In “Time Travel” the opening poem of Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat she writes:
“That winter
of frequent snow
it was unconscionably
cold
and I was also
unconscionably cold, as if
warmth would come at too
high a price...”
I thought, “This book wants to go on a trip to Florida in January,” and that is what happened. My husband and I got on a plane and the book came along and now the two will be forever linked in my mind.
Much later I look up the epigraph by Giordano Bruno, the first European man to conceptualize the universe as we understand it today, foreseeing Sagan’s “billions and billions” of suns. “The light that exists in relation to substance is the last vestige of the light that, they say, burst forth as the first act of creation.” For writing like this Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.
I thought a lot about the price of warmth that week, fleeing a northeast winter, and the indulgent yet boring vacation. I did not bring Turn Up the Heat to the nude beach or motel pool. It stayed on the night table, so each evening I would return to the unfamiliar bedside light, and appreciate the outlandish juxtaposition of reading a book that is intellectual in this Floridian leave-your-cares-at-home space. It made the world of this book more vivid.
Reading Turn Up the Heat is like witnessing a star being created in the vacuum of space, outside of ordinary time.
Danon’s plain-spoken language and variety of shapes on the page, the granular detail of a semi-paused life is her palette. Life is paused due to an illness, the COVID era, but mostly various forms of icy cold weather. There is a husband, cats, a window, and appliances that make noises in a curated silence. This juxtaposes that intellectual curiosity, curated ideas, or, are they obsessive thoughts, weighing the dualities?
The dark humor in the epistolary “Guns or Butter” references a policy by president Woodrow Wilson to emphasize production of weapons over dairy products.
“Dear Someone,
Have you considered the possibility that we will at some unknown point in the future run out of butter?
I am not using “butter” metonymically, but I do derive a small amount of satisfaction from using that word.
But I really mean butter, and I really am worried.”
The “domestic” worry, of house and of country, ends in a punch line that still made me smile on the third read.
As Danon calls it in the book’s notes, the “spine of the book” is a trip to a small village in Sardina. Here she witnesses the ritual feast of St. Anthony the Hermit, centered on a giant bonfire, and several poems in the book consider this “price of warmth,” evoking Bruno’s death at the stake for “intellectual curiosity.”
“always and in
all things one side bright and
one side shadow.”
-“St. Anthony’s Fire”
The star is formed, the world is shaped and orbits around its fiery light.
****
Again, I am in bed in the evening with a book, but at home during a huge summer storm and I am full of doubt and worry. The book is Maureen Owen’s everything turns on a delicate measure.
I am disturbed this night because my alma mater, the Naropa Institute when I attended, Naropa University now, is about to sell their physical campus in Boulder, Colorado, about thirty lush acres and many buildings, which back onto Boulder Creek. I spent 2 years studying writing there, and believed even then that the land was sacred before Naropa became its steward, but especially after because of the college’s contemplative intention. I discover this night after doing some research that the land was acquired by the college in an improbable streak of good fortune, the same year, 1987, as the premature death of its founder, renown Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
The synchronicity horrifies me. I think that perhaps his spiritual presence exists in the sacred space of the physical campus, that his intention for this 100 year project, at the halfway point now, is invested in that land. All of our powerful transformations and creations and meditations that happened there also somehow live there. When I first heard the news and people were angry my first thought was, “Impermanence. Live with it. Nostalgia. Get over it.” But now I feel deeply powerless at this loss. One of my former classmates asks me, “Do you think Naropa will survive?” and all I can do is rant about the failure of higher ed in an email I do not send.
I chose to read Maureen Owen’s book because she teaches at Naropa, though I never studied with her. Lineage was something that was and maybe still is discussed a lot at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. “Owen is my tribe,” was my thought. “so I am going to read her.”
I was enjoying the book in bite sized chunks over the last few weeks. Owen name checks so many of my teachers and acquaintances (Anselm Hollo! Anne Waldman!), it feels like going back to the Naropa that exists in my mind.
“throw on a layer of” delights with lines like, “knobby conjectural” and “raw kookiness,” words that have never before been paired in the English language. It explores the awkward spot of being at a public event, but not really vibing with it:
“and what is really engaging is the
Step step back step pattern of the wooden floor behind
the elbows of the cellist...
no one really comes up to you
as you are leaving the party...”
And there are certain cadences that are Beat, the read-aloud rhythms and solid imagery, building on the page, as in the poem “Theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle”:
“purring of insects their rhythmic
ratcheting hum rolled through the
dry silence of sleeping houses over
mullein & buffalo grass & sidewalks
haloed in streetlights of glittering gold...”
everything turns on a delicate measure answers the question, “Who is inventing feminist surrealist poetry right now?” Maureen Owen is.
But I still didn’t quite have a handle on the book as a whole in the way I would have liked, and I promised to do that by a deadline and I wanted to that and I had to work with what was in the way: “Struggling”, the frightening water-sloshing-over-the-gutters storm, my son driving home in it at midnight, and the question around Naropa, a place that for better or worse shaped my entire life going forward.
When I am sad I play poetry roulette and open to a random page as a prayer to help. Page 66 delivers this:
“What We Do
II
will it be us raining slurping over gutters
marvelous animated slushes of tears because what
we have done will seem so terrible to us we have put
ourselves in the equation ...”
“What We Do” is about the environmental catastrophe happening in real time, sloshing gutter and sloshing gutter synchronicity. In the morning I read that a neighboring town here on Long Island got 9.8” of rain, and a road was washed away. I recall a former classmate’s conjecture a few days before on social media that perhaps because Naropa’s campus rests on the Boulder Creek flood plain that it is too expensive or impossible to retrofit all the buildings to code or insure it. And another classmate asked if that was the case why didn’t they just come out and say so.
In part IV of “What We Do” Owen writes:
“we change lanes look the fox in the eye the fox is not
thinking what we think she is thinking Do not
pet the fox Would we welcome the fox pet us?
We are not earth’s smartest move”
The light touch extends to language, juxtapositions between individual words and phrases are hinged on that delicate measure, as Owen quotes in the epigraph from an article on quantum physics in “Science News”:
“Our best description of the past is not a fixed chronology but multiple chronologies that are intertwined with each other.”
This idea, like the book that follows, is wildly generous, a gift to our “free scattered various” tribe.
Karin Falcone Krieger’s recent writing appears in The Decadent Review, Tofu Ink, Viewless Wings, Hunger Mountain, The Colorado Review and in the anthology, “A physical book which compiles conceptual books” (Partial Press, 2022). She is a master gardener who writes about astrological and regenerative gardening at Wild Working Gardens on Substack, and types poems made to order for lovely strangers on her vintage typewriters. These and other projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com.