Common Measure - A poem + some important news!
A poem + some important news!Stay til the end for the announcement and, um, sorry for being late today.“Technical difficulties” caused me to not send this this morning. Please accept this poem as an apology.AthleisureClothes no longer match the bending trees No longer are bent by the wind or bend Except at joints, where knees and elbows flex Against the skin, no longer blending in Neither with shape, nor colour, being Sky blue and neon orange, bleeding Out from their surroundings like a scar In the real, queued to be healed. Unlike a painting, capturing a park Both overpopulated, but along the Seine, The neutral tones that dress the painter’s corpses Seem bent like nature, echoing the copses. ExplanationI was walking in Rattray Marsh when I noticed how distantly the clothes that my fellow hikers were wearing resembled the natural world of which they were made. It seemed to me that the clothes in Georges Seurat’s painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (Fig. 1), tracked nature more closely than does modern athleisure garb. The pants and skirts were more like tree-trunks; the parasols more like foliage; the clothing’s colours more telluric. At Rattray meanwhile, I was struck to notice Pikachu-yellow hats, orange tops, and neon-blue elastic pants. It would have been like a birds’ plumage, but the shapes were so unwieldy that the resemblance was lost. Two excellent colours to bring with you on a forest hike are neon orange and blue. Why? Because they are not likely to be present on a forest floor, so you will stand out if you need rescuing. It seemed like everyone at Rattray Marsh was adhering to this advice; I, somewhat conservatively, lamented the loss of the more organic colours and shapes worn by the figures, the ghosts of Seurat’s painting. Today, walking clothes are definitely more functional, but also uncanny. Metal zippers and plastic hooks hang from even the most pastoral Fjällräven clothing lines. As we get better at manipulating nature, our creations resemble it less. Fig. 1. LessonBring neon orange or blue items with you (clothes, trash bags, whatever) if you go on a serious hike. AnnouncementI am very pleased to announce that Common Measure will be featuring poems, with brief commentary, by Monroe Lawrence in the coming months. I will be sending out the first of two late in August, and another in the Fall. I am thrilled to bring you another voice in this publication, especially that of such a talented author. Please familiarize yourself with Monroe’s work:Vi Khi Nao interviewed him in July His book with the Elephants Press, 2021 Stay tuned for Monroe’s forthcoming poems!Scansion & Vocab
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Key phrases
Older messages
Photographs when no one's watching 📸
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Learning about someone through their digital artifacts.
Friends, I missed a week.
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
There is now a Mrs. Common Measure 💒.
Self-Reliance
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Others won't always be there, but you always will.
Perception 👅
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Trying to get the popcorn out from between my teeth.
No one writes in meter anymore
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Newsletter lucky number 13 from Common Measure.
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