I'm at what I think is an important moment in my life. I lost my wife a year and a half ago. I retired from teaching two months ago. I’m within days of finishing my sixty-sixth trip around the sun. We’re four months into a coronavirus pandemic that shows no signs of letting up. We’re in the midst of nationwide protests against systemic racism, white supremacy, and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. We’re three months away from one of the most crucial presidential elections of my lifetime. It feels as if we are on the verge, the brink, the edge, of something. Time to consider new ways of looking at the world, new ways of being in the world. In this writer’s blog I hope to work some of this out and share it with others...
David Duer / July 2020
“I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world.” -Rainier Maria Rilke
“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” -T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among / things that change. But it doesn’t change. / People wonder about what you are pursuing. / You have to explain about the thread. / But it is hard for others to see. / While you hold it you can’t get lost. / Tragedies happen; people get hurt / or die; and you suffer and get old. / Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. / You don’t ever let go of the thread.” -William Stafford, “The Way It Is”
“I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying.” -Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence
“These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.” -Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one one remembers it in order to recount it.” -Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living To Tell the Tale
"Caminante, no hay camino, / se hace camino al andar." [“Wayfarer, there is no path, / the path is made by walking."] -Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y Cantares XXIX”
“I will admit … that writing does do something to one’s memory – that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things – I don't want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing would empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets
“Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.” -Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
“Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my open life makes no logical sense but exists as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and stains instead of fades.” -Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
“Halfway on my journey through life, / I found myself in a dark wood.” -Dante, The Divine Comedy
“You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing…. // Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final…. // Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. // Give me your hand.” -Rainier Maria Rilke, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” -Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
“Remembering the past is … a way of believing that this moment will someday be the past. Which is to say, nostalgia for the past is also a way of being in the future…. I find it useful to turn to [the] distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia. While restorative nostalgia wants to recreate an idealized past, reflective nostalgia interrogates the very image it longs for. Restorative nostalgia is drawn to monuments; reflective nostalgia to ruins.” -Leslie Jamison, “This Year Has Taught Me a Lot About Nostalgia”
A Memoir and Poetry Blog
I recently retired from teaching English language arts at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. I served for many years as the Washington Literary Press faculty advisor. In the late seventies I was the editor of the literary magazine Luna Tack, and in the early eighties performed with the Iowa City “new wave” band Pink Gravy and with side projects The Monoslab Orchestra and The David Convention. I worked as an editorial associate and assistant printer at The Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press in West Branch, Iowa, until its move to Minneapolis. My work has appeared in Ascent, English Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Little Village, North American Review, and Poetry, among others. A chapbook of my poetry, To Bread (o.p.), has been published by Coffee House Press.
I am a poet and writer. I’ve also been a paperboy, a caddie, a county road crew worker, a roofer, a rough carpenter, a scrap metal yard worker, a Pepsi bottling plant worker, a pallet factory worker, a hodcarrier, a bartender, a short order cook, a liquor store clerk, a baker, a used bookstore clerk, a coop grocery store clerk, a letterpress typesetter and printer, an editor, a hospital clerk, and a language arts test specialist.
I was born in the Rubber Capitol of the World in the year of the soft sell, the baby boom, the fish stick, the tie tack, the blacklist, and the red scare.