End of semester—exhaustion. Finished my final paper, and it wasn’t what it should be. But then, I always think those final papers at the point I hand them in are really a starting point, and not an end point. So, perhaps I have the start of something.

*

I’ve been sad since my mother sent me the news that Dorothy Porter is gone—too soon. I have a number of friends who knew her much better than I, but she is someone that I admired, and wanted more of.

*

Leave tomorrow for Frankfurt, then Bulgaria. I guess there’ll be a lot of sleep on the place.

*

Anticipating lying on Australian ground, trying to figure out what Anne Carson is doing with error, and exactly makes it different from how other poets might choose error.

*

Packing, now. Triage: must take, can take, don’t need to take.

As a form of training…it is important that the poet develop a strong bond with life, to be able to observe and able to choose his subject matter. …Afterwards, he can abstract things by abstracting coincidences, and symbolize them. This time of observation (for a poet) is an elementary process akin to learning reading and writing.

—Saadi Youssef

Oh my. As further evidence that a combination of work and world history have taken over my life, the Independence Day Project is about to overtake poor miss kate, underground or otherwise, in its number of postings.

I realise that there are a lot of countries and territories in the world, and September has been a busily Independent month… And July was just insane. I’ve just been realising how, being so busy suddenly (aftermath of illness?)

They’re trying to bring back a Galapagos tortoise from the dead. I don’t know how I feel about this—scientists thinks they can “tap into” this particular extinct Galapagos tortoise’s DNA from descendents, and recreate the original. Have these people read Jurassic Park? Okay, I do find it really interesting—and in truth I love turtles and tortoises, especially giant ones… But this makes me feel a little uneasy.

The election is starting to get to me. Sarah Palin is getting to me. (Her smugness in that interview with Charlie Gibson: Gibson, basically respectful; Palin, “oh, yes, Charlie; oh, no, Charlie; In what respect, Charlie?”—I know it’s his name, but I found this so, so forced.) And where is Biden? I’m hoping to go out to see a viewing of the first debate—and I spoke with a friend today about finding some bar full of politicos on 4 November to sit and watch the results coming in.

Wow. I’m already planning for 4 November.

Oh. 15 percent of meals eaten today in America are eaten in cars. I’m glad I don’t have a car.

from “Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Rat”

If we were to walk for a hundred years, we could never take
One step toward heaven—
                                               you have to wait to be gathered.

Two cardinals, two blood clots,
Cast loose in the cold, invisible arteries of the air.
If they ever stop, the sky will stop.

Affliction’s a gift, Simone Weil thought—
The world becomes more abundant in severest light.

April, old courtesan, high-styler of months, dampen our mouths.

The dense moist and cold and dark come together here.

The soul is air, and it maintains us.

—Charles Wright

Back in the land of… well, a friend tells me the United States is the land where it is possible to claim the moral high ground, no matter what. I think it only works if you’re American. I beat him at Scrabble (sadly not as common occurrence as I would like) and while I celebrated victory, he assured me he got to celebrate the moral high ground. I asked him the nature of this moral high ground, but he was really quite vague.

So, I’ve just spent three weeks in Panama and Costa Rica, discovering, among other things, that I’m not a beach person (give me an occasional surf beach in Australia, and as many boat trips as you like), I am a volcano person, and I’m in love with the Panama Canal.

The day before leaving, though there were a lot of things I didn’t do (I feel like I move very slowly when I travel—I’m not someone who likes to dash around as much as possible, but instead I like to stay a place for a week or so and feel it out… so I was moving around a lot for me!) I feel like I did the things I most wanted to: I saw the Panama canal at both ends, I saw lava flow from an active volcano, I visited a 3000 year old archeological site, I saw contemporary art and pre-Columbian artefacts, I swam in the Caribbean, I met some truly excellent people, I visited a church with a magical relic, and I wrote some things.

I also took a lot of notes: my journal is in fact almost entirely in note form. So, to make up for the relative lack of communication on my part, notes it must be… Not all of them (that would take you days to read…) but a substantial amount.

The walls of hostels all resemble one another, only with newer or older paint. Bathroom so depressing, compelled to buy flip-flops for the shower.

All shoe stores in Panama City are air-conditioned.

The only man arriving in Panama City already wearing a Panama Hat: camel-coloured pants, white blazer, thick rimmed glasses—resembling the millionaire you assume is a patsy until it turns out Marilyn’s character really does love him.

Watching Indiana Jones in Panama City.

Man passing in a van, saying in a deep growl, “I love you.”

Indecision about where to go. My pleasure at just sitting on a bus, watching things pass.

Not sure if I have set my watch to the right time—could be walking at a different hour.

Hydrography—the cartography of water.

Watching the “Japan Sea,” the “Venice Bridge” and the “Torm Mary” pass through the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal.

Colón—yes a slum. Dangerous? Possibly. More surprised than anything to see me walking around.

Panama Viejo—ruins open among the poor suburb.

A stone from the remains of the oldest American Pacific settlement.

Reading Herodotus outside the Artisans’ Market.

Taxi to Albrook terminal: car falling apart, Mike holding his surfboard on the roof the whole way, no suspension.

Bocas del Toro. Sandal nation.

Rained out and playing cards in Boquete. “Claire’s game.”

Hurricane Alma and endless rain. The water off in David when I arrived.

The Interamericana closed between Panamanian border and San José. Diverted to the coast, a traffic jam just past Quepos. One way bridges taking the bulk of Costa Rica’s traffic. 14 hours instead of 7.

