Hey Friends

Welcome.

For four years I kept an email correspondence with my granddad who, in his old age, became increasingly hard to talk to over the phone. Another reason for emailing him, maybe the most important reason, was that we were both writers. Email gave us space to explore our thoughts, contradict ourselves, run tangents for miles, and to pull from other literature in order to structure our own. These emails were lengthy, and often we responded to one another paragraph by paragraph. We spoke of God, of oak trees, and books that are on our minds. We never spoke enough. Never enough. Can I reach him through sub-stack? No. The desires remain the same. To write someone.

Elizabeth Bishop once wrote to Paulin about a plan to teach a course at Harvard, a course on “just letters as an art form or something,” to which he asked “And there is a poetics of the familiar letter?” Yes Paulin, yes. He thought on this a bit and concluded that the familiar letter “construct themselves on an anti-aesthetic, a refusal of the literary.”  This last bit is bleh, but revealing. What excites me is Bishops’ fascination with the familial. Or, to reconstruct Paulin’s phrasing - an aesthetics of familiarity. A poetics of the spontaneous and the private. 

Thomas Travisano remarks that, “What concerns them most (Bishop, Lowell), whether in art or in ashtrays, were the practical problems of making poems and of living one’s life.” 

Bishop is quite aware of the space between living one’s life and writing. As with this excerpt, where she is distracted by time and the birth of a calf. I hope these screenshots are in the right order - but whatever. See how she swims between subjects of literature and the matters of life. 

A letter is a kind of holding, how light envelopes a room. This is a space to feel more connected to the friends I can’t hug in real time, and for those I’d like to share more of my time with; to keep in touch.

I just came into the house after finishing Merwin’s translation of Purgatorio. I am watching the sun set out the window and the flowers on my desk whither. You could feel Spring approaching New Orleans today. I’m only hoping the heat will take its time. 

I don’t know if I have any business running a substack, but will see. The sun is set and I am getting ready to go out, see friends. See you next week!