Bloggiesta: Day 3

Well, I've gotten caught up on Poetry Log postings. I'm happy about that.

I've decided on a twitter strategy:
1. One the weekend find 3-5 lines of poetry to tweet during the week.
2. Post a link to Poetry Log when I've posted something interesting there.
3. Post links to hubpages lit articles.
4. Post a link to my facebook page once a week.

And I've come up with a once-a-week strategy for my facebook page as well:
1. On status, put links to any poetry-related postings I've done for the week.
2. In discussion, put a synopsis of the week's Poetry Log books, including:
A. a general statement about the 5 books
B. for each: Day, date, title, author
C. a statement inviting people to view the posts and comment

One thing I have continued to procrastinate on is signing up on weebly. Setting that up just seems like too big a project right now. I want to move Poetry Log there eventually but for now, I'm stuck doing something rather predictable and one-dimensional and might as well keep it on wordpress. I also want to create an ESL website on weebly and this I need to think through a little better before jumping in.

Both my twitter and my facebook strategies necessitate employing tiny url, so that's a goal that has grown out of this Bloggiesta.

In general, I'm happy with what I've accomplished with the time I've had and I look forward to the next Bloggiesta. I hope by that time I'm ready to tackle some of the more technical aspects of spicing up my blogs.

Bloggiesta: Day 2

Well, I can't call myself proud. I've let too many distractions distract me. However, I am plugging away at the goals.

One thing I've discovered is that writing a critical assessment of a book of poetry really takes me a lot of time. This may be the most important self-knowledge I come away with from Bloggiesta. I'm not one to whip things out. I'll be lucky to complete one critical blog a week. I can hope that the repeated mental exercise will eventually make it easier and quicker, but I'm not going to be winning any races at this or saturating hubpages and thus create a decent residual income in a year. I need to accept my inner turtleness and accept my limitations.

But I needn't necessarily accept defeat. I'm a fan of individual poems and writing about individual poems may be the best way for me add to my blog consistency. Maybe write on a larger work once a week and a single poem once a week. I'll have to play with the mix to see what works.

For tomorrow, my main project is to get caught up on Poetry Log (poetrylog.wordpress.com). By caught up, I mean scheduling posts through the rest of this coming week. I've got three more to go. These are smaller, easier posts than those mentioned above because I'm assessing whether the books belong in our library rather than giving a general review of them. Most of my other goals for bloggiesta are ones regarding thinking about what I want to do, planning rather than writing, so perhaps I'll come close to meeting my goals despite getting a slow start.

Bloggiesta Goals

I'm so grateful for the excuse to concentrate on my blogging efforts. For instance, I forgot I even set up this particular blog space. Today, Friday, I have to focus on paying work. But I've come up with a few goals to concentrate on this weekend (not in any particular order).

Finish first Hubpages article and post

Decided what I want to do on facebook AND make first post of that type AND add this action to schedules

Create a Weebly free account

Decide if I want to use my blogger blogs at all. For photos? For more personal things?

Rethink my use of twitter

Get caught up on Poetry Log (my primary blog) through the end of the coming week (assuming the library is open today and I manage to get out to it for more books)

Respond to a request for a review that came in yesterday

More Frost

Wow, it's been a long time since last I posted. Life interferes too much with the reading of poetry. I'm now reading mainly at night before sleep and only Frost. Alternating two books is unrealistic at this point. That said, I've been finding this collection of Frost a curious read. His earlier work, pre-New Hampshire, is so heavily story-telling that I wonder if in this day of creative nonfiction he would have opted for that genre. Or since these stories are almost always told through the conversation of two people, perhaps he longed to be a dramatist. Was he wanting imitate Shakespeare by mingling poetry and drama? Or converting the dramatic monologue in poetry past into the dramatic dialogue? These stories are quaint and enjoyable to those with an interest in rural life and history but I don't consider them exceptional poems. I'm just starting to enter his more lyrical phase and am hoping to find more poems that move me with more than mild charm, and that charm primarily due to subject matter. "To Earthward" was worth reading twice but strikes me as rather twisted and subdued within the form.

Cruising

I've been reading along slowly in Frost. The hallmark of my love of poetry is not that I see virtue in all poems or am in a constant state of swoon as I read them but rather that I'm willing to read so many that don't move me in the least in the search for ones I do enjoy. I'm bracing myself for a stretch of Frost poems that I expect will be an arduous journey. I'm at the end of selections from the first book and am headed into those of the second, nearly all of which are over 100 lines, many well over. I've never heard anyone tout Frosts long poems. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps they're simply not known or widely read because their length makes them hard to anthologize. But I'm putting on my poetry parka and heavy books in fear of the worst.

