Morning list essay

1.  I don't think consciousness lives only in the mind.  All your cells know it.  Or-- how do we say it?  Mind is everywhere?

2.  I should spend the summer re-reading Emerson.

3.  Reading Reznikoff, Niedecker.  Who else?  Poetry isn't just in the poets.  [And do I even mean "poetry"?]

4.  I love Americans and their solitary hunkering down into ideas.  Esp. Americans of the 19c who wrote wild and tortured books.  Dickinson.  E. Stoddard.  Thoreau.  Even Poe.  In the 20c, Jean Toomer does it in Cane, this hunkering, letting the material get almost out of hand.  There's a slipshod gracey genius running amok.

5.   Eudora Welty had it.  Found it funny.  Dressed it in gloves and set it on the steps for us to see before it tore off its coat and bonnet and ran away, out of frame.

6.  An extra-social social act.

7.  What's that thing at your shoulder, just out of frame?  Feel it?

[photo: Elizabeth Stoddard]