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Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

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Lenore Kandel

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“Our Skirt (by Kathy Boudin) You were forty-five and I was fourteen when you gave me the skirt. ¨It's from Paris!¨ you said as if that would impress me who at best had mixed feelings about skirts. But I was drawn by that summer cotton with splashes of black and white--like paint dabbed by an eager artist. I borrowed your skirt and it moved like waves as I danced at a ninth grade party. Wearing it date after date including my first dinner with a college man. I never was much for buying new clothes, once I liked something it stayed with me for years. I remember the day I tried ironing your skirt, so wide it seemed to go on and on like a western sky. Then I smelled the burning and, crushed, saw that I had left a red-brown scorch on that painting. But you, Mother, you understood because ironing was not your thing either. And over the years your skirt became my skirt until I left it and other parts of home with you. Now you are eighty and I almost fifty. We sit across from each other in the prison visiting room. Your soft gray-thin hair twirls into style. I follow the lines on your face, paths lit by your eyes until my gaze comes to rest on the black and white on the years that our skirt has endured.”

NostalgiaMothers And DaughtersShared Memoriesories
Book:Aliens at the Border: the Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
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“I thought you were all living my dream," I said to the gowns, although in actuality I was speaking to the distant women they represented. "But you must have all been frightened and lonely and uncomfortable, just like me. And yet, you endured. You conquered the enchantments that threatened your lives and your kingdoms. And I will endure as well. No matter how many years I'm trapped here, I will one day shatter my enchantment and find my happy ending.”

NostalgiaEnduranceHappy Endings
Book:The Abandoned Princess: A Retelling of Rapunzel
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“The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia. (It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)”

NostalgiaTrendsNostalgic
Book:The Real Frank Zappa Book
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“I wrote this next song a while ago to a great American singer who died several years ago. I used to bumb into her from time to time at hotel in New York where a lot of musicians used to come. A lot of those musicians are gone. They say the era is over. They say these are now the times of the conservative, the stable, the order. Perhaps that's true. She certainly stood for something that was beyond order and beyond chaos, beyond the radical and beyond the conservative, which is what every great singer embodies. Something that is not an argument, not a philosophy. Anyway, I wrote this song for her a long time ago.”

NostalgiaTrue Art
Author:Leonard Cohen
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“She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen in its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead. So, she thought, could she at last put circles on her life. Slowly she crossed that day, as one crosses a field by a little path through the grasses, with the sorrel and the buttercups waving on either side; she crossed it again slowly, from breakfast to bed-time, and each hour, as one hand of the clock passed over the other, regained for her its separate character: this was the hour, she thought, when I first came downstairs that day, swinging my hat by its ribbons; this was the hour when he persuaded me into the garden, and sat with me on the seat beside the lake, and told me it was not true that with one blow of its wing a swan could break the leg of a man.”

TimeNostalgia
Book:All Passion Spent
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“Nostalgia (noun) 1. The unsettling sensation that you are never able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. 2. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”

Nostalgia
Author:Carmen Maria Machado
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