{"id":3091,"date":"2023-07-02T19:28:11","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T19:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=3091"},"modified":"2023-07-02T19:28:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T19:28:11","slug":"70-rotten-swans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=3091","title":{"rendered":"70 Rotten Swans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I am borrowing rotten swan to put at the top of my rotation list of favorite images.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the British poet Alice Oswald\u2019s concoction: In her book Falling Awake,<\/strong> \u201cSwan\u201d observes her own wondrously devolving construction as she hovers above herself.\u00a0\u00a0In a 2016 interview in The Guardian,<\/em>\u00a0Oswald said, \u201cjust as a tree can be a nymph, a poet can be a rotten swan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine 70-some rotten swans gathering and living wing to wing in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a week!  Imagine a conference \u2013 Community of Writers at Olympic Valley \u2013 where poets had 24-hours to write a poem, for six days, and deliver it by 7:30am to be discussed and critiqued by fellow poet-swans!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Misery!?\u00a0\u00a0Communal perversity, self-flagellation, dissolution?\u00a0\u00a0A few went the way of the\u00a0poet maudit<\/em>, despairing, scorned like Baudelaire\u2019s Albatross.\u00a0\u00a0Others observed their own emotions and processes hovering outside self, as Oswald\u2019s swan observes her \u201cown black feet lying poised in their slippers\u201d and \u201cchina serving-dish of a breast bone\u201d as she flies from her body.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Others dealt in the magic of metaphor \u2013 this is that<\/em> \u2013 rapt and suspended by the flash in the blank space between clarities.\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s where I like to be if I can, between place and place, spellbound as something is happening.\u00a0\u00a0And hopefully convey the discovery as this becomes that<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Some laughed \u2013 the joke\u2019s on us! \u2013 a took a long, deep, beautiful breath.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am borrowing rotten swan to put at the top of my rotation list of favorite images.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the British poet Alice Oswald\u2019s concoction: In her book Falling Awake, \u201cSwan\u201d observes her own wondrously devolving construction as she hovers above herself.\u00a0\u00a0In … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1296,1293,1241,138,1295,1294],"class_list":["post-3091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alice-oswald-2","tag-community-of-writers","tag-metaphor","tag-poetry","tag-writers-workshops","tag-writing-conferences"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-NR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3091"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3094,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3091\/revisions\/3094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}