june 24/RUNSWIM

4.1 miles
river road path, north/south
66 degrees
humidity: 78%

What a great run! Partly because I felt good, but mostly because I was able to hold onto some thoughts about my poetry and then, 2 miles in, had a breakthrough about my larger goals in writing and how they connect with my earlier intellectual work. I had planned to run 4 miles without stopping but when the idea came to me I decided I should stop at 3 miles and record my thoughts on my phone. I did and then ran another mile. When I stopped the second time, I recorded a few more thoughts into my phone.

Here’s the transcript:

My poetry comes out of decades of work on an ethics of care and curiosity…a pedagogy and poetics of care…fundamental to the care is both the disrupting of knowing and vision and the posing of alternatives, other senses, other motivations for caring and curiosity. Not to know and to dominate but to feel and experience and that connects in with my vision problems and my earnest efforts to both explore the alternatives and to play and trouble the idea of knowing anything with my vision which often leaves me ignorant or produces fantastical or unreal images. That is what this project is all about, it is undergirded by this poetics and pedagogy and ethics of care as paying attention, being aware, being curious.

I’m interested in how our senses get disrupted and this ability to know becomes impossible or distorted through cone dystrophy or through running or swimming of walking or moving. How this impacts what we feel and know and what we can know, how we know it. And some of this exposes the inability to ever really know or the undesirability of striving to know, but it also opens up new ways of knowing and thinking and being that breathe and move.

Cool. I need to work on this stuff some more, but it’s a good start!

This morning it’s overcast. Rain is coming. Thunderstorms this afternoon. Everything is dark and green and out of focus. Soft, not sharp. Fuzzy. Saw several people parking under the lake street bridge and walking down the road to the rowing club. Will I get to hear some rowers on the river? (No.) Caught glimpses of the river through the trees. With all the green up above, you could run miles on this trail and forget that the river was below. Was able to greet the Daily Walker. Encountered a few dogs and their humans. No man in black–does he walk earlier in the summer? Or is he on vacation? Encountered several runners, one flashed a big smile as a greeting. Running by the construction site for Minnehaha Academy, upper campus, I thought about when the old building exploded 2, or was it 3?, years ago.

The Rules
Leila Chatti

There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we can agree
we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now realizing

they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem
are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.

You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing whatever
they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—forgive me,

I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional
pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking

as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take place
at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing moment

of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and everyone in it is still
at work. This poem has no children; it is trying

to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or fairy tales,
no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers, no mothers—God,

no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit
it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no body

referred to as the body, no one
dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty

okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists
calling a thing what it is. So what

if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I mean. Oh hell, before

something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them all.

I love this poem. Unsentimental sleet? So great.

swim: .68 miles
1200 yards/4 small loops
big beach, lake nokomis

Went swimming at the big beach this afternoon while Scott ran around the lake. Cold(er) and windy but still great. I love swimming gin the lake. As always, a little unsettled, wondering what fish are swimming below me. It was only 70 degrees with a few random showers, so I had the lake to myself, except for a few kayakers and paddle boarders.