one of those days

when the meringues you have made to celebrate someone's finding an apartment just aren't working, even when you have put the splendid madagascar vanilla your husband ordered for you in them, and a bunch of shredded almonds AND have continued reading student papers, AND are thinking where to send a proposal for your book on your painter grandmother AND waiting to hear about a proposal for a Thinking with Pascal book about his pensees...

but it is sunny and you can go out and Get Fruit

and think about all those ocnverging ideas in your mind like Mallarme and Mahler, ever since you heard Alan Gilbert conduction his Third, and you have a new friend who sang under him and announced how very nice he was

so you should go OUT and come BACK and look at the MERINGUES again, because lots of things change with againness...

Monet's garden

There we were today, at 10, early and the exhibition space at the Botanic Garden almost empty, except a school group, so intelligently shepherded by 3 teachers, with excited 8 year-olds (I'm guessing by size and language..)
rushing about the brilliant colors and commenting: "would you not think this a grand show?" an enchanting red-haired young man asked me? i did indeed think so, especially because of the large and readable boards with various poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme. (a great Roger Fry translation, that I chose from his whole volume of translations by his -- and my -- favorite poet)... and some of us will do readings later from these poets --
but I see we are to speak about how they have influenced our poetry! well, it is like a garden we never wanted to get out of, though that will scarcely do...

And a Handel opera in the lounge of the Gershwin hotel! of course, and we will make our way to see a film about Mahler on the couch, if I have correctly understood, in the film festival over at Lincoln Center, with a couple of smart-as-hell pals...

Will I ever settle down to tidying up my Modern Art Cookbook, never unless now. So, now.

Translating Pierre Reverdy

One of the happiest things in my very fortunate life is being able to translate French poetry, along with others. For years, I had the great luck of translating with Patricia Terry (now, alas, not with us), and we spent marvelous long moments over and over contemplating how best to render modern poets -- that is, from Mallarme on to the present.
Now, to my joy, Joe Phillips, which is to say, Black Widow Books, will be publishing the translations of Pierre Reverdy we did together -- and all of the Roof Slates Pat did and the Prose Poems I did and the introductions we wrote side by side. Very remarkable, working side by side with someone: my favorite thing.

And then I am preparing a selection of Reverdy poems also, with translations by several different hands -- what a subtle and grand poet he was!

SYMBOLISM

What a lark, teaching symbolist poets! My seminar this week concerns  ( as it did last week also, how to stop? ) Mallarme, the most 21st century poet writing in the 19th century, blows anyone's mind... for sure. Every time you read him on Loie Fuller (as in his nigh-impenetrable essay on the Ballets) or on shipwrecks and typography (as in the major-important No Throw of the Dice will Get Rid of Chance, or any way you desire it translated), you feel as if you could shout with Virginia Woolf after reading Proust: "What is there to say after that?" Well, she continued to say a few things, and we are glad of that. 

Reading, teaching, going to jazz

So I keep passing around my copy of The Hare with Amber Eyes to various friends, and so far, my women friends have been FAR more enthusiastic than the men... what does this mean, I wonder? but I don't have time to wonder very long, have to go give a seminar on Mallarme, Whistler, and the rest of those great writers and painters (I love Whistler's writing in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, to say nothing of his Nocturnes and beach scenes) but hope to say lots about them, and show some, so my super students can react... Each has to choose something of Mallarme's to react to, and they will... Who wouldn't? the most 21st century poet around, I often think.
Then to see friends from France and to the Blue Note, because they want to hear some jazz. I have lived in New York for Years and Years and have never ever been to the Blue Note!