po-blogs . . .

. . . so I was adding websites for my poetry students as additional resources, and it occurred to me that out of all the blogs I frequent, only two are consistent about posting on poetics: K. Silem Mohammad and Reginald Shepard. (Links added to the left.) Surely there are more out there in this vein, and I invite you to kindly send me in their direction. (I should also add that the resources for my students do not include my own blog, but rather Blackboard for those of you in the know of academic networking.)

And, yes, it also discourages me with this blog, because ultimately I want to open discussion of poetical matters as they are pertinent to my own growth. So what am I working on now? Ideally, my thesis. I am halfway through the program, with one full semester before I have to start pulling it together. I am not worried about it the way I was before. Basically, I have a million poems. (Not really.) I figure I'll just pull out the poems that seem to have a conversation going on with each other, arrange in a way that feels conceptual to a mood (am I even writing in English anymore???) and naturally this will all happen the night before it is due to my advisor.

Please, don't burst my bubble. Let me live in this fantasy for a bit.

Seriously though, we are looking at Levis in workshop. (I think Levis is going to follow me the rest of my time here. This is the third time I've been 'exposed' in grad school to his work, and I am not complaining. I wasn't ready for him in undergrad. There was something off putting about his poems and how they think. I couldn't wrap my mind around them. I was too enraptured with Phil Levine.) The difference with this reading of Levis is that we are looking at his body of work, and how he evolves from the first book to the posthumous one. More on that later.

Once again feeling the push and pull of poetry versus fiction. I am very excited about this short story I am writing. Not because it is fantastic and great, but because I am actually enjoying the writing of it. Usually, I dread the act of writing fiction. (But not poetry - it pleases me to write in that frame of mind.) But this story is working well for me in term of pleasure. Which is what it is all about right?

Long weekend. Already need it.