Even though it's a short week, I'm already looking forward to the weekend. I've had one of those weeks where things don't seem to go quite right. I can now say that I have made enough mistakes at work that I wonder that I have not yet been fired, and I can also say that of all the annoying things that your neighbors can do, practicing (badly) the flute in the dead of night is quite high on the list.
The weirdest thing about the bad flute music is that even once it stops, you still think you hear it. It must be something about the way your brain processes the higher registers -- you get tormenting mental echoes.
My New Year's resolution is to post more to the blog. And to pay more attention. I find poetry easy to write; hard to pay attention to. And I'm becoming comfortable with the fact that there is a whole lot of poetry out there that does nothing for me -- on both ends of the poetry spectrum (you know -- super conservative writing program aesthetics, and then super dissociative boho aesthetics). I want poetry with the narrative structure of South American boom fiction -- that doesn't lead you to the end by the hand, but provides at least a few partially obscured trail signs in a language more or less recogizable. Totally inward-looking and inward-referencing poetry is just too hard to pay attention to, and I don't find it enjoyable. When I read it, I feel the same feeling I get when I'm eating a food that's entirely unpalatable, but which is supposed to be good for you. At the same time, I find overly narrative, or overly sensical poetry -- not in a syntactical or grammatical sense, but in a cause-and-effect, reportorial sense -- to be just damn boring. Great. Your dog died. It was sad. Now you're in touch with the cosmos. Whoop. Dee. Do. Like you've probably read the latest salvo from ye olde Houlihan. I tend to agree with her, though. I'm just not terribly interested in poetry that doesn't try to tell me anything. She's mean about it, which is silly, but I also like her rewrite of the Rebecca Wolff poem better than the original. The problem is, of course, that Houlihan's own poetry, at least what I've read of it, which admittedly isn't much, is beyond dull. Instead of leaving the reader in a state of utter bewilderment, it's the poetic equivalent of a schoolmarm -- correcting the reader's posture, forcing us into a completely narrow and thus impoverished experience. I know I said yesterday that I'm read to be a word dictator and oppress my readers, but hey, there's a limit. Try this one. I'm afraid I'm all "bleh" to that.
Update on the teeny press: I am now awash in paper, glue, books on bookbinding, and ideas. It feels good. I've been making mock-up logos and mastheads for the website. Will there ever be any books? I don't know, but the prep is enjoyable.
Also going to do some chapbook reviews this week, hopefully. They're part of the "paying more attention" part of ye olde resolutions . . .
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