carrying the bulk of Costa Rican traffic today... More to follow, most likely when I am home, to fill in some gaps.

The Panama Canal is amazing.

This time tomorrow I will be in Panama. I don't have much left to do, but am still a little bit crazy! For some reason my flight is via Newark, where I have a 5 hour wait. Special!

This is all to say that this is where things will get sparse for a few weeks.

Miss Kate Underground: Gone Adventuring.

The poet has come back to being a poet
after decades of being virtuous instead.

Can’t you be both?
No. Not in public.

—Margaret Atwood

I’m feeling oddly crippled at this end of semester. I’ve finished most of the little bits and pieces I had to do—fellowship applications, etc—but there are still tiny administrative things to do in the next week, the kind of things that drive me crazy. And I want just to write, and yet—and yet. Things are coming slowly.

I’ve been starting to think about the shape of a second manuscript. Now—this is not something I envisage coming together for a long time. But—it’s seeding. Three suites. Different types of “monsters.” I wonder if it will work. In, you know, the next five to ten years.

We started up the poetry workshop again today—four of us, add Gewanter, stir. I had this poem that is really the beginning of something—a mere scrap—that is about Hero and Leander, but with an Antarctic fish thrown in because I just discovered “icefish” a week or so again. (My friend Robyn last year described the process of travelling through wikipedia, sticking to the topic you are doing background research and then, all of a sudden, falling sideways into something else. For her, it was biography of the actress who played Rayanne Graf in My So-Called Life. For me, icefish.) I’m frustrated because I didn’t know whether I should workshop that, when I know where it’s going in the next few rewrites. I never know whether to bring something I feel has gone as far as I can take it, to bring something in process, to bring something that has hit a wall…

I want to write. I think it will be scrappy for a while. But I’ve always liked patchwork.

I'm so sad that Robert Rauschenberg has died. I've written about his work a few times before - he's an artist I've really loved for a number of years now. Oh!

I am adjusting to life post-epigraphs. I had hoped to just put them out of my mind immediately, but it seems it will take a day or two to recover from the process of waking, thinking about how this epigraph relates to that epigraph, how they both relate to the Jewish plot, and - so forth. Plus, being "epigraph-free" makes me sound like I had a rash.

You should see print out of all the epigraphs and quotations in Daniel Deronda. Lines going everywhere. John Nash has nothing on me.

I'm celebrating. I had a hamburger earlier today. I think I'm going to go wild and see if my body can handle a milkshake.

(Oh, and I'm pleased that Häagen Dazs has released a new flavour of icecream that raises awareness about the world's dying honeybee populations. I've been worried about the honeybees for quite a while now. But I seem to have been the only one. Admittedly, most people probably didn't take multiple excursions to "The Honey Pot" near Coffs Harbour in their childhoods, to learn about bees AND taste many, many types of honey, but still... We don't know why they're dying. And it's not just a problem because of the honey... Now icecream lovers everywhere can share the concern.)

My body has chosen a very inopportune moment to get sick. I have less than twenty-four hours to finish writing about the epigraphs (and yes, that means I’ll stop raving about the epigraphs too…) and all I want to do is sleep and eat protein. In fact, I think my body is rebelling and demanding all the protein it missed out on all the times I couldn’t be bothered eating a well-balanced meal. I can’t bear the idea of sugar or coffee (especially coffee. Oh god! It’s come to this!) and the only things I want to eat are eggs, vegetables, rice and meat… it’s a little disturbing. I eat, I sleep. I force myself awake to write about George Eliot before my body demands yet more sleep.

But as the paper was pretty well advanced before I got sick, it’s not the end of the world. So perhaps it’s better to be sick today and not next week when I’m off to Panama. I remember travelling from Corte to Bastia, Bastia to Livorno, Livorno to Florence all in the one day after I’d spent a day on Corsica unable to keep anything down. Another day with godawful flu catching a train across Poland, getting into a town I didn’t know with no accommodation booked—apparently completely unaware that it would be impossible to find accommodation. (I still bless that taxi driver who took me to a nearby town and went into each hotel for me until he found a room I could afford. He was very kind, and obviously took my extreme budget into account when he charged me!) The point? Long days of travelling while ill are miserable.

I plan for my mystery illness to be gone by Wednesday. (I’m determined.) Then I plan to eat Mexican food.

Okay, so I went to the Library of Congress last night—it was Charles Simic’s final event as poet laureate, and he gave a lecture. The lecture was on translation and poetry—a favourite subject of mine—and yet I felt grouchy with it. He shuffled papers and told occasional anecdotes, in between repeating the same things I’ve read over and over about the act of translation. He read one poem by Vasko Popa. One? Only one? I was hoping he’d talk about a specific translating—what was involved in translating Popa’s “little box” poems—but he didn’t. I feel a little like I’ve spent the last several months breaking up with Simic. In part it’s that I enjoy reading his poems the first time, and then rereading them, they’re a disappointment.

I wonder if it’s the tyranny of distance wearing off. In Australia I’m so excited when anyone international becomes accessible. Here it feels like so much is accessible, and so the novelty is gone. Instead of feeling like a thirsty girl at an oasis, I feel like I can just evaluate each thing I go to on what it added to my thinking. This, unfortunately, added very little. (He did read the first poem he ever translated—a twelfth century Serbian “poem” that was pretty fantastic. I want to track it down. So—there was a glimmer of joy. Plus, hearing just one Vasko Popa poem read aloud was also pretty great. Not a complete loss.)

Still toiling on George Eliot and thinking through authority and framing texts and the way she defines audience through use of foreign language texts and literary allusion and proto-Zionist rants by Mordecai and the two incredibly anti-Semitic sequels and… you get the general idea. I was telling Professor Ragussis about my big chart and pile of notes on the epigraphs, and the odd anomalies I found, and he was really interesting. Mediating Jewish space and Deronda as Moses, baby.

Bought Cage’s lectures and essays on silence yesterday. Opened it and instantly remembered reading these texts a few times back when I was studying music intently. I’ve been reading a few different music texts recently, and as well as thinking through the implications in poetic terms, I found myself wanting to compose something. Something small. Oh! It’s been so long… Oh! John Cage!

Gewanter yesterday. Wearing a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts t-shirt. Hmm. The class met at his place for pizza and general conversation. A couple of people said they’d be reading more poetry over the summer—success! Surely that should be the measure of a good contemporary poetry class? He amusingly revealed the “key” to getting papers accepted for conferences.

I have to get a couple of conference papers together, actually. Timely advice, oh sage one.

For the second time this week I’m going out to Actually Be Social. Gathering at Robyn’s house for a cheap happy hour. How cheap? I’m tossing up between taking “two buck chucks” wine from Trader Joes, or splurging and taking a bottle of whisky. (I am still amused I’ve become a whisky drinker. Even if it’s only a bit of whisky, and only now and then. Still, my celebratory evening a few months back of mussels, whisky and chocolate mousse will live on in my memory forever. Best celebration ever.)

Robyn! Most likely going to Hungary! On a Fulbright! I’m so, so proud of her. And a little devastated that she’ll be gone… Actually, my friend Carolyn too—to Bulgaria. While I just want to get somewhere to write. To get this paper done, and think about poems and poetics and other writings for myself. The countdown is on.

Robert Craft: You do not mention in your autobiography whether you attended Rimsky-Korsakov’s funeral?

Igor Stravinsky: I did not mentioned it because it was one of the unhappiest days of my life. But I was there and I will remember Rimsky in his coffin as long as memory is.

From Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

I recently read Darkling, a long poem by Anna Rabinowitz, from Tupelo Press. I was disappointed by the book, but was interested in the fact that the who book was an acrostic work, incorporating Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.”

It’s had me wondering about why acrostics are used so rarely. Why there seems to be something so “uncool” about them—I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed using them when I’ve thought of it, though I think of it so rarely. Maybe it’s a sense that there’s some riddle there, but the answer is too “easy”—and yet who ever looks at a poem vertically to see if there is an acrostic embedded into it? Considering the fact that I so often set myself arbitrary restrictions, I think I’m going to revisit acrostics.

When I first bought the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry I was fascinated by the fact that it had some poetry by John Cage in it. With my music background, Cage has been someone I associated with music from the age of fourteen, when a teacher played me a record—a record!—of the 4’33”. Later I’ve been delighted when I’ve encountered his work elsewhere. His writings on silence were probably the most profound pieces of musical philosophy I have read. Then, when I took one of my early trips to Brisbane to work on the opera I was then writing, The Crimson, I took myself to the National Gallery, where they have a painting by Cage in the collection. A few years ago, in San Francisco, I was similarly delighted when I came across a “collaboration” between Robert Rauschenberg and Cage—an extremely long piece of paper that went around the room, with a tire track from a painted tyre across the whole of it. These little instances of his aleatoric work spilling out from the music. And—his poems.

The poem I remember was an acrostic—a centred acrostic, with “MARK TOBEY” appearing as a column down the middle of the poem, the work surrounding it.

I want to reread John Cage. I want to reread X: Writings on Silence.

Lewis Carroll wrote a lot of acrostic poetry too. (Incidentally, I’ve recently been very upset to find out how many people I know have not read Alice in Wonderland, which I feel like has been with me my whole life—though really only since about the age of five.)

So—again I’m asking: why do acrostics seem uncool?

And, while epigraphs are in my head, they do actually strike me as having a similar function—or the possibility of that function, if people see the acrostic—in being a place where you can provide a framing text. Though I suppose it is also a framing text that could go unnoticed.

I wrote a poem on Sunday. It made me almost dazzlingly happy, though it is not finished. I think I’m going to try for a pile (or rather notebookful) of poems in their early stages over the next few weeks, and when I get back from Panama I’ll try to whip them into shape. Along with a lot of other poems I want to revisit. Poems! I’m so close—so tantalisingly close—to being able to think of poems. My day will come.

Procrastination has been crowned a ruling passion in my life at present. I assume my Deronda paper is kicking around in the back of my mind, while I research more independence days and dream of travel and learning new languages. Petra, for instance. Who doesn't want to go to Petra?

And, knitting. My America blanket will probably be quite large. I’m learning new patterns, too.

I’m in the middle of the April issue of Poetry—it’s a translation special. I’ve found a few journals that are dedicated to work in translation recently, and then there’s this issue of Poetry. I plan to write something about it when I’m finished, but I’m loving it at the moment. There is so much happening in it. The translations aren’t all modern poets—unless Ovid is still hanging out somewhere between Rome and Tomis. But that doesn’t matter. It’s been a while since I read any journal cover to cover, but it looks like that’s what I’ll be doing with this issue of Poetry. How exciting!