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Friday, February 27, 2009

Fresh Cut Grass and Poetry

I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile. ~Tom Clark


Spring Training games started on Wednesday and my beloved San Francisco Giants won their first game 10-7. I can smell the poetry and the fresh cut grass now.

Next week I head to Arizona to visit tow of my daughters and take in some Giants Spring Training games. I'm excited even if I am anxious about being away from the office for a week. It is rare that I take this much time off. Okay, more like extremely rare.

Besides Giants baseball, we'll catch an ASU baseball game. In spite of all this baseball excitement, I am equally excited about seeing my kids (who aren't really kids anymore) and I'll likely let that excitement spill over into my blogging while I'm gone. I guess you can all consider that fair warning.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Just a thought...

To live is so startling

it leaves little time for

anything else.  ~Emily Dickinson

 

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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Who Knows the Great Poets of Today?

David Orr writing in the Feb 22 N.Y. Times piece titled "The Great(ness) Game" asks what we do when John Ashbery and his generation are gone?

The assumption made in the article is that there are no great poets living, outside of that generation and I don't know myself if there are or there aren't. This is precisely because I'm not privy to what constitutes greatness in a poet. Orr himself acknowledges the illusiveness of such a definitive yardstick. What is a great ice cream flavor? We all have opinions but can I sell Black Walnut to the public at large a the great ice cream Flavor?

We can look at an Emily Dickinson and perhaps agree on a designation of greatness, but how long did it take for that to become common knowledge. She was dead before it was ever widely accepted, and by quite a few years I believe. So really, we could have great poets among us and not yet be aware of the fact.

Orr asks if great poets are one and the same as "major" poets? What do you think on that point? I'm inclined to think you have to be a major poet to be a great one, but the reverse. Still that isn't releasing the secret ingredient in the recipe.

Digging deeper still, Orr looks at a 1983 essay by Donald Hall in which Hall said it seemed to him that contemporary American poetry was afflicted by modesty of ambition. Going further, the test according to Hall is to write words that live on. To aspire to be as good as Dante.

Donald Hall is among the living poets whose work I respect and with whom I connect with more often then not. Is he a great poet? I don't think all his work would meet the Dante test. So can a poet be great if hits that high mark on occasion or must he have to be consistent? Was Dante himself consistent?

Then I'm hung up on the lament that there isn't enough ambition going on. Are we really wanting hungry ambition from our poets. I know the monetary climate for poets certainly supports the hungry aspect, but ambition is such a sleazy word when it snuggles up next to an art. Maybe dedicated, focused, serious. Perhaps we are really splitting hairs.

David Orr's article is a critical look; not quite so much at the state of contemporary poetry as it is what we internally expect from poetry. What we are willing to settle for. No art is static an neither are its consumers.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Subliminal Mutterings - week 316

Subliminal Mutterings

[I've missed several weeks of this, sigh.  So spank me!]

You say.... I think:

  • Be mine :: valentine
  • Ecstatic :: hoppingly happy
  • Orderly :: quiet
  • Sebastian :: butler
  • Sore :: ouie
  • Don’t need :: unnecessary
  • Rockstar :: Springsteen
  • Tinfoil :: hat
  • Addiction :: habit
  • Where? :: there
  •  

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    Journal bits for the past week

    a few random items from my journal this week...

    Feb 14 - At times like this Alice will sit at a small table/pouring Earl Grey as we sip from miniatures/and talk about what, I never recall.

    Feb 15th -In talking with Meghan yesterday I can tell she is getting excited about my upcoming visit.

    Feb 16 - Yesterdays rewrite of An American Whim  came after receiving critical comments (that I sought) from PB and AD. AD gave me the most critical (technical) view while PB spoke to things she liked about it. 

    Books are scissor stacked/in piles, on end tables,/desktop, the thick of carpet/on the floor next to the easy chair

    Feb 17- Where has this month gone to? Already a shortened month it appears to work against the benchmarks I've arbitrarily set...

    Feb 18 - MR emails me, "you of all people have new stuff and old stuff." Feel like I've been busted.

    The pretext for the afternoon / was as one sided as the face /of Mount Rushmore but not near/as stark....

    It was not with the exchange/of currency or anything so mercantile/

    Feb 19 - was so totally whipped out from work today...

     

    Wednesday, February 18, 2009

    Blue Moon Over Kansas City

    A poet friend the other day was giving me feedback on one of my poetry drafts and in response to something I had written said, "You should read Wallace Stevens if you haven't lately. The crazy things that guy does with repetition and refrains." So, I went looking for a Wallace Stevens poem and read The Emperor of Ice-Cream which I found enjoyable. I then moved away from the poem and began to type. Keep in mind I often begin drafts in longhand. There were just two words that came to my mind and they were, "The pretext" and nothing more. Where they came from I couldn't say, but after typing them from the keyboard with just a momentary pause I began to type again and in relatively short order, maybe 20 minutes at the most I had a draft that I stopped working on. After moving away from the draft for some time, I went back and quite frankly felt that I could do nothing more to it. Not by addition or subtraction other than a change of title.

    The number of times I've written something on the spot like this and could not improve on it are like never.  There is one occasion in which I came close to this, but still made some editing changes. It's not an occurrence that one has happen very often, if ever.

    I may well wake in the morning and find room for improvement, but I don't expect it will likely change much. That's how good I feel about it. Better than some pieces I've worked on over a span of more than a year. It's moments like this that makes all the other eternal rewrites seem worth enduring through.

    Thanks Amy for the advise. How the Emperor of Ice-Cream led me to the pretext and all that followed to write what I now call The Face of Mount Rushmore, I'll never figure out. They are nothing alike, but I'm sure that one lead to the other.

    Tuesday, February 17, 2009

    I've Been Bad

    Instead of writing tonight I watched three rerun episodes of Boston Legal. Does that make me a bad poet? I'm being rhetorical here, a response is not required.

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