"And perhaps what one learns most is how alike they are in their
dailiness, human exchange and emotions, and how societies that might appear so different are really so very much alike."
When Indigenous people--both Native and Palestinian-can take such joy in the
dailiness of life, their land and freedom are not commodities that can be easily taken away.
I was ready for almost anything, except "Hi." The
dailiness of it.
In case my handwriting is not legible, the poem, titled "JCF in Alamar," reads: "torture is visible up / on his face as / is the ecstasy that / on occasion visits him / he has stepped out / side of any typical /
dailiness & is thus // most observant of each / day having within it / no routine for food / sleep no owned place / to be it is / a bright & painful / (he is there) light" (Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27), 55).
Galt, Jarrell argues, is a forerunner of Karl Ove Knausgaard in his preoccupations with writerly process,
dailiness, and detail.
Having done extensive work on Woolf's diaries myself, I have often found it easy to get lost in a text which seems to have no real order apart from the
dailiness of its structure, and one of the best things about Lounsberry's approach is her ability to impose order on apparent chaos: she chooses to see Woolf's diary as divided into three major periods--early, middle, and late--and rather interestingly frames her argument with analysis of the published diaries Woolf read in each period.
The poems of this collection are grounded in the quotidian--ashtrays, handkerchiefs, the timbre of a village accent "good for reading, singing, and seduction when I drink." Emanating from these artifacts of
dailiness, Zaqtan poses the question that best defines his poetics, captured in the epigraph to The Heroism of Things, which is included in this collection: "I'm mystified / how do I / rearrange the poem / everything's been said."
Ashbery will evade you, charmingly, but he'll usually wait around the corner for you to catch up, perhaps with some funny-melancholy bit of
dailiness:
Let us rejoice that she is now liberated from the world of pain and suffering, from the
dailiness of deadlines.
Ulrich concludes that "it is in the very
dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious
dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies....