Day 49 Of 365 Days of No TV (sun)

49

Plasticland writing and printing session.  I've also been listening to a lot of music. 

Lunch with D at Laut to talk a bit about collaboration.  She is a valuable resource (and amazing friend)  and thanks to a lost date - I got to go see a dance show that was like:  Six Characters meets Ira Glass.  Ira Glass was in it!  His version of story-telling with the dancer's dancing.  A section where he interviewed the dancer's and the audience gets a chance to hear their thoughts.  Storytelling and dance.   Groovy!  

One of the stories came from an interview with Donald Hall - a poet who wrote "Without"  A book of poems about the dying days of his wife of 22 years.  Ira had recorded Donald reading one of his poems.  It was amazing.  This piece was couched in the part of the show called:  Act II.  Act II was all about love.  

A review of "Without" 

You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement -- his give and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.