Today I met with two friends and did writing exercises, which was fun. I get some good material for poems that way. And some human contact, which is a good thing. Today was cloudy and a little drizzly and oddly warm, but I didn't go out, even though Clif took the baby on two walks. I ate cookies and drank tea. I met with my friends. Later I made some beans and rice and played with the baby and put him to bed.
The exercise for the piece below was that we read a poem out loud and then had to incorporate some of the words into our own piece. (For this one, the poem was from Notley's The Descent of Alette.) Here it is:
Attempted Dispatch
I wish I had more to report, a dispatch back from my journey,
but I'm in it now and now hovering and now living it
but also an image of myself projected onto myself
by a movie camera, something from a Charlie Kaufman movie--
marionettes, tunnels, rebirths, dioramas, a warehouse containing
my life and all the paths I walk in Brooklyn with the baby
in the stroller or the baby in the Ergo carrier. When I found out
I was pregnant, my mother remarked that we had embarked
on an alternate reality and we had. We had all boarded a ship
or walked down into a narrow trench, or I had, walking willingly
and with interest and then with trepidation, and then it opened
out into a colossal cavern, and that was the night he was born,
when I floated there alone even though I wasn't alone,
eating pellets of ice and watching the window for some kind of sign
of attendant angels or of a soul cohering. Really I was listening
to a comedian I don't know being interviewed on a podcast
I kind of like until they had to break my water and it was dirty
and they had to increase the pitocin to get him out, until I was vaguely
threatened with a caesarean, until I began to complain of all
the pressure breaking through the epidural, until it was time to push.
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