January’s Windows (2024)

I begin almost every month not knowing what I will focus on. I don’t panic or try to force it, but keep reading and thinking and noticing, and usually within a few days in, a theme. Windows came to me on January 4th, when I happened to think about an essay I’d read a year ago that referenced another author who discusses the windows of language. Technically, the initial theme was windows and doors, but I soon realized windows was enough (and them some) for a monthly challenge.

As part of the window month, I spent some time finding and tagging all of the entries from this log mentioning windows — there are a lot! Here’s the tag: windows. Entries tagged had poems with windows and/or my own references to them as I moved outside.

Then I created a playlist of Window songs, which was not as easy I thought it would be, but was fun (I’m listening to it right now as I write up this summary):

  1. Window/Fiona Apple
  2. Window/Genesis
  3. Smokin’ Out the Window/Silk Sonic
  4. Keep Passing the Open Window/Queen
  5. Lookin’ Through the Windows/Jackson 5
  6. I Threw a Brick Through a Window/U2
  7. When I’m Cleaning Windows/George Formby
  8. Skyscraper/Demi Lovato
  9. At My Window Say and Lonely/Billy Bragg & Wilco
  10. My Own Worst Enemy/Lit
  11. Junk/Paul McCartney
  12. In a Glass House/Gentle Giant
  13. Belly Button Window/Jimmy Hendrix
  14. Look Through Any Window/The Hollies
  15. The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)/Missy Elliott
  16. One Way Out/Sonny Boy Williams
  17. Silhouettes/The Rays
  18. The Glass/Foo Fighters
  19. Tip Toe Thru’ the Tulips/Annette Hanshaw
  20. Waving Through a Window/Dear Evan Hanson
  21. Open a New Window/Mame
  22. Open Your Window/Ella Fitzgerald
  23. Fly Through My Window/Pete Seeger

I read through the past window poems I’d already collected over the years and created a list of meanings for windows:

Windows in Poems

  • things viewed from the window most often: trees and birds and weather
  • things heard: music, conversations, wind, rain, the city
  • often things press against the window, sometimes they rattle them — sometimes they press from the outside — the heat, the cold, the green, and sometimes from the inside — children’s faces against the glass
  • windows separate us from the world
  • a common cry: open the windows!
  • sometimes the window is one of many images, sometimes the whole poem is built around it
  • some poets write window, others like windowpane 
  • a favorite part of the window: windowsill
  • sometimes included with window: blinds, curtains, shades
  • window as line/bar between inner and outer
  • window as distorted or makeshift mirror
  • whether the window is dark or lit matters, makes a difference in image meaning — we can see through dark windows, while lit windows reflect back
  • sometimes windows are openings, sometimes they’re barriers
  • enclosing and disclosing — concealing (or keep safe) or revealing
  • more poems want you to open the windows than shut them 
  • window as access to the soul, the spark of life within
  • window as word, as language
  • the divide between the domestic space and the world — private/public
  • the window as opportunity to stop thinking and just be — look out the window with me
  • some birds notice the windows, others don’t — this noticing can be a mistaken belief that there’s another bird on the other side
  • some birds notice us on and are observers, others don’t and are just observed
  • window offerings: a view, fresh air, comfort, a break from writing, in May hornets (J Schuyler), a friend waves
  • what happens at the window: a bird feeds, a bird shits, ED puts her soul while others put their eyes, I write or wash the dishes

I read Wendell Berry’s series of Window poems, which I’ve wanted to read ever since I discovered them last year: 7 jan, 10 jan

Made note of all the windows I looked through, both inside and outside.

Tried an experiment: listen to my playlist while I wrote an entry, allowing the songs to interrupt me. Assessment: I might try it again, but I found this to be too distracting! (18 jan)

Collected more window poems:

Window Poems/Lyric Essays Collected this Month

Listened to the audio book, The Woman in the Window, which was fun and yielded some insights on windows and seeing and not seeing. I like this idea of listening to a “fun” book in the midst of the study and seeing what inspiration might happen.

More Window ideas

Virginia Woolf in Street Haunting, windows (and doors) as the shell/house encasing the soul:

The shell–like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. 

6 jan 2024

SUNG CH’ANG-HSING says, “In this verse the Great Sage teaches us to understand the source by using what we find at hand. Doors refer to a persons mouth and nose. Windows refer to their ears and eyes.” 9 jan 2024

a few more random window references that recently interrupted me on 11 jan:

  • Maria in The Sound of Music: “When the Lord closes the door, somewhere he opens a window.”
  • She Came in Through the Bathroom Window/ The Beatles
  • My Own Worst Enemy/ Lit — came in through the window last night(thanks Scott)

With all three of these examples, I’m thinking about the window and how it’s not a door. And in The Beatles and Lit examples there’s something not-quite-right, not normal, unacceptable about entering through the window. Using the window instead of the door is another way of saying something about your life is fucked up. 

  • unrelated to these other examples, the scene of the window in The Amityville Horror– 1979 (iykyk) — I still think about that window falling on the kid’s hand sometimes. I’m not sure I’ve seen the whole movie — maybe I watched this bit on HBO and was too freaked out to watch the rest?

window songs from 12 jan:


Windows can certainly change lives in all sorts of ways. “Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door,” quips the English philosopher George Edward Moore. “Well,” says Julie Andrews, not yet breaking into song, but you never know, as she gazes out onto those hills alive with something, “when one door closes, another window opens.” She’s opened us onto the window of film, so how best to set the scene? “An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.” says Billy Wilder.

Pleasure and Pane: songs about windows

ideas from Emily Dickinson’s Windows — 13 jan

Rachel Sherwood — 14 jan:

In the center of things
between the pressing of the window and air
— a small space —
there is a meeting that defines
nothing, everything.

magritte and his window paintings, and window as framing absence (19 jan):

The window as an opening in a wall refers to an absence which can be filled – by a material (glass, wood, paper, stone), by that which is seen through it, or by something rather immaterial like light or air. If defined as an absence, the window becomes a frame for its variable content, a marker of difference between what is inside and outside.

Part 2: Magritte’s Window Paintings

Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows, Chapter 6 (Close Reading: Windows), includes discussion of Emily Dickinson’s “We grow accustomed to the Dark”:

Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them–they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window’s increase of light, scent, sound, or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas. 

20 jan 2024

a story about running into a glass door 22 jan.

a window opening versus an open window 23 jan

an assessment of this window study: fun! I liked creating, and then listening to the playlist, and spending some time thinking about all the different ways windows are used, literally and symbolically. So many cool ideas. None of them ready to pin down in a poem yet, I think. I also enjoyed listening to the audio book as a new way to think about windows.

future experiments/topics

  • windows as eyes/ears and doors as mouths/nose
  • open windows vs. windows opening
  • more on Emily Dickinson and windows
  • a month of noticing: windows I looked through
  • collect “tree at my window” poems — even more than I already have and contribute some of my own observations from my windows
  • a list, an essay, a poem about the view from my window