Pontificatory Palace, etc.

The Palace at 2:00 a.m.
menu du jour:

1. small pontification
of the Beggar Queen,
pontificated over laundry--
possibly ridiculous,
as is the wont of
pontifications

2. poem with God and also
an unexpected zipper

3. lunar Rilke, without glowworms

not 4. I am desolate: we are all out of the wild boar pâté de campagne.

yes 4. haywire credit
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1.
In between bouts of laundry, I’ll be working on a longish novella today. This morning I’ve been mulling about how few people there are who see a thing whole for what it is, and not for how it deviates from some set template of the thing—a “poem,” a “story,” a “novel”—already implanted. This lack of freedom goes for writers and readers, editors and reviewers.

And that idea of a template… How quickly one settles and solidifies in the mind! A story can be perfectly satisfactory—indeed, superior of its “kind”—and yet not fully satisfy because it has not gone beyond the maker’s own prior sense of what “story” is and can be. In a particular story, that may mean that he has not gone beyound his mental construct of what a character is, what a shape is, what causality is: any number of elements.

Those leaps beyond what has been imagined in the writer’s past and into some newness carry with them blood and vigor and electricity that convey fresh life to the story. The little trodden world already created in past stories is a world where the writer is entirely too cosy. The inner landscape of the writer herself needs to be transformed before the work gains newness of life. And I imagine that is true in all the arts, whether one is a painter or choreographer or poet or some other permutation of the artist.

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2. NeoVictorian / Cochlea just picked up the only poem in the universe that contains both God and a zipper, "Dream of a Waltz with God." Perhaps there is another... And yet I doubt it. If there is, it couldn't possibly fool around with waltz rhythms as well. I gather that after print publication, it will appear on the website.

The above makes me feel virtuous, because I finally sent out a couple of those little envelopes stuffed with poems--something that I detest doing. Needful for a book-to-come, yes, but an annoying frittering of time.

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3. From today's reading--
Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke,
selected and translated by Edward Snow
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986)

Forget, forget, and let us live now
only this, how the stars pierce through
cleared nocturnal sky; how the moon's whole disk
surmounts the gardens. We've sensed so long already
how the darkness breeds many mirrors: how a gleam
takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance
of night. But now let us cross over
and invest this world where
everything is lunar--

Paris, early summer 1909

And isn't it lovely to be Rilke in 1909 at this particular moment, when fragrance is rising from the gardens and a single star is jumping a hurdle and falling, falling, falling with a splash that breaks up the moon caught in a distant fountain?
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4. The photograph of book browsers at Haye on Wye was taken by Anne Koth of Dresden, Germany, www.sxc.hu.