I love San José. A weird mix of familiarity and grit, plastic and fading glory, occasional splendour.

Reading Pico Iyer’s Global Souls as wandering around the everywhere-city that, under the surface (how far under the surface?) is really individual.

Meeting a negative Englishman who spent a long time in Australia—returned recently and “frankly” found it “boring.” Doesn’t like San José. He liked Panama City better, but never saw the canal.

While sugar packets are different everywhere, “Equal” and “Splenda” packets are always the same.

Reading about the Mallee Scrub in the tropics—the dirt road to San José all stirred up.

Enamel cups stringed from the rafters as decorations. Made in China.

Jade museum, sign telling me that: the pre-Columbian society used to make “winged hungers” in jade, “representing that way a cult to the brat.”

Kelly and Chritina—two girls from Canada, travelling Belize and Costa Rica. The expensive ends.

A gushing girl from America talking about travel “opening up opportunities” and “being on her journey.” Invited to go fire dance in Africa but instead going to become a yoga teacher. The interesting mixed with platitudes. Refused to believe that people drinking too much bottled water having a detrimental effect on dental health.

The odd blankness of the archaeological site.Heavy rain walking 3 kilometres down a pot-holed road. Three hours till next bus. Being taken in by a very kind lady—Maria?—to wait. She showed me her parrot, puppy and chickens. Spoke no English, but showed me her husband’s certificate in English. Communicating in little bits.

Meeting Crispian and Christy, Canadians. Crispian a game warden in South Africa for seventeen years, now taking a job in Vietnam, setting up marine national parks. Driving down from Canada since Christmas.

Man from Suriname, wife from the Netherlands, both of Indian ancestry, touring Costa Rica.

Lava lighting up as darkness fell.

Planning days back in DC—saving money, going to galleries, borrowing books from the library.

Jenny from Sweden—afraid of San José, shocked by prostitutes (I saw maybe four in a week), planning to go home and waitress. Wants to open an organic soup restaurant one day. Just soup.

Seeing the city from the hill where the old jail, now the Children’s Museum and National Gallery (and now done up to look like a jumping castle)—back turned. Hardly any signs or brand names evident.

Sign: Hotel English Spoken.

Bar: Nashville South. Saloon doors.

Farmacia Catedral. Cathedral nowhere in sight.

Lottery ticket sellers everywhere.

Mis-writing: coffee shop for culture shock. I wonder what’s on my mind?

*

I’m glad to be “home”. I feel really re-energised—I needed a break, and, indeed, a bit of “culture shock.” Ready to start working for the summer—finish some poems, read some poetics, read books of my own choosing, think some more about Henry James, tutor and teach… As well, of course, as the galleries and shows and movies I want to see, and getting to nearby places like Philadelphia and Baltimore and Harper’s Ferry.

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

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

George Eliot's epigraph for the opening chapter. No, it's not the longest.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measure, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle, but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divide his unit billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which out story sets out.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

If you don't start buying art when you can't afford it you'll never start.

—Helen Hughes

"For me so much of poetry and the making of poetry have to do with a willingness to wait for something to yield itself. It’s a powerlessness that one allows to occur. In my own life I feel as if I do a lot of waiting, and it seems to me a proper posture of the heart, or the mind, waiting for the poem to arrive. Or waiting for a final shapeliness to occur in my own life. Or waiting for a god to show himself. Waiting for the dead to come back."

—Li-Young Lee, from the interview “Waiting for a Final Shapeliness to Occur” in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee.

"A mosaic is a conversation with what is broken"

–Terry Tempest Williams

"The literature I love most is the literature of exile of ruins and the experience of exodus. I don’t know why but, for example, the Book of Exodus is very important to me—the wandering of the children of Israel has profound resonance for me. I don’t feel as if those stories are about a primitive tribe in some distant desert. That struggle for belief and faith in the face of humiliation, annihilation, apostasy—all that seems to me really what I go through and what we all go through, finally."

—Li-Young Lee, from the interview “A Well of Dark Waters” in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee.

"I took a friend to an art exhibit; it was an installation art piece. I believe it was Joseph Beuys. We took the subway to a very seedy part of Chicago. We got off the subway—it was about five o’clock, the streets were empty, it was snowing—and we knocked on a big freight door. A man in a security uniform slides the door open and says, “What do you want?” and I said, “We’re here to see the Joseph Beuys exhibit.” He said, “Come with me,” and we walk into this huge, empty warehouse. Then he goes to the other side where he opens this tiny, little wooden door, and we walk through this narrow, little hallway, and he opens another door and there’s another huge warehouse. Then he goes to the other side, and we’re walking all the time, and my friend is baffled. He goes to another tiny, little door that we have to stoop to go through, and he says, “Here it is.” And there’s a brick wall, gold-leafed, and there’s a hat rack with a coat and hat there. The guard says, “Well, that’s it. Take a look.” So we took a look. He says, “Had enough?” and we said “Yeah.” So we turn around and walk out. My friend and I were talking about it, and he says, “I didn’t understand it.” And I made the comment he would understand it if I told him we’re no longer awake, what we’re going to experience now is a dream. There’s a logic to dreaming. We don’t ask the same logic of dreams that we ask of life. So I don’t think we should ask the same kind of logic and understanding of poems that we do of life. I think I’m moving in a different element when I’m reading or writing poems. I don’t ask the same things of them."

—Li-Young Lee, from the interview “Seeing the Power of Poetry” in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee.