… in UD‘s Key West apartment has a remarkably good library, and among its books is Auden’s Collected Poems. 

Every time UD starts reading a Robert Frost poem BECAUSE SHE PROMISED YOU SHE’D WRITE ABOUT ONE ON THIS BLOG BECAUSE FROST LIVED ON KEY WEST she gets about four lines in, puts it aside, and reads an Auden poem instead.  What does this mean, doctor?

Anyway.  It says here that when UD walks through Frost’s KW garden, which she’s about to do, she’ll hear his poetry coming off the walls.   Something special in the air.  Here I go.

… UD‘s gotten as far as Caroline Street and been waylaid by the Coffee Plantation, a great find. Excellent jazz piano piped in (Skylark at the moment – I can’t hear the Youtube, but I think this is the piece.), free internet for an hour with purchase (In UD‘s case, this would be a glass of iced tea, much needed. Must tell you — if you’re thinking of hopping down to KW — it can get seriously hot here. Never humid, and the breezes are great, but if you take long walks like UD in the midday sun, be prepared.) The annual Robert Frost whatever’s coming up (Whoops. Just checked out the Frost House website, and the place closes at four! Can you tell I’m somewhat reluctant…?), and I did promise to take a close look at a Frost poem (UD thanks various readers who’ve written with suggestions) as part of my ongoing Key Western Civ course…

You know, Frost didn’t even like Key West.

R J O’Hara reminds UD of this essay by Key West inhabitant Annie Dillard on writing. Let’s see if she’s got something useful for us.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Quelle downer! I’d rather write as if I were living if you don’t mind. I mean, I take the point that I should aim for non-triviality (I guess – though I can think of plenty of essays about absurd teeny things that I’ve loved.), but must we be so grim? And it’s not the case that we’re all terminal patients. Terminal, to be sure, but I understand by patient someone hospitalized. And who says dying people become enraged at anything other than profundities? The classic scene of dying people shooing away well-meaning clergy should tell you something.

She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.

Absolutely. Writers have an intense and interminable relationship to other writers, always circling around and rereading inspirations. It’s important to choose well. You know UD‘s prose obsessions. Feel free to share them.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble… Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem … – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that.

Exactly what John Banville says here. One will always fail. And it’s partly because of this that Dillard goes on to make her strongest point:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Not to be trivial, but UD’d call this the Scrabble rule. Veteran players know not to hoard, hoping each turn for the G that will enable them to make a seven-letter word. Always go with your strongest hand, now.

Dillard’s right that this is true of writing too. Just do it.

This is easy to say, though. The problem of constraint – verbal and otherwise – lies very deep. UD has noticed that many smart and talented people over the years develop comprehensive internal brakes. She knows not why, but there are brilliant singers who do not sing, dancers who do not dance. She presumes this odd repression has to do with the complex balances needed to succeed in other things. Psychologically, you find yourself unable to pursue your brilliant corporate litigation career and play the guitar. Or maybe it’s a time thing. You just don’t have time. And maybe instead of the musical release, you take an easier chemical one — since, whatever you do, UD assumes you need your share of disinhibition…

“[T]he draftsman must aggress.” Yes. But notice how many drafts are about the failure or errancy of that energy. We may want the writer to “magnify and dramatize our days,” as Dillard claims, to “illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness,” but we shouldn’t be surprised when the writer gives us something smaller and sadder.

UD had a wonderful visit from a University Diaries reader yesterday. Chris is a linguist, and over a late lunch at Siboney’s, he introduced her to this distinction.

Turkish is another agglutinating language: the expression Avustralyalılaştıramadıklarımızdan is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as “one of those whom we could not make resemble the Australian people.”

… totally collapsed on Duval, the island’s main commercial street. What with spring breakers avoiding Mexico, it’s madness out there.

Duval North (UD lives a few blocks from Duval South, the quiet end of the street) is always pretty raucous, with cruise shippers jostling frat packs on the narrow sidewalks — made narrower by whiskey kiosks and hawkers done up as pirates. But now it’s insane, and UD finds herself apologizing in advance to Mr UD (he arrives soon) for what he’ll soon endure beneath the noonday sun.

My Key Western Civ course isn’t complete without this notable denizen of the island… But I really can’t stand Robert Frost, and my effort to find ONE poem of his about which I can think of something to say is going very badly… Stay tuned.

“Are you writing the great American novel?”

UD‘s server, a thin young man in a thin cotton shirt, asked her this as he set a spinach salad in front of her at a sunny corner table at Kelly’s. UD had been writing in her notebook.

“Nope. I’m writing about writing.”

“Writing’s hard!” he said. “I’ve been trying to write a novel based on my travels. But I don’t know how to start! How to start?”

“All kinds of ways. Some people just do a kind of automatic writing which somehow if they’re lucky begins to be what they want. Other people spend weeks outlining…”

“You have to know what you want to say…”

“But not entirely. A vague sense of the general point can work. What’s more important, I think, is some particular catalyst: A person you met along the way who moved you. The hats women at an outdoor market wore. Often you gain entry to your writing and thinking through small stuff.”

And often as you lie in bed a sentence comes to you. UD wrote a poem this morning that she likes a lot so far (Ask her again when she rereads it in a day or two.), and the first line came to her as she lay in bed thinking about its subject. Really just a pure sentence-visitation. Can’t rely on those, though.

“I spend half the year here, and half in Catalina. So my surroundings are certainly inspiring…”

“Well, the other thing you need is to read. A ton.”

“I do. You know who I love? Bill Bryson. I’ve read every word of his a bunch of times. He’s hilarious.”

“And a fine prose stylist. Good choice.” UD‘s phone rang. Mr UD, giving her information about his arrival in Key West at the end of the week. “Good luck with your writing.”

“Thanks. Enjoy your salad.”

… Key West, though of course I won’t be here long enough to understand much.

But today, for instance, reading through The Secret of Salt while eating a spinach salad at Kelly’s, I discovered that in fact Richard Wilbur no longer lives here, having decided a couple of years ago that he and his wife were too old to manage two houses. His upstairs study in Key West, he recalls, was “full of airiness and swaying leaves.”

“It was marvelous to go every winter to a place where there’d be plenty of old and lively friends … It was quite a world of writers and artists with whom to enjoy oneself in the evenings. … I’m going to miss it a great deal, not just for its temperature… It’s a place that makes me feel youthful.”

************************

Tonight, UD‘s going to the Waterfront Playhouse to see BITCHSLAP.

When Chris, our guide through the mangroves, said this to UD at the end of her kayak trip today, UD smiled very broadly. She’d been so nervous about going out solo that at the last minute she asked Chris if she could share his kayak.

“Can’t do that,” he replied. “I’ve got to have my own boat in case people need rescuing.”

So against a twenty mile an hour wind, UD joined four other kayakers as they paddled out to the mangroves. The wind settled down when they got to the islands.

It wasn’t the wind and the choppy water that made the outing a bit of a challenge; it was negotiating the narrow inlets through the trees — staying clear of voluminous roots, threading the boat through vegetation.

Once inside the long cathedral the sun-filtered canopies made, UD let her paddle rest. She drifted among the creeks and watched the waterbirds and the starfish. Chris dipped his little yellow net here and there and came up with prickly things and slimy things, all of which he insisted UD hold. Once in awhile he’d suddenly row like mad after a ray or a shark, and we’d follow him and watch large dark creatures ripple just below the waves.

Military jets broke the silence now and then, but it was mainly a quiet and meditative thing, being out there. Once UD calmed down about her ability to steer a kayak, she floated happily above the shallow grassy water. She recalled how her mother liked kayaking on the C & O Canal.

************

UPDATE: For a terrific primer on all things kayaking, go here, to Chris Cole’s article at Nature Sport Central, “How to Kayak – A Beginner’s Guide.”

… by these guys for some more kayaking of the out islands.

UD‘s many quotations from poets and philosophers who lived on Key West begin to constitute a new field of study. Call it Key Western Civ.

Merrill, Bishop, Stevens, MacLeish, and now John Dewey (the paragraph below is from Art and Experience) — all of these islanders evoke the tireless quest for intensified life, and describe artistic creation and aesthetic experience as our supreme paths toward the clarity, exultation, presentness, and sense of inner unity that constitute intensified life.

“To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous, but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present, because we subordinate it to that which is absent. Because of the frequency of this abandonment of the present to the past and future, the happy periods of an experience that is now complete because it absorbs into itself memories of the past and anticipations of the future, come to constitute an aesthetic ideal. Only when the past ceases to trouble, and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now.”

Dewey House, the original home of philosopher and educator John Dewey and its neighbor, the intimate La Mer Hotel are located in the heart of Key West’s historic district on the Atlantic Ocean.

UD has never reckoned with that set of instructions before, and she probably never will again.  But as you enter the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory, that’s what you’re asked to do.

These tubbies are bobbing about underfoot as you walk the butterfly path, and you don’t notice them because you’re taken up with the psychedelic flittering all ’round your head.  Everywhere immense and profuse lepidoptera, with the usual insane range of colors and patterns, buzz you.

No touching, of course, and sometimes you’re close to stepping on them.  You’re not even supposed to reach out to them, but it’s impossible not to.

The same music they play when UD‘s at a spa getting a facial pipes along as you pause at a pond and look at koi. 

The whole thing’s way zen, and UD kept going back in, flashing the little red butterfly stamp on her hand at the ticket taker and circling the path.

Now that much of Florida is in foreclosure, UD has almost decided which house to buy here in Key West.

It’s either 420 Elizabeth Street, or 620 Elizabeth Street.

Neither house has a for sale, let alone bank owned sign in front of it. But all in good time.

420 has a slight edge at this point, though every time she walks by 620 UD wavers.

420’s smaller (UD likes small houses) and so fine. A white palmy house with a wide porch on which black urns display purple impatiens, the place conveys calm and sunniness, but also a sort of classical restraint. It looks across Elizabeth Street to a planting of riotous bushes and trees.

UD snuck down the alley, stuck her nose between some slats, and can confirm a pool.

620 is about the lavish overgrowth more typical of Key West houses. It’s got a much bigger front yard than 420, and the yard gushes green. Island winds whip up the bougainvillea and buttonwood and laurel, and high above them the palms rattle like mad.

It’s a jungle, and UD leans over the white picket fence and shakes her head at the unsubdued elations when the forest blooms of it.  Makes you feel like you’ve just snarfed some hot sauce.  Whoo hoo.

Three flat black marble slabs lie on the pavement in front of a long pier out to the Atlantic.  On each, many names are inscribed.  Between the slabs, smaller slabs quote poetry, or they quote prose.  This one quotes Gibran:

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun.

And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides,

That it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Restless tides is nice, but UD‘s with Leopold Bloom.

Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.