english weather is only good for a few things
a steady, inconsolable rain outside my window the whole afternoon, and inside I am hungering for the sort of sunlight I read about in the many books of poetry strewn about my bed - the kind that etches dandelions in hard white, or the kind that throws soft purple shadows across the garden path. it has usually always been the case that I take a break from reading by reading, and the distance from the academic text to poetry asserts itself like a sort of seesaw. something academic satiates for an hour or two, and I am lost in narratives of urban eighteenth-century Paris, Hegelian histories, post-colonial screeds, feeble attempts at Heideggerian historicism. then the imbalance calls for redressing, and I turn to dear Czeslaw, who weaves Chekhovian tenderness into languid, heartbreaking prose poetry, to Robert Hass's meditations that wring tears from one's soul, to Billy Collins, whose poetry billows out of the page like so many soft white cushions.
but rainy days: rainy days are for pushing those weighty tomes on historicism and Jansenist politics and historical cyclicality away. rainy days are all about poetry.
well, poetry, and gleefully reading up on that trip, which is scheduled to take place this coming week OMFG SO EXCITED