Lists of the living, dead, fictional, and me

Sep 1, 2025

Happy September! After a very dry blogging month of August, I'm trying to be a little less self-conscious in my posting habits. After all, one of the main goals of creating this space was to write and think in public, which is hard to do if I'm always aiming for the fully-complete post.

One way to do this is to occasionally share some of the post-reading scribbling I already do, even if it is a bit rough around the edges, mundane, unfinished, etc. I'll tag these "Reading Journal." For the inaugural post, I'm literally sharing what I wrote in my reading journal this morning, with very little editing. We'll see how this goes.

Nothing much in the September Poetry has grabbed me and I have wondered, over the last few days, if I should just take a poetry break. But picked Blade by Blade back up and there, on the page, Laméris had the nerve to play with a historical list, to make it her own.

They Say the Heart Wants

what it wants, but no one tells you what it gets. So here's a list, mine: tall grasses blowing in the wind,

and she continues her list: some cups, California fog, boulders on a beach, Billie Holiday singing "I'll be seeing you...," other stuff of life. Then midway through the poem, two things:

of wild greens and beets. The time a man kissed

my hand when we met, then pressed my palm to his cheek. Sei Shōnagon's eleventh-century list

of "Things That Give One a Clean Feeling": an earthen cup, a new metal bowl, a rush mat, the play of light on water

This man of memorable manners shows up, then Sei Shōnagon, and after reciting a few things from Shōnagon's list, Laméris adds a few of her own items:

To which I add a drawer of beeswax candles,

steam rising from a pot of tea. So much stored in the heart's farthest chambers. And though

The nerve, the courage, the audacity of picking up the list of an 11th-century court lady and adding to it! But she does it without comment, as though it is the most natural thing, like it is remembering a kiss long past, from someone long dead.

And why shouldn't it be? Why shouldn't we pick up the lists of the past, appreciate their integrity and presence and then unwrap them, revive them, make them our own? Our impulse to isolate and sacralize the dead, to encase their spirit in a glass dome, inaccessible, aloof -- perhaps it is our political moment, but right now I am looking for ways to shatter the glass and, in the clatter, bring them once more into time.

We can practice with the living. I don't quite know what to make of this list that Laméris is making, that she adds Shōnagon to: a list of things the heart gets -- but what does that mean? Is it get, as in receive? Or get as in, understands, resonates with, appreciates? Or some space between.

But still I hear her list and I might add, in my own voice but following her lead:

big blocks of single-crop fields lit alive by sunrise and sunset

defied expectations, unsettled assumptions

that one oak tree that pulls at me just by being there

(Is that the "get" -- the satisfaction of being pulled, the thing that is complete in the pulling? That which makes us forget the want, which plucks at the type of desire that is full in itself, ebullient, overflowing?)

To Shōnagon's list of "Things That Give One a Clean Feeling," I might add:

cold showers and fresh towels after sweat- and sun-drenched work

flower or flowers, new in a vase and unexpected, arranged lightly

In Samantha Harvey's Orbital, Chie scribbles lists, clips them to pouches of keepsakes, such as her list of...

Irritating things:
Tailgaters
Tired children
Wanting to go for a run
Lumpy pillows
Peeing in space when in a hurry
Stuck zips
Whispering people
The Kennedys

Sure, we can break that glass, too. I might add:

the stubborn dog locked in place on a walk

never comfortably finding the button to take a picture, always impossibly placed

And perhaps I'll start a new list, a list of questions about behaviors that confuse me, in myself and others:

Why do my lists tend to be tasks or items, to read like inventories, rather than insights, memories, proximities?

Why do we mistake the good intention of respecting the dead for an imperative to render them inert or static?

How do we learn to make conversing with the further past second nature -- as moving and intuitive as feeling anew a kiss several decades old? As enlightening and intimate as hanging out with an artist, night and day, and asking questions of their voice?