Happy Birthday Dear Sieve

Photo by Eveline Ip

It's hard to believe but A Sieve Like Mine turns one today!  When I started this blog, I had some inkling that it would be a useful place to lodge some of the ideas, readings, and images that I encounter in my daily life, but I didn't realize that it would also be a place of discovery as well.

Some of the things that I've realized or reaffirmed along the way:

1. Writing is an act of discovery.  I may begin with an idea of what I want to write or even just an image I want to post and then realize that there are lots of associated ideas that have been floating around in that soupy amorphous subconscious o' mine which then emerge onto the page and sometimes even make sense!  And sometimes when I look through some of my photos for a related image, I realize that perhaps we're less random creatures than we think.

2. Language matters.  When I was in college, I went through a period where I paid attention intensely to the world around me and would scribble down little observational poems on napkins at cafes or wherever.  It makes sense given that I was an English major and was doing a lot of reading and study of literature and poetry at that time.  Over the years, though I still enjoy reading good literature, I have gravitated more towards reading non-fiction and focusing on ideas rather than the language used.  So when I first noticed that "poetry" is the first thing that comes up in my cloud of tags, I was surprised.  I don't consider myself a poet or even much of a wordsmith, but like anything else, the more you pay attention, the more you see.  So that's been a lovely discovery.

3. I am shallow.  I know there's a lot of blogs out there that focus on just one thing (the appearance of a lowercase L on a sign that is otherwise all capitalized, for example) and that enables the writer to really explore that one topic in depth and to create a community of folks that all eat, live, and breathe cooking, design, photography, travel, etc., and I love reading those blogs.  However, I get bored much too easily with just one topic.  Some people like to go deep; I guess I'm just really shallow.  And that's okay with me because this fits my 2012 goal of having no deep thoughts.  (My co-worker Keith thinks that I'm thinking too highly of my 2011.)

4. Humor matters.  Humor is my second most used tag, which makes me happy because if I'm going to take the time to write a blog, at least it can amuse me and my one follower (yay, Ingrid!).  In honor of Sieve's birthday, I'm combining my top loves, poetry and humor, and presenting two Billy Collins poems.  I can't believe that in a year, I've only posted one of his poems.  But that's alright; these two poems on forgetfulness are perfect for Sieve's one year birthday.  This is one of my favorites lines from his poem about forgetting the lines of a poem he meant to write: "they are gone forever, a handful of coins dropped through the grate of memory"--he gets the sieve!

Lines Lost Among Trees

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place –
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in the back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of the syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem –
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

--Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightening

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

--Billy Collins from The Art of Drowning

To find out more about this funny and profound man, check out Billy Collin's interview.  My friend once described him as the Seinfield of poets, which methinks is an apt analogy.  I especially love how he says in this interview that when he's writing, "I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me."  I told my students to give that a try next time they're writing a paper for class.