April 30th – flying to Texas

There’s so much going on today. Kafka’s America, for instance. Jonathan’s panel at the Pen conference in New York. And something else. So much else. Lately I’ve been bumping up a little against Susan Sontag’s diary. I was wondering how a blog is different from a diary. Susan didn’t get paid to write hers, and she had to die first before we could read it.

The pure whiteness up here. We are organizing a project back in New York called The Collection of Silence. To see what we’ve got if we don’t use sound. Poets I mean. So twenty five of us are not reading at The Hispanic Society on June 30 at 7PM. I have many reasons for doing this because silence means so many different things to everyone. So that's good for a public event. But definitely part of of my reason for doing this is that I had worked on an opera a few years ago – wrote the libretto, wanted to direct it but didn’t. I think I was afraid. But I do feel completely competent to direct a project of silence. I am kind of dedicated to the doable. It’s a huge part of what I mean when I say poetry. 

And I bet every poet would agree that a poem begins in silence though they would probably disagree once it begins:  the poem, I mean. But it happens throughout. In every poem I believe. Silence is shaping the thing. I was in a meeting on Wednesday at the Dia office planning the big silence event. We should have a blog said Barbara. Oh I do have a blog I thought. O Harriet. And so she begins….