--Washed up on the shore of a weekend. On my island bed, I survey the waves of light on the rooftop opposite my room (that tree taken down a few days ago has left a gap, and light's rushed in to fill it).
I'm content to be on this island for a while.
My cat has picked a spot in the sun, and it's amusing, because it's so bright she has to squint to see, but she doesn't move. (The proverbial cat! the proverbial sun!).
Last night I didn't write, not due to laziness but fatigue (and the need to give myself a 'day' off).
Today's my final post for you, and I'm thinking But I didn't write
--about the post-modern poetic elegy (Kristin Prevallet's I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, Essay Press 2007; Akilah Oliver's A Toast in the House of Friends, Coffeehouse Press 2009: both driven by personal losses, startling, in very different tones of language, a performance of detachment [Prevallet] "vs" Oliver's raw ritual emotion)
--about the Scottish Poetry Library (its motto, by leaves we live, its modest, peaceful building a raft downstream from the tourist frenzy of High Street, Edinburgh; over 30,000 "items of poetry" including an assortment of contemporary Scottish poetry, "unrivalled" in the nation [to quote their delightful newsletter, which seems to be issued quarterly] )
--about "Yiddishland" as a place of origin and return, existing at the stretch of a book and in the imagination (did you know that Yiddish poets internationally in the 'teens and '20s of the last century felt engaged and challenged by modernism? and, rising to the challenge, published their own manifestoes, their "little magazines" reflecting the energies of rival factions?) (If you didn't--and you'd like to know more: shameless shill! -- take a look at my book Recovering 'Yiddishland,' published by Syracuse last year.)
Mikhl Likht translated into Yiddish poems by Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, Gertrude Stein... (and many more). --I didn't write enough about Likht.
So, I hope you'll want to read about him.
--But the most important source, for me, of modern Yiddish poetry translated into English (and the