The selections from A Boy's Will remained rather light and mostly dull. I enjoyed "A Tuft of Flowers" http://www.online-literature.com/frost/757/. I like the transformation of thinking in the poem from one of assumed isolation to assumed communion, and I like that the catalyst of such a transformation was a tuft of flowers unmowed, how it became a link between two people. And bravo that Frost accomplished the telling of this in rhymed couplets to emphasize the meaning.

I also enjoyed "A Line-storm Song" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-line-storm-song/. It's a lovely love poem about ignoring the condition of the world and embracing anyway, reminding me much of one of my favorite love poems "Love is Enough" http://www.bartleby.com/101/801.html.

To The Thawing Wind

As I mentioned, I enjoy poems of celebration and tribute. The next poem I enjoyed in the Frost collection was "To The Thawing Wind" www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=155, which is also an invocation. I like the pace of it. He started with a couple of tetrameter lines but the rest of the poem has seven syllables per line. Each line is a command and begins with a heavy beat before falling into trimeter (this is the sort of thing I wouldn't normally notice without slowing down and wondering whether 7 syllables was a shortened tetrameter or an extended trimeter). I also like the end of the poem which expresses the poet's desire to be turned out of doors, to leave the insular, isolated life of desk and papers and engage the world. Whitman has a lines of that sort in "Passage to India," ending with "Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough?"

I agree that the ideal life involves both times of settled reflection and times of active engagement, mental vigor and physical vigor. It's a very hard balance to find when work often demands a great deal of sitting on our behinds in confined spaces. For Frost, at least during the times he's writing about in this period, weather dictated whether or not he was active, spring obviously being an invitation to go out. At present, here in Alabama, the cool fall weather does the same for me but work and the shorter days keeps me from enjoying it as much as I would otherwise.

One has to wonder what the most congenial vocation is for a poet. It's generally considered the academic life where their craft is considered a legitimate activity and where they can commune with other poets. Presumably, it also allows more time to practice one's art, though I know writer-academics who would dispute that. But it seems to me the academic lifestyle overemphasizes the contemplative aspects of life. Perhaps the poet, if teaching is to be his or her profession, would be better off teaching recreation. Or leave behind academia entirely, get a degree in finance or some other profession that allows you to make so much $ per hour that you only have to work 20 hrs per week and the rest of the time spend in pursuits invigorating to either mind or body in whatever ratio most benefits you. Frost's farming life is far from ideal since living by the demands of seasonal work creates extremes.

This strikes me as a serious issue that isn't given enough attention, this problem of how to create a life that is congenial to one's art. Academics tend to espouse academia or teaching of some kind but we all know there are more English majors and MFAs being unleashed on the world than there are positions for them to fill. The problem of a secondary profession needs to be brought up earlier to those with an economically self-destructive leaning toward poetry, a specialized career counseling. The best I've encountered so far is Carol Lloyd's Creating a Life Worth Living. But most people won't do the work in a book without the support of a leader or group. I encourage anyone with artistic leanings to get this book and go through it with another artist with the intention of continually using her approach to fine tune your direction in life until you've got something that works for you, your art, and your bank account.

Culling

Over several months this past year, I went through a large pile (almost a ream) of photocopied poetry I'd collected over the years, culling almost all of it. I decided I would only keep those that were satisfying both in language and in meaning for me, or which affected me very strongly because of the use of language or the meaning. Much as I like the linguistic fireworks of Albert Goldbarth, I saved only one of his poems. In fact, it was reduced to a pretty thin pile which I've been typing into my computer so that I can ditch the paper copies. And reading over what was left, I realized I probably should have culled even more but left well enough alone.

It is with this new stricter standard in mind that I looked over selections I'd marked in the first 250 pages of the anthology of world poetry (which is a 1250 pg tome) and found much wanting. Quite a bit of what I marked amused me and much of it was out of sociological interest--I found it interesting and amusing that we shared such similar sentiments with ancient Romans.

By Martial:

You are a stool pigeon,
A slanderer, a pimp and
A cheat, a pederast and
A troublemaker. I can't
Understand, Vacerra, why
You don't have more money.

tranlated by Kenneth Rexroth


On a gentler note, from ancient India, by Prakrit:

Lone Buck
in the clearing
nearby doe
eyes him with such
longing
that there
in the trees the hunter
seeing his own girl
lets the bow drop

Translated by Andrew Schelling


But I find that what moves me the most both from among the poetry in my collected ream and from those circled in this volume are those of tribute or celebration, poetry with either a touch or a load of the ecstatic.

By Propertius:

O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again

How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a love cave, around her face. Return and return again.

Translated by James Laughlin, this goes on to list other details of intimacy with that refrain.

And I like poems of artful and powerful clarity such as this one, also by the Indian Prakrit:

These women plunder my husband
as if he were plums
in the bowl of a blind man.
But I can see them, clear as a cobra.

Translated by David Ray

Anger and the drive to revenge is so palpable in that simple 5 line poem.

There are a few other curiousities and beauties but no time to share them and I feel it's best to end this review and move forward in the book.