ON a saturday that begins quietly, with a penguin-spotted fleece and cold feet exposed to the world, I welcome the true start of wintertime! sunny winter days in oberlin are few and far between, but the feeling of sitting in my pajamas with a cup of hot chocolate glancing at the blue sky and the frozen grass feels me with hope, happiness, joyful calm, serenity, and warmth!

upon that backdrop the world seems to shrink upon me, as my life is captured (or kidnapped) by words, music, recordings, impending travels, and not a moment to think!

yet everything works in two ways. i am optimistic due to the influence of ms. marianne moore, who takes the hallowed theme of animal and puts it to paper. is this the voice of one nishy, i ask thee?

.....
Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the

sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breath and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary? The sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

to it, it may
remain there; do away
with it and I am myself done away with, for the
patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

there to begin
with.
.....

(and so on, much further on)

and back. i wonder how through this whole class of modern poetry, i have really only been struck by two poets, moore and eliot. wallace stevens and yeats and frost all left an unsatisfied feeling in me, and as an admirer of their works, i wondered what this might be. at the end i find myself returning to a common theme, which is that all art might be created either for the sake of individual enjoyment or over-stimulation, or both, and the 2 poets who capture that most boldly in my limited reading of the past few months are moore and eliot (and ashbery, who is not a modern poet.) and perhaps this is a personal ideal, because lots of people love yeats, worship frost, and see stevens as a beacon! but where is the fun, or the driving passion? Philosophy is not enough, but must be infused with humor, passion, love, or desperation, or all of these in one...

lately i have been thinking that i began writing because i was sort of lonely, and now i am a bit lonely without writing... therefore this trip and january mark a new task of writing! food, music, travel, it should all be contained within.