Category: erasure poem

july 24/15.4 MILES

67 degrees
mississippi river road path, south/minnehaha falls/minnehaha parkway/lake nokomis/minnehaha creek path/lake harriet/return

My longest run ever. Slow. Difficult. Lots of walking. But, I did it. And, I’ll do it again next week. It was a beautiful morning for a run. It started to feel really difficult on the way back. I have no deep thoughts. No brilliant insights. No interesting observations. Just fatigue and relief.

Technically, I should count these miles in this week’s total, but this long run is for last week. I didn’t have time to run it any sooner because 2 of my college friends (and favorite people!) were visiting. So I’m adding the miles to last week.

Hover over entry to reveal the erasure poem

june 8/REST

I’m experimenting with an account of my first injury. It’s really no fun to think about and try to remember it, so after I offer up the facts, I’ve decided to have fun with them:

Hover over the first paragraphs to reveal an erasure poem

The Facts*

On April 2, 2016, while doing a flip turn in the pool, I felt something pop in my knee. When I got out of the pool, my knee hurt and I was limping.

I had previously experienced a pop in my knee on February 14th of the same year which forced me to take a break for running for the rest of February.

After the second pop in April, my leg felt stiff and I was having difficulty bending it. Within a few days, the limping had increased. My right knee wouldn’t bend and I was struggling with the mechanics of walking, especially lifting and bending my right leg. My knee didn’t really hurt, but it wouldn’t bend.

In May, I went to a sports medicine doctor and discovered, after an exam and x-ray, that I had a bone spur on the interior side of my right knee and that the tendons—or was it the ligaments?—were rubbing up against the bone spur and causing inflammation. I was instructed to seek physical therapy, to undergo the R.I.C.E treatment: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation and to take 9 ibuprofen tablets a day until the swelling went down.

At the end of May I was able to start running again. I had not run for about 6 weeks.

This was my first serious injury. It freaked me out. I was so freaked out that I failed to pay careful attention to the details that both the doctor and physical therapist offered. All I remember is “bone spur” “knee” “Inflammation” “RICE” “ibuprofen”

I have a vague memory of the doctor explaining that a bone spur, or osteophyte, can be caused by arthritis. I have no memory of whether or not he mentioned if my bone spur would stay or go away.

*at least, the facts as I’ve tried to recall them. I have trouble remembering “facts,” especially when they’re medical and technical and related to injuries to my body.

SOME FUN WITH THE FACTS:

Hi bone spur! This is Sara. Quick question: are you still there? if not, cool. if so, when are you planning to leave? No pressure. Just curious. BTW, thanks for not causing any problems for the last year.

Osteophyte, some anagrams:

O, the pest, yo
yo, the poets
oh, to set type!
hot eye post
they step too
oh, toes type?
set too hype
he poots yet
hot pot eyes
the soy pet
O testy hope!

R.I.C.E. doesn’t just stand for Rest Ice Compress Elevate, it stands for:

Rude Idiots Can’t Explain
Really, I Care Enough
red indigo copper ecru
ribbon ink carbon electromechanical
rancid icky curdled eggs
Rosie is currently elated
rapture is coming early
Rats! I can’t enumerate.
random isotopes create elements
rhode island can’t eat
Right, I can’t even.
respect is carefully earned
rudeness is considered evil

may 31/6 MILES

62 degrees
the franklin hill turn around + extra

Today was a harder run than yesterday. My legs felt sore. I took it out too fast. And I was overdressed. Decided to walk a few times when I felt like I needed it, which was a good idea, not a failure, I’ve decided. Recorded two voice memos into my iPhone, one about attention as a salve against apathy and another about how bodies are machines.

Before the run, I started working on a series of wanderings around attention. I’ve given years of attention to attention in my ethical work on curiosity and a feminist ethics of care and now, in this running/writing project, it keeps coming up as a primary goal for me: to pay attention to my body, to my surroundings, to my voice, to authentic expression, to nagging injuries, to breathing, to joy, to staying upright, to resisting oppressive regimes.

Attention, Wanderings

Wandering One

Mary Oliver from Upstream

“Attention is the beginning of devotion” (8).

Here’s my (first?) attempt at a sonnet, riffing off of Oliver’s line:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Devotion, the beginning of prayer.
Attention sets curiosity in motion.
Curiosity is a form of care.

Attention can lead us to question.
all that we’ve been taught.
Compelling us not to rest on
the assumptions we have wrought.

Attention promotes belief
belief breaks us open,
spilling out a grief
that comes from loss of hope and

apathy, a monstrous twinning.
Attention is the beginning.

Wandering Two

Marilyn Nelson, “Crows”

“What if to taste and see, to notice things,
to stand each is up against emptiness
for a moment or an eternity—
images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon—
is the main reason we’re on the planet….”

So many ways to connect this excerpt with my wanderings on the vertical yesterday! The tree. the horizon. The purpose of life.

This is makes me think of Krista Tippet’s interview with the poet Marie Howe. Howe has some thoughts about the is, which she calls the this, and how we struggle to “stand each is up against emptiness” (hover over the following quote to reveal the erasure poem):

“It hurts to be present, though, you know. I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them. Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. You know I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth. Uh, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason….We want to — we want to say it was like this. It was like that. We want to look away, and to be, to be with a glass of water or to be with anything. And then they say well there’s nothing important enough. And then it’s whole thing is that point.”
Attention

attend to:
witness
keep vigil
be devoted

have a long attention span:
don’t forget
keep noticing
pay attention

give attention:
care
care for
care about

be curious:
wonder
imagine
believe

receive:
breathe in the this and breathe out the that
slowly absorb the is through your skin

note: So many more variations to do, including one with Simone Weil.

may 20/5 MILES

46 degrees
mississippi river road path south/mississippi river road path north/greenway

Almost a repeat of Monday, except I ran with Scott and we ran south first. For most of the run it was raining, although it was a soft rain and I was sweating, so it was hard to tell. I greeted lots of other runners with a perky “good morning!,” partly to be friendly but mostly to check my effort level. As long as I could get out the full phrase and not sound like I was dying, I wasn’t running too fast. The last time Scott and I ran together, I suggested that we should come up with a longer phrase that we could use to check how hard we were running. I can’t remember his suggestion, but I know it involved speaking with an Irish brogue. (I just read this part to him and he told me that it was “Top o’ the morning to you.”) Maybe I should come up with some poetic line? Or what about a koan/unanswerable question?

After we got back, as I was eating my favorite breakfast–cheerios, bananas, walnuts–I started reading one of the books I just picked up from the library, Flanuese: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin. On page 2, she writes:

women came to the city…to pass unnoticed, but also to be free and to do what they liked, as they liked.

Then she describes “the key problem of the urban experience”:

are we individuals or are we part of the crowds? Do we want to stand out or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we–no matter what our gender–want to be seen in public? Do we want want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent or invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon?

My immediate reactions to these passages include:

  • Yes! I want to go unnoticed so that I can do what I like, as I like!
  • You mean other people feel that way too? I’m not the only one?
  • Being able to go unnoticed requires a lot of privilege. Who can choose to be invisible (as opposed to being rendered invisible) and who is always hyper-visible?
  • Wow, I’m only on page 2 and this book already has me thinking about so many things.
  • I want to write about this in my log entry because one aspect of running that I’ve barely addressed but that certainly subtly shapes my experiences, is being a woman running in public.

Question

  • What does it mean to be a woman running in public?
  • What does it mean to be this woman running in public?
  • What does it mean to be this white woman running in public?
  • What does it mean to be this white, middle-class woman running in public?
  • What does it mean to be this white, middle-class, healthy-looking woman running in public?
  • What does it mean to be this white, middle-class, healthy-looking woman running in public spaces that are well-maintained and safe?
  • What does it mean to be this white, middle-class, healthy-looking woman running in public spaces that are well-maintained and fairly safe, but still seem haunted, perhaps only slightly, by the threat of an unwanted encounter or assault?

In thinking about running in public l want to link my experience to the larger history of women in running (less than 100 years ago, a woman wasn’t supposed to run for fear that her uterus would fall out! Kathryn Switzer was attacked by the race director while running in the Boston Marathon in 1967. The woman’s marathon wasn’t in the olympics until 1984.) and women in public, including: women and safety and women and sexual harassment/assault. Of course, you also can’t leave out exploring an intersectional history of who is allowed to occupy public space and how running bodies get read by others–are they seen as exercising or running from a crime, for example. Both of those are heavily shaped by race. And, what about the types of public spaces runners have access to–dedicated paths? busy sidewalks? In what parts of the city do they exist?

Scroll over the first paragraph to reveal the hidden poem.

may 1/REST

Another day of rest, partly because of the cold/rainy/windy weather and partly because I want to give my legs some more time off after the race. Thinking about what I read last week: an excerpt from George Sheehan’s Running and Being that I first encountered in late January.

Sheehan writes about what he tries to do when he’s running: “I must listen and discover forgotten knowledge. Must respond to everything around me and inside me as well. Poets do this naturally. A really good poet, wrote James Dickey, is like an engine with the governor off. And it’s no good for people to say that life should not mean that much to a poet. The really good poet, said Dickey, has no choice; that’s the way he is (3)”.

I was curious about his reference to Dickey and the “engine with the governor off” because I don’t see feeling life this intensely as healthy. At least not for me. I become too lost, too overwhelmed and too much for myself and the people I love. I looked up the phrase, and found two instances of Dickey using it. In the first, found in Sorties, Dickey reflects on his writing process. In the second, found in Self-Interviews, he discusses James Agee. Hover over the quotes to reveal the erasure poem.

“…working like an engine with the governor off it, not only during the conscious portions of the day, but during sleep as well…Twenty-four hours a day the mind is associating so quickly, ideas are occurring and recurring so frequently, things are cross-fertilizing each other in such an amazing variety of ways, that the human body cannot really bear up under the associations and the thought processes of a “normal” mind. But there is nothing more exhilarating or exciting. It is the thing that makes middle age worth it all, for, as the result of long discipline, I know what I am doing, and I know, pretty well, what to do with what my mind gives me. Not with absolute certainty; that is of course impossible. But with a fair degree of predictability. And who on earth ever has that, besides artists?”

“he did have this quality of complete participation, of commitment of the self to whatever it was he contemplated. I think this commitment is tremendously important to a writer. It’s because of that writers are so unstable. Emotionally at least, a really good poet is like an engine with the governor off. It’s no good for people to say that life shouldn’t mean that much to a poet. By god, it does mean that much, and people will just have to accept it. The really good poet has no choice; that’s the way he is.”

april 22/10 MILES

57 degrees
mississippi river road path south/lake nokomis/mississippi river road path north

Beautiful. Sunny. Hardly any wind. A perfect spring morning for a long run. Focused on lifting my knees and “activating my glutes.” It helped. My left thigh felt a little sore, but not heavy and I was able to run the entire 10 miles without any problems and without stopping. This is one of the main reasons why I’ve been working so hard these past couple of months on my running. So I could run today for a little over 90 minutes without pain or doubt, on the paths that I love. The Mississippi River Road path, the Minnehaha Creek path, the Lake Nokomis path.

Shortly before leaving for my run, I looked over some notes that I took a couple of months ago about writers who run. The writer/runner Rachel Toor discusses the state of vulnerability that both writing and running create:”When I think harder about it, what I believe running and writing have most in common, at least for me, is the state of vulnerability they leave you in. Both require bravery, audacity, a belief in one’s own abilities, and a willingness to live the clichés: to put it on the line, to dig deep, to go for it. You have to believe in the “it,” and have to believe, too, that you are worthy.”

I wanted to reflect on this statement as I ran. For the most part, I didn’t. I was focused on keeping my breathing steady, making sure I was using my legs properly and enjoying watching the creek as it gently flowed towards the falls. But, about halfway through the run I started having some dark thoughts about my son’s upcoming trip to Europe that he’s taking with many of his 8th grade classmates. He’ll be gone for 10 days. It’s his first time away from home for that long and his first time on a plane. I haven’t been too worried about him. He’s a confident, relaxed kid, so I was surprised that worries about what might happen on the trip were suddenly erupting in my mind. Would the plane crash? Would he get sick? Would something happen at the airport? Then I remembered this notion of a “state of vulnerability.” Running makes you vulnerable. Toor understands this as an opportunity to prove your mettle, to “put it all on the line.” Today during my run, I saw the state of vulnerability as an opportunity to be open, to allow the feelings that I’ve been hiding from myself to surface and be addressed. In the past, my inclination would have been to quickly tamp down my dark thoughts, to dismiss them as ridiculous or overly dramatic. Today, I let myself experience them, allowing them to linger beside me for a few minutes as I ran by the main beach at Lake Nokomis.

In an interview about their documentary, The Runners, the filmmakers talk about the purpose of their project of filming random runners in a park, while asking them serious questions mid-run:
“We were trying to understand what goes on in the minds of runners as they charge through the streets. What does it do to them and what can we find out about ourselves by interrupting them at this moment of vulnerability and clarity?”

I feel like now, almost 400 miles into this project, I’m finally using running to tap into my own vulnerabilities and being willing to acknowledge and accept them.

