1. It was a dank afternoon in Eugene today and I walked with Snug, thinking about lines fromT. S. Eliot,lines like "the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table."
And I thought about reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for the first time in 1973,
and how the gray, toxic skies of Kellogg helped me understand the spiritual void Eliot portrays in poem's like "Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men".
And so I took pictures of this black tree's branches against the gray sky in Monroe Park, thinking about
"half-deserted streets" and "muttering retreats", but most of all thinking about emptiness in the outer and the inner world. This grayness might seem more depressing than beautiful, but it was exhilirating for me to find out when I was 19 years old that I wasn't alone in feeling empty and in seeing emptiness around me. It was my secret. Poetry and its images made that emptiness external. I could get it outside myself. These trees reminded me of the liberation I first felt when poetry began to help me inquire more deeply into Kellogg.
2. Both of my sisters wrote me emails today and told me they enjoyed my Snug blog. I'm enjoying taking daily pictures of Snug and posting them and was very happy that Christy and Carol are enjoying this modest project of mine.
3. I spent most of the afternoon preparing for tomorrow's first day of classes for winter quarter and am particularly eager to teach Intro. to Poetry again.
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