Time to do a bit of reading and thinking today. MJ leant me an essay today by Donald Hall, called Poetry: The Unsayable Said. It's always easy to enjoy things that you agree with, and what excites me in poetry is the idea that you are in the business of annexing new territory from silence, and finding words for things that have not yet been expressed.

There was a lovely image in the essay which is as follows:

Friends of ours bought an old house in the country, a warren of small rooms, and
after they furnished it and settled down, they became aware that their floor plan made no sense. Peeling off some wallpaper they found a door that pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: they found no corpses nor stolen goods. The unsayable builds a secret room, in the best poems, which shows the excess of feeling over paraphrase. This room is not a Hidden Meaning, to be paraphrased by the intellect; it conceals itself from reasonable explanation. The secret room is something to acknowledge, accept, and honor in a
silence of assent; the secret room is where the unsayable gathers, and it is poetry's uniqueness.

In other news MJ had a job interview this morning, which seemed to go well. When she got back, we went back into Northport for a cheery lunch where I had a Catfish Po'boy, chiefly because of its name. It was essentially a catfish burger and with my amateur ichthyologist head on, the phrase bottom feeder kept popping into my head as I ate it.

Kate off on a playdate this evening and I had a game of chess with Jack. Although I managed to win, he is surprisingly good for a 10 year old.