It's metaphysical

Plans!

1. Metaphysical Fortune Cookies
   an idea for a volume of fortune cookie messages like "you may not be who you think you are"  It is a challenge to make poetry this way, but I'm sure it can be done.

2. Read the Metaphysicals (Traherne, Vaughan, et al. They are on my mental syllabus for the semester, but I haven't gotten there yet. They are essential.

3. the Kafka Adaptation - lots of plotting and thinking so far, but small progress

4. Aesthetics! Phenomenology! I am still in progress on these two topics as related to poetics.  As Liz Camp, from Rutgers noted I am in the mainstream of philosophers through the ages in my slight progress in the area of aesthetics.

5. More sonnets and triolets, hybrid verse and prose.

6. More reading in the Romantics, Catullus, Greek playwrights, and post-modern classicists.

HD, Edna, ee, Bobby Burns and the continuing saga

This week I have read a lot of modernist poetry, notably the poems of HD (Hilda Doolittle), who seems less a modernist than a thorough-going classicist (Ancient Greek influence, mainly). She was called an "Imagist" and a "Vorticist", but I really don't get those labels. Her poems on Cassandra, Helen (of Troy), Calypso and the Sea GodsMare much more firmly classical.  Her poetry really grabs you and its hard to see why she wasn't rated highly with her contemporaries: Pound, ee cummings, Millay, Yeats. Her poetry is pretty hard to find, but I did find her collected poems at the local library.  She had a volume, Sea Garden, that is incredible, describing shore life, mainly in short lyrics. I give it an A+.

ee and Edna have also been on the list this week, reading more sonnets. They were both convincing, of course: ee cummings with experimental sonnets, Edna with the traditional lyrical love sonnets.

Bobby Burns is so rhapsodic and vigorous and his dialect poems evoke late 18th Century beauty. Actually, there's nobody like Burns. Maybe Sir Walter Scott, a little bit.  I shouldn't say that until I blaze through a Scottish anthology or two, but he seems pretty primal.  When he goes on about the bonnie Doon and Wallace, you really are plugged into the deep Scottish State, as it were, but musically and emotionally so. I can't read him aloud, I always get choked up. Beautiful, beautiful stuff and a direct connection to my late father-in-law. I read Burns to him the night before he passed away. That's a really indelible memory and feeling.

I'm thinking I need to communicate more than by email with my adviser, so will request that once my latest work packet is returned.

It seems hard to believe that my Master of Fine Arts in poetry would cause me any doubt, but it did this past month. Of course, I pushed on through it and am charging right along.

Yesterday I sent in my third packet of work to my advisor (a week early) and sent five or six submissions to literary magazines. I also applied for a prosody online course with a couple of great poets. Today I am working on a chap book (60 page book) of poetry to submit to the Omnidawn contest.  I easily have 60 5x7 pages to put out there. I'm going to send a bunch of triolets, sonnets, micropