Category: poetry experiment

june 7/5.85 MILES

74 degrees
mississippi river road path south/minnehaha falls/mississippi river road path north

A tough run. I should have, but didn’t, bring my water with me. I really dislike the heat. Until my kids are on summer break, which starts next Thursday, I can’t start running until 8:30. By next week, I’ll be running by 6 or 6:30. It should usually still be cool then. I hope.

This is when my training starts to get really tough. The miles are increasing, along with the temperature. I’m not lacking motivation; I want to be out there running. It just feels hard. I would like to blame it on the humidity, but it’s not humid, just warmer. And, it’s not even that warm yet. So, what’s the problem?

In trying to work through this question, I did the following writing experiment:

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

It’s not the humidity, it’s the heat.

It’s not the heat, it’s the atmospheric moisture.

It’s not the warm temperatures, it’s the moisture in the air.

It’s not the warm temperature, it’s the moisture in the air and in your hair, on your skin, in-between your toes, on the back of your neck. And it’s the stickiness between your fingers as you rub them together, trying to keep your hands relaxed. And it’s the fibers from the cottonwood seeds, the catkins, that fly into your eye or your mouth or get stuck in the sweat on your face.

It is the heat and the humidity and the effects of both on your body as you run:
the increased sweat,
the depletion of electrolytes,
the flagging energy,
the dehydration,
the pumping of more blood to the skin and less to your heart or your muscles,
the sweat that can’t evaporate to cool your body,
the elevated heart rate.

It’s not the heat or the humidity it’s the dew point, the temperature at which water condenses. The closer the dew point is to the temp in the air, the longer the sweat will stay in your hair because the air is too saturated and your sweat can’t evaporate, which is how your body cools you down.

But, here’s the problem:
Today, as I slogged through my run, struggling to stay upright for 60 minutes, the heat wasn’t too bad, only 74—still high, but it could have been more. The humidity was a mere 37 percent. And the dew point? Only 45! The chart that I found online didn’t even bother describing a dew point so low. It started with 50-54, marking it as very comfortable running conditions. Very comfortable?!

So it’s not the heat, not the humidity, not the dew point? Could it be me? Maybe. But, today’s run was no failure of will; it was a test of fortitude. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t fly or breathe in the world or even run the entire time. But I kept moving, accepting, and not resisting, my limits.

It’s not defeat, it’s humility.

june 6/6 MILES

68 degrees
the franklin turn around + a little extra

Decided to listen to music today because I wanted to. When I started this project, way back in January, I listened to my headphones a lot. Then I went through a phase of only listening to headphones occasionally. More often, I listened to the birds and the cars and the conversations and my breathing. I think I’m settling into a balance of headphones/no headphones. I’ve been tagging them in my posts and I have 40 for headphones, which I’m calling “playlist,” and 45 for no headphones.

For some runners, the headphones/no headphones debate is a big deal. Not for me. I like both. Sometimes I need headphones and music or a playlist to distract or motivate or disconnect me. Other times I don’t want them so I can pay attention to the Mississippi river or my breathing or what I’m thinking about.

Over the past 5+ months, I’ve written a lot about listening with and without headphones. Here are two more poems to add my growing list:

Absent

Perhaps
Listening to music
All the time leaves
You with very
Little connection to the
Is: the concrete realness of things, the
Silence and sounds,
The this of being present on the path.

Present

Not silence
Only sounds:
Heavy breathing, sweat loudly
Evaporating
Across my forehead,
Dogs barking sharply, their collars clanging,
People chattering incessantly,
Hardly stopping to listen
Or absorb the landscape.
No break,
Even the gentle breeze, with its constant
Sighs, interrupts.

Skimming through my past entries, I’ve noticed that I’m interested in opposites: headphones/no headphones, freedom/limits, attention/distraction, mundane/sacred, being undisciplined/becoming disciplined. These opposites produce tensions that I don’t want to resolve, but to balance. I don’t want to pick one, the either/or model, but explore both, the both/and model. To fit with that, here are two more poems about headphones/no headphones:

The Purple Banana

Prince might have
Liked how much
Attention I’m paying to his lyrics. Did
You know he sings the
Line, “let’s look for the purple banana”?
I didn’t, until the
Song came on my phone
The other day when I was running and I listened.

The Daily Walker

Now, after years
Of running, I am finally listening! I
Hear my breathing,
Every inspiration and expiration and
All the rhythms as my foot strikes
Down on the
Path. I
Hear the greetings from
Other runners and the walker who
Never misses his daily walk.
Every time I encounter him he
Says “good morning” to me. I never noticed until now.

 

june 5/REST

I feel pretty good today. My strategic walk breaks must have helped me to get 30 miles for the week without being sore or tired. Yesterday I wrote a nonet poem about my morning routine. I liked the poem, but it functions more as an ideal, one that I sometimes realize, than an actual description of my daily habits. Plus, it doesn’t include the various disruptions that occur, especially during the school year. So I decided to add an additional version and rename the poem.

2 versions with descriptions that vary in how true they are: from almost true to mostly true to I wish they were true to too true to not true enough

Version 1

poetic form: nonet

Wake up at 6. Feed dog. Make coffee.
Write some while drinking the coffee.
Eat: cheerios, banana.
Wash face, brush teeth, comb hair.
Put on running clothes
and running shoes.
Go outside.
Walk some.
Run!

Version 2

Wake up at 6. Feed dog. Make coffee.

Get irritated at the dog because she wants to play and I’m too tired because I woke up several times in the middle of the night with restless legs or because I went to sleep too early and slept too long or because I woke up too early, then went back to sleep and had an intense, freaky dream or because I had the extra drink last night that I shouldn’t have had or because one unfortunate side effect of being 42 almost 43 is that I am no longer a “good morning!” person, but a “don’t talk to me (or lick me) until I’ve had my coffee and spent time sitting on the couch, slowly waking up” person or a “I feel regret or shame about some intangible thing that I didn’t actually do and this makes me uneasy until I’ve fully woken up and restored my sense of exuberance” person or because Delia has decided that she will not be ignored and that I will play with her, right now!

Write some while drinking the coffee.

This one usually works out, except for on the rare day when one of the kids gets up early and needs something…breakfast, advice, a hug, a performance of the “Let’s make Mom yell or cry or both” show.

Eat: cheerios, banana.

I also like walnuts, but it didn’t fit the number of syllables that I needed for the line, which was 8, so I left it out. In fact, walnuts are the key to this breakfast. When we run out of walnuts, I’ll still eat the cheerios and banana without them, but it’s just not the same.

Wash face, brush teeth, comb hair.

In a better world, one where dropping a deuce is not stigmatized as “impolite conversation” and where the coffee always does its job, I might replace any of the above with “go poop.” Sometimes I wash my face, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I wait to brush my teeth until after my run. Most of the time I don’t comb my hair, I just put it back in a ponytail. But I always poop. Pooping is an important bodily function and the failure to do it before a run can be bad. Very bad.

Put on running clothes

Remind one of the kids that “it’s time to get up!” in a sing-songy voice that usually irritates everyone, including me, but I can’t help doing. Remind them again and again and again until there are 10 minutes left before school starts. Luckily, this is not as big of a deal as it seems. It takes 5 minutes to walk to the school from our house. This leaves 5 minutes to get dressed, eat and get out, which can be done if the kid is properly motivated. Threatening to take away their phone is usually motivation enough.

and running shoes.

After the kids have left for school, comfort the dog for a minute because she’s freaked out by all of the yelling and crying and frantic scrambling that has just occurred.

Go outside.

Maybe stretch, maybe don’t. Always try to squeeze the glutes a few times, which probably looks funny, but helps prevent hip and hamstring injuries.

Walk some.

“Some” usually means 2-3 minutes. If I’m walking all the way to the river road, which is 4 blocks, “some” = 5 or 6 minutes. But there’s always some walking involved. For fun, Scott and I like to imagine a comical situation where you might get up out of bed, jump into your clothes, run down the stairs and out the door and immediately start your run. No stretching. No warm-up. No walking. Neither of us ever want to do this, but we saw a neighbor run out their door in their running clothes and continue down the sidewalk one time and we hoped that this was just what they were doing.

Run!

june 4/3.75 MILES

67 degrees
mississippi river road path, north

Still getting used to the heat. Otherwise the run went well. In the summer, I don’t have nearly as much stuff to put on before I go out for a run. No extra jackets or base layers or buffs or gloves or double socks. Just shorts, a shirt, socks and some shoes. Here’s a description of my running attire in the summer, in the form of an abecedarian poem:

Attire:

1. black shorts with white trim. Not black as
coal, they’ve faded in the sun. The
drawstring is gone too. It was a pretty bright blue. Now
elastic is all I have to keep the shorts from
falling down.
2. Green
headphones, if I’m listening to music, and
if I am, that music usually includes a
Justin or two: Bieber or Timberlake. My
kids wouldn’t
like me to admit that,
mostly because it embarrasses them. I say, here’s something to look forward to: when you’re 42, almost 43,
nothing embarrasses you!
Other favorites to listen to: Barry Manilow,
Prince. 3. A
quick-drying tank top, either in black or blue. I
really don’t care which.
Sometimes I wear a green tank-top, but it’s
thicker and not quick-drying, so only if the temperature is
under 70 degrees. Otherwise it’s
very uncomfortable.
4. White ankle socks, with an orange
x on the heel, at the end of the word, “Power Sox,” and mismatched trim that is
yellow on one foot and blueish green on the other. 5. Bright blue shoes with
zero swooshes, only coral swishes.

And here’s a poem describing my morning routine in the poetic form of nonet: 9 lines, first line has 9 syllabus, second has 8, and so on until ninth line has 1 syllable.

Morning Routine

Wake up at 6. Feed dog. Make coffee.
Write some while drinking the coffee.
Eat: cheerios, banana.
Wash face, brush teeth, comb hair.
Put on running clothes
and running shoes.
Go outside.
Walk some.
Run!

I wrote both of these poems because I was having some difficulty sorting out all of my ideas about ritual and repetition, habit as mundane or sacred (I also wrote about these in yesterday’s log). I decided the best place to start was to describe some of the mundane aspects of my run, like what I wear and what my pre-run routine is.

june 3/4 MILES

77 degrees
mississippi river road path, south

Another hot and sweaty run. Scott and I ran together today. We were both struggling because of the heat, although running through the sprinkles when we were almost done helped. We talked about one of my new favorite poets, Chen Chen, and his book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. We also talked about Scott’s Stravinsky project. And we were almost successful in avoiding talking about dictators and oppressive regimes.

Before and after running, I wrote two new things:

What’s the difference

between ritual and routine?
Superstition and belief?
When is it a prayer and when is it just proper form? Efficient breathing?
When does a habit become sacred?
Does it need:
a doctrine?
a theology?
hymns about souls and rejoicing and kingdoms and conquering and reigning?
chants about fathers and spirits and ghosts and sacrificing sons?
basement potlucks with seven layer dips?
uncomfortable pews?
getting up too early on a Sunday morning?
yes, it needs this.
Could it be that one defining characteristic of the sacred is
a refusal to stay in bed?

my purple toe

Have I told you about my purple toe? It’s on my right foot and it’s the second toe, the one that sticks out just a little bit farther than the others. Did you know, that this toe, the second one, turns purple? It’s not purple all of the time and maybe purple isn’t even the best way to describe it. Eggplant? I wish it were electric purple or purple mountain majesty or grape popsicle purple. Purple is my son’s favorite color. His computer case is purple. His clarinet case is purple. His suitcase is purple. His school binder, which he dissects and disembowels in new ways everyday—first removing the strap, then shredding the front pouch, then taking out the cardboard insert that helps keep it’s structure, then doing something to the 3 ring binders that I can’t quite figure out that makes them only barely close—is purple. The purple he prefers is royal purple. Not fuchsia or pearly purple or phlox.

My purple toe is purple from running. Technically, it’s my purple toenail, I suppose, but toe is much more pleasing to write and to hear and to imagine as purple than toenail. Anyone can have a purple toenail; just slap some nail polish on it and it’s purple. But a purple toe is special. A purple toe is a sign of a runner. Before I started running, I was unaware that this was a thing: your toe can turn purple. I read somewhere that it’s called runner’s toe or subungual hematoma. It’s also called black toe. I like purple toe, so that’s what I’ll call it, or “my purple toe” or “my perfectly purple, not painful at all, toe.” Is it the second toe for everyone? I don’t know.

Here’s how it usually works for me. After some random long/longish run, my second one, the toe that sticks out just a little bit farther, feels strange. It looks like it’s splitting. At first, it isn’t purple, but i know what’s coming: in a day or two, it will be purple. The toenail never falls off. It just grows back in freaky ways: twisted, bent, doubled. Maybe I should call it “my perfectly freaky purple, not painful at all, toe.” After the nail grows back, it usually returns to its normal color. That is, until the cycle begins again. The “purple toe effect” has been happening for at least five years now.

In the same online article where I read about “runner’s toe,” it was also referred to as a “runner’s badge of honor.” I’m not sure I’d say i’m honored to have my perfectly freaky purple, not painful at all, toe. More like delighted by how it grosses other people out. Or fascinated by its freakishness. Most of the time I forget about it. It’s just a toe that’s part of my right foot that enables me to run—and walk and skip and saunter—without much pain and hardly any injury. It sticks out farther than my other toes. And it just happens to be purple or, if you prefer, which I don’t, eggplant.

june 2/11 MILES

76 degrees
the lake nokomis loop, long

Hot! Sunny! Difficult! Today’s run was not pretty. Well, the path was pretty. The lake was pretty. The many bridges that I ran over were pretty. But my run was not. It was hard and hot and tiring. But I did it, with the help of several walk breaks.

I decided to do my long run today instead of tomorrow because it is my 6th anniversary of running. I started on June 2, 2011. I used the couch-to-5k program and ran/walked less than 2 miles. Today, 6 years later, 11 miles! My route today included the Minnehaha creek path, which is what I ran on in 2011.

I had grand visions of doing some cool poetry experiment with the run: maybe stopping every mile to compose a line. But, I was too distracted and uninspired by the heat. So, instead, I’ll mark the occasion by sharing something that I’ve been working on about the body electric. It’s inspired by Prince (“electric word life”), a pbs show about Ibex and the harrowing lengths they go to replenish their electrolytes (scaling seriously steep cliffs), Walt Whitman and “I sing the body electric,” the movie Fame and their version of “I sing the body electric.” Marilyn Nelson’s “is” and Marie Howe’s “the this,” Frédéric Gros’s philosophy of walking and my own wanderings on electricity and the beauty of machines, developed while running. I suppose there’s a dash of Emily Dickinson in here too (her nobody).

the body electric

The body electric is not a metaphor. The body is electric. It contains electrolytes, that, when consumed, break up into positively and negatively charged ions that travel by water through the body, triggering electrical impulses in the nerves and muscles. Every body needs electrolytes to function properly. They’re found in sodium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphate.

The body is a machine.
Not the body as machine
or the body is like a machine
or the body is only a machine.
But, the body is a machine.
An efficient machine,
capturing energy, consuming minerals, converting air into breath.
The body is an intricate machine,
made up of muscles and tendons
and ligaments and joints and bones
and organs and arteries and veins
and fluids and systems
that work together in the complex process of locomotion.
The body is a marvelous machine,
containing strange creatures
with multiple heads and fantastical names.
The body is a beautiful machine,
composed of grace and exuberance and joy.
The body is a powerful machine,
able to endure intense pain and absorb tremendous force.
The body is a delicate and temperamental machine;
it can shut down from overuse, lack of use or repeated abuse.

This body, my body, is not any body and it is not the body. It is just a body, a somebody who is happily a nobody, running and flying and floating free, feeling the sizzle of the sand under my feet on the path and the howl of the wind rushing by my ears, passing under the shadows of the towering tree in the midst of other bodies, who are somebodies and nobodies as well but who feel the earth and the sky, just the same but differently too. Each of us an I. A self. A soul. A body. But also a we. Selves. Souls communing. Charged bodies with electrons flowing freely. The Body Electric.

june 1/REST

I’d love to run today because it’s so beautiful outside, but I won’t. It’s my day to rest. My right hip is a bit sore and needs a break. And tomorrow is my 6 year runniversary and I’m planning to do my long run to mark the occasion.

This morning I worked a bit more on my sonnet about attention. I tried to stay truer to the Shakespearean form by using 10 syllables in each line. In one or two lines, I failed. Not sure if it’s really in iambic pentameter either.

ATTENTION

is the beginning of a devotion
which can be a form of daily prayer
that you undertake while you’re in motion
running in and through the outside air.

A prayer given with lungs and feet
to inspire the trees and absorb the earth
a letting go to a steady beat
desiring nothing but the rebirth

of an earnest and a loving belief
that has the power to break you open
and to spill out the terrible grief
caused by a decreased sense of hope and

increased apathy, a monstrous twinning.
To end, attention is the beginning.

What I’m Fascinated by, a list
  • breathing/respiration as the process of inspiration (in) and expiration (out). I want to play with these some more.
  • absorption: energy absorption + how Frédérick Gros describes it The Philosophy of Walking: “But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads (85)”.
  • body prayer: how does the body pray? What is praying–the rituals and habits?
  • Simone Weil and attention as prayer.

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.