Rubens

It's turned cold here, around freezing, with a bit of snow in the air, but nothing on the ground. The church had its all-night vigil, so it was earplugs and window barely open (but open nonetheless). Yesterday sat and read the paper in the park until the guardians whistled everyone out at 4:30 pm, as the birds (lots of parakeets around the persimmon tree--apparently they are becoming a nuisance, saw lots in London along the Regent's Canal towpath, too), then stopped in at the Rubens (royal portraits) show, which was warm and cosy and full of people. I thought the most interesting paintings were a self-portrait, the last painting on the way out, and a Valasquez life-size painting of Philippe 4th in hunting attire--all warm shades of brown--with a wonderfully painted dog. I recall from the Prado how much Valasquez likes dogs--better than kings, one suspects.

Lunchtime. Been reading Ashbery, Houseboat Days. Am on last year of Woolf's Diaries and dawdling. Sinead Morrissey, Douglas Dunn, still. Bonnefoy's interviews about poetry and painting.

AR Ammons

Always a favourite poet of mine. This from a New Yorker review I just came across, which I post, because I identify with the problems evoked, this week:

. . . we tie into the
lives of those we love and our lives, then, go

as theirs go; their pain we can’t shake off;
their choices, often harming to themselves,

pour through our agitated sleep, swirl up as
no-nos in our dreams; we rise several times

in a night to walk about; we rise in the morning
to a crusty world headed nowhere, doorless:

our chests burn with anxiety and a river of
anguish defines rapids and straits in the pit of

our stomachs: how can we intercede and not
interfere: how can our love move more surroundingly,

convincingly than our premonitory advice

Derain, Malani

I went to the Centre Pompidou yesterday afternoon, as much for a walk as to see the current Derain exhibit. I have a membership card, so it's easy to wander around, in and out of galleries, without having to consider whether or not to buy a ticket to the current show and whether to spend an hour there or 20 minute or two hours,

So I spent probably about an hour, asking, as the show itself asks, why Derain, so obviously gifted, never pursued his gifts into the first rank of painters of his period. There was the Fauve thing, but it wasn't enough, or durable enough, of an innovation to raise him to the level of his friends, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, although Picasso borrowed some of his ideas and built on them. Rooms and rooms of Matisse-ish paintings, and why and what did Matisse do that Derain didn't? Less innovation, less exploration, less intellectual structure? He went to Chatou, to Le Pecq, painted the banks of the Seine, stollers; then he went to Collioure, he went to Estaque, he loved the Mediterranean light. It was lovely, but same-same-ish, not provoking, except in trying to define what wasn't there.

Then I spent a little while in the Contemporary collections, recently re-arranged; there was a show devoted to an Indian woman, Nalini Malani, very politically engaged, hot and cold. A Basquiat I liked too.

The Hotel Eden

Is it crazy to have agreed to do a new collection of poems so soon after the last? When the offer came, I was surprised and doubted I had enough poems. On the other hand, I didn't want to turn the opportunity down, so I assembled everything I had and thought about whether it could all be viable by the beginning of 2018. I decided to risk it. The chance might not come again. I think it's going to be ok but--well, I hope it is. Right now I'm reading a wonderful new collection by Sinead Morrissey, On Balance, which I picked up in London at the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney. I like it a lot, better I think than her previous book, though I must read that one again in the light of this one--perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood.

Also working on a review of August Kleinzahler for the TLS. Just about done with that. Tinkering. I like the tinkering stage of writing, probably let in go on for too long. 

About the new book. I had to do a lot of writing for it, in a very short time, and I'm wondering whether that isn't a good stimulus rather than being hasty.

Just came back from a run around the Garden, which ended in a downpour. Now I have errands to run and it looks as if the rain has slowed or stopped. How lucky is it to be able to go out and run errands in the 6th arrondissement of Paris? Would Beverley Bie of Saskatoon Saskatchewan and Vancouver ever have dreamed she'd end up running errands (kitchen sponges, radiator paint) in glamorous Paris? (Sometimes now I think Saskatoon Saskatchewan sounds pretty glamorous.)

(I'm going to attach a second post with a page from the Saskatchewan Archives, that someone in the archives sent me.)

It's Sunday Evening

This time last week we were in London and had spent a lovely afternoon 1) walking along Regent's Canal east to Victoria Park where we had lunch, and then 2) continuing east to the Olympic Park. Today we went to an organ concert (Bach) in St Germain des Pres and then walked down to the Seine and east along the Right Bank quais to the bridge after the Pont Notre Dame and back. We would have gone to Mariage Freres for tea but we got lost in the labyrinth of streets and gave up looking for the right one--rue des Grands Augustins, I think. And home to a Scotch instead.

Yesterday evening we met friends for a drink rue Cler and walked home. I volunteered at the Soupe Populaire for lunch: it was cold and raining and the lunchers were pounding on the door to get in, especially if we were late, as we inevitably are. They could stand in the Arcades across the street in front of the Apple Store, but they don't want to miss their place in line (so to speak; mostly they crowd and push) and the security guards keep a close eye on our bunch. Dessert was apples from one or two of the 200 or so apple trees in the Luxembourg Garden orchards. I snuck one home.

This Wednesday Morning

I am sitting in bed in my daughter's Hackney flat, with a teapot on a tray beside me, reading, writing and intermittently listening to life go by on the street below: a bus drawing up to the stop, letting off, then taking on new passengers, people going to work, children in their English school uniforms (flannels, ties and jackets that make everyone look equal--this is a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, but the majority of the children I see are of African descent)--going to school. There is a tree in the brick courtyard with maybe half of its leaves still. 

On the other side of the flat there is a pocket garden, then a grassy space with some playground equipment, then Regent's canal, lined with canal boats, and with a tow path on which, in one direction, you can walk or ride a bike towards Kings Cross; and other the other side (which we took on Sunday) towards Victoria Park and eventually (we got there) the River Lee and the Olympic stadium. The canal in fact bifurcates and the fork we didn't take goes south towards the Thames (I almost said the Seine).

Plans for today: writing this morning: tinkering with my new poetry manuscript, mostly minute (but enormous to me) changes to one or two poems, but also a book review I am working on for the TLS. Lunch, then I'll put a second coat of paint on the entryway to my daughter's flat, which was painted dark blue, but is now turning white. Later I'll meet someone for a drink and after that a reading in Notting Hill, a trek from here, but a neighbourhood I also know a little because mmy daughter lived there before she moved east, to Hackney, a few years ago.

Eurostar

We are on the train, traversing northern France. Large, flat green fields—beets?—smallish, tidy, new houses like Monopoly houses, or children’s drawings of houses: a cube or a rectangle with a peaked roof, two window and a door. Then suddenly, on the horizon, slowly turning, like a clock whose arms circle incessantly, a wind farm, then another, then they are behind us, dark against the winter sunlight. It was damp in Paris, it is sunny here. Everything is tinged gold or bronze, leaves still on the trees, mostly. Here, right now, a circular village with small newish houses, a spire in the middle, scattered trees, in the middle of green fields or ploughed fields, patches of dark, a pond, some swans, or a river.

Now gently rolling hills, a line of poplars, backlit, some cattle, small roads with the odd car, like a toy car. And another wind farm on the horizon, a water tower, warehouses

London

We are off to London in a couple of hours. I love train trips, I've loved them since I was a kid, travelling across Canada, through the Rockies from Vancouver-Jasper, when I was a student, working at a resort there in the summers, or to Toronto and Montreal, on family trips or on my own: the Rockies, the endless prairies then the rolling hills into Ontario and Quebec. It now seems like the stuff of myth.

We are taking the Eurostar of course, out of the Gare du Nord to St Pancras in London. Even the stations are mythic--rolling out of Paris across the hilly north, villages and towns clustered around grey stone churches, fields and of course, shopping malls and highways; then into London, coming out along Regent's Canal. St Pancras is much nicer than the Gare du Nord and more recent. It's a place people go, not only to catch a train. The British Library is nearby, you quickly walk into Bloomsbury. But we are headed to Hackney where our daughter lives.