Hanging by Our Words [by Sharon Dolin]

Hola from Madrid. I am honored to be blog buddies with David St. John and I share his concern about Craig Arnold. May he be found soon.

These will be brief posts until I get situated in Mojácar.

 Two men in suits are hanging by their mouths—not teeth. As though their words had literally caught them in mid-air. Or is it they are hanging on their words:

           so much depends

           upon . . .

             what is pendant.

This is the sculpture in a retrospective for Juan Muñoz that transfixed me in my jetlagged, sleepless haze at the Reina Sofia  Museum in Madrid. It didn’t strike me as a scene of torture, but a willful participation by the figures. But of course, many have been hung because of their words. Now mind you, I was very very jetlagged yesterday. And I hope not much will hang on these words I am writing. But as a poet, I do hang by my words, hang onto words.

Today I strolled through Retiro Park. Inside the Crystal Palace, an empty glass house, with nothing in it but the installation “Are Animals People?” which consisted of two stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling: a panda and a large brown rat that looked like a bear. Occasionally roaring sounds would emerge from somewhere. All I could think about were the two women last night in a tapas bar who were chatting and drinking and smoking, oblivious to the huge cured slabs of ham hanging just above their heads.

Strolling  through a crowd of people in the Puerta del Sol, a main plaza in Madrid, I chanced to look up and saw a plaque honoring Jorge Luis Borges, who had written some of his first poems in the building. As I stood there staring up at the ceramic plaque (trying to photograph it, unsuccessfully), I felt so at home. A poet had lived and written here. Why do we/I derive comfort from such things? Perhaps because in the face of so much invisibility, here was confirmation that poetry survives. Or tonight, walking home from a Flamenco Carmen, I see several lines of poetry by Quevedo have be incised in gold in the pavement. I’ve never been a person who likes to visit the graves of writers I admire. I’d much rather see where they worked and lived. And so I feel heartened by the traces of writers that I find throughout the world.

Comments

[DL]

Thank you for recovering these ghostly traces -- and your independence, on which so much hinges or hangs. What were the Quevedo lines?

[Sharon Dolin]

Alas. I didn't jot them down. It was a few lines from one of his sonnets. It was late at night. Mi disculpe.
Sharon