1. After much delay -- I've only driven about 200 miles since the middle of October!--I decided that since I'm driving to CdA on Thursday for an appointment with Dr. Bieber that I'd have my snow tires put on. And, who knows? I might decide to drive over to CdA again this winter. The Sube has been a little slow turning over when I start it and, indeed, it needed a new battery. And, after 17 years, the front wheel bearings need to be replaced. I'm grateful to live just a stone's throw from Silver Valley Tires where I can have these jobs done and be able to walk home and wait there for them to finish.
2. I poured myself a cup of hot chocolate spiked with some dark rum and settled in for this week's Tree House Concert, performed masterfully with vigor, good humor, and gratitude by Bill Davie. Tonight's audience was exceptional. I enjoyed how Bill lit up as one after another, people from the many walks of his life popped into the comments feed and he affectionately greeted them. Bill's songs are often warmly nostalgic as he sings about memories of Summer Island, the birth thirty years ago of his daughter, the steel drum bands in downtown Seattle, before aggressive gentrification, in the 1980s, and of his father. I melt into Bill's memories and enjoy my own during these songs, warmed also by the hot chocolate and rum.
Tonight, Bill read poems by Elizabeth Bishop. I was of two minds as I listened. On the one hand, I admire and enjoy the poets who broke new ground in American poetry soon after the middle of the 20th century, writing less formal poetry, freer verse, less metrical, often less rhetorical. On the other hand, I loved listening to Bill read as Elizabeth Bishop channeled her love of Marianne Moore, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Washington, D. C., and as she channeled her feelings of being haunted by her visits to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D. C., through more formal verse. She employs rhymes and purposeful repetition. Each poem has a more formal architecture -- for example "Visits to St. Elizabeth" is modeled after the English nursery rhyme, "The House that Jack Built". It's haunting to experience the haunting reality of the hospital written about in a form meant for children's poems.
So, yes, in the world of poetry, as in every other form of art, it's always out with the old, in with the new. I love the new, but not at the expense of the old. Tonight I enjoyed listening to Bill's reading of these elegant, carefully crafted poems. I fondly remembered Elizabeth Bishop's very formal poems, her villanelle, "One Art" and her sestina, simply titled, "Sestina". Do I want all poetry to be this formal? No. But when these more formal poems work, they engender in me admiration and a unique and deeply felt emotional response.
3. As bedtime drew near, I wasn't quite finished being moved. I watched the third episode of the second season of Midnight Diner, centered on clams steamed in sake. I won't give away the story, but will point out that, as these episodes always do, this one compressed, in the style of the haiku, a great deal of feeling into a brief story built around the co-existence of opposites. Many haiku resolve the tensions of the first two lines in the third line and I enjoyed how this story, in a similar way, arrived at its resolution in its closing minutes.
One final note: I enjoy the energy of many people being in a single place. I enjoyed this living near Washington, D.C. New York City gives me a jolt when I'm among the crowds, whether walking the streets, sitting on a bench in Washington Square, or having a beer in a noisy tavern. London had the same effect on me, although it's been nearly 35 years since I was in London.
I get some of that jolt from watching Midnight Diner as each episode opens with street scenes and neon around midnight in Tokyo (where I've never been).
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