Last updated on December 29, 2018
Things I think about wander all over the place. Perhaps you are wondering, then, on a site apparently focused on poetry (hence the URL), why I don’t narrow them down to my thoughts just about poetry.
In fact, I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing about poetry. For instance, what the difference between poetry and prose is, though after several attempts, I concluded that it was a fruitless inquiry. It’s like trying to define the difference between New York and Ohio. Sure, there’s a clear difference between New York City and Sandusky, but the closer you get to the border between them, the more you find they have more in common than not.
I do have a fifty-page essay written for my MFA program analyzing rhythmic structure in poems by Randall Jarrell and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I also have written a lot of thousand-word annotations for the same program, and I might post some of them someday. But their focus is pretty narrow. I kind of don’t think most people would enjoy reading them.
As for what I do post, what does it have to do with poetry? Well, maybe not so much, unless you consider that poetry is everything.
How? Andy Roberts’ poem, “Sometimes I Take Becoming a Monk” (just after my poem “Vespers” in Albatross) says it better than I can:
I think of Darwin as a young man
crawling through the East Essex marsh
on his hands and knees, storing a spotted frog
in his mouth because his hands and pockets
were already full.
Poetry is the taste of the frog.
If you object to this generalization as being too smooth, think of it in the way Richard Hugo writes about sound at the end of his essay, “Writing Off the Subject,”
The fact that ‘suicide’ sounds like ‘cascade’ is infinitely more important than what is being said. It isn’t of course, but if you think about it that way for the next twenty-five years you could be in pretty good shape.
Some of these posts are current, some were written a while ago. Some of them appeared on my previous blog, some never appeared anywhere but my computer.
I’ve edited the posting date to show when they were first composed (as opposed to made public here). I hope that doesn’t upset anyone.
See the sidebar for past blog posts.
Oh yeah, and none of these pieces are poems.
