A blackout I put at the top of my letter, “Summer Catch-up.” I haven’t done these in a while. Takes a bit to get back into them.
Everything has been saved from a wreck
The subject line for Friday’s newsletter came from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
“Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.”
(Every book of mine is what I was able to save from the shipwreck of a great idea.)
The year is too young to be this long
I used this 2016 blackout poem for last Friday’s newsletter, “The year is too young to be this long.” A few people commented that they couldn’t believe it was made 10 years ago. This is the thing about making art and writing in a diary: you keep the receipts.
The best way to read the internet
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about the best way to read the internet.
Little rooms
Last Friday’s letter, “Little Rooms,” begins:
“Great things start in little rooms.” That’s André 3000 of Outkast in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, referencing Jack White of The White Stripes, who told young artists in his acceptance speech to “get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed.” In my opinion, White’s “Little Room” is the greatest song ever written about success. Here it is in its entirety:
“Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!”
I followed that item with this line from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation:
“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”
And ended with a line from my typewriter interview with poet Matthew Zapruder:
“To me poems / feel like rooms / you enter / again and again.”
After I sent the letter out, Scott Newstok sent me his “How to think like a sonnet, or, fourteen ways of looking around a room”:
What’s in a room? Whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s “mighty room” or Samuel Daniel’s “small room,” William Wordsworth’s “narrow room” or John Donne’s “pretty rooms,” we strive to “find room” in these “little room”s — a phrase invoked by Hayes, and before him Billy Collins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Campion, and John Donne. As Ted Berrigan self-reflexively queried, “Is there room in the room that you room in?”
I was surprised nobody asked why I didn’t mention Virginia Woolf.
And I remember, only now, that almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a letter about writing being a place that you enter.
It was called “Room to think.”
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