Hover over the entry to reveal the erasure poem.

april 18/3.1 MILES

54 degrees
mississippi river road path north

Ran in the rain. Didn’t mean to. Thought front had passed. It hadn’t. At the start, everything was just wet, still dripping from the heavy drizzle that had been going on all morning. Feeling the water on my nose, thought it was more dripping, then realized it had started to rain again. I don’t mind running in the rain, especially when I have on my favorite baseball cap and a jacket. Then I hardly notice it.

Not too far from the start of my run on the river road path, the walking/running path dips below the road, down to the ridge of the gorge. In the summer, when the leaves have returned to the trees, it’s a sea of green and nothing else. But from late October until mid-May, the trees are mostly bare. You can see how the earth steeply slopes down to a small bit of woods, with a floor of dirt and dead leaves and a worn path that leads to the river and a sandy beach. You can reach this path by walking down some stone steps that are closed during the winter. I remember the first time I finally noticed this section of the path. It was during early spring a few years ago, after the snow had melted but before anything had started to grow again. It was early morning and a fog was lingering on the tree branches. It was eerie and beautiful. A month or so later, my daughter discovered the steps, which had always been there, in plain sight, but I had ignored, and we hiked down them to the river. Now, it’s one of my favorite places. Today, there wasn’t fog there, just a soft, steady rain, but it was still beautiful. The grayish light made the colors of the early spring trees more intense: a rich brown mixed with vibrant shades of light green. It reminded me of some of the illustrations in one of my favorite books as a kid: Oh What a Busy Day! by Gyo Fujikawa.

Mundane things to note from the run: maybe due to the rain, my watch stopped tracking my run 1.26 miles in. My left leg started to feel heavy again, towards the end of the run. I probably should take at least two days off to let it rest. The wind was bad, about 17 or 18 mph. Running north, it was at my back. When I turned around, it swirled around me and then pushed the rain in my face.

Hover over the log entry to reveal the erasure poem. For more on this poem, see An Unexpected Erasure.

note: The walk down the steps to the river is featured in a short digital story that I created a few years ago.

april 17/REST

Today is a rest day. Well, resting from running at least. I’m still thinking and reading about running. Read Thomas Gardner’s log entry #42 today. In it, he writes about running repeats (1200 X 4, with jogs in-between) on campus when “about one hundred and fifty cadets descended on the track.” Descended. He uses the same word that I did in my post from Saturday about running at the YWCA track. I wrote: “a class descended on the track.” His experience was much different than mine. He writes:

On my faster laps, they would give me the inside, groups of threes and fours swinging wide at my approach then closing back in on the rail. On my jogs, the pattern would be reversed, the faster groups swallowing me up and then leaving me behind (44).

Far more ordered than the chaos I experienced when I ran on the track with about two dozen freaked-out novice runners.

What would it feel like to suddenly be on a track with 150 runners, all in sync, as you passed them or they swallowed you up in their group? Not so bad, I imagine. I don’t like crowds, but I think I could handle them better if I didn’t need to worry about any unpredictable behavior, like a runner darting in front of me and then stopping or another speeding up to pass me and then slowing down and then speeding up again when I tried to pass them or yet another weaving in front of me and taking up the entire path so I can’t pass or even move. Ordered and deliberate movements and the following of certain expected rules, like stay to the right and run single-file when approaching other runners, makes encountering other people manageable for me.

 

Thinking about packs of runners and their behaviors makes me think of a lot of things that I’ve read, watched or experienced while running.

A List of Things this Log Entry is Reminding Me About:

  • Running with lots of people in a race doesn’t freak me out nearly as much as I thought it would. I usually find a way to separate myself. I’m almost always running in the gaps between big groups of people.
  • The most distinctive, and perhaps magical, experience I had running in a pack was during the 2014 TC 10 Mile. It was about 10 minutes into the race, when the sun was just rising and the air was still and calm. As we entered a tunnel, all packed together, we ran in unison, our feet shuffling the same rhythm at the same time. Really cool.
  • The idea of being swallowed by a pack reminds me of watching the Tour de France, which is one of my favorite things to do in July, as the peloton finally catches a group of riders who have broken away in the hopes of winning the stage. One minute the riders, usually 2 or 3, are their own small pack. The next, they’ve disappeared, absorbed by the mass of bikers all biking together like a giant snake.
  • Big groups of runners aren’t usually the problem. It’s the handful of arrogant and unprepared dipshits who are the problem. I recall reading one of Kenny Moore’s essays about running in the 1972 Olympic Marathon. In the first mile, Moore is tripped by an inexperienced runner who is running too fast and too close to him. Moore falls but manages to get up, only slightly bloodied.

Hover over the third paragraph to reveal an erasure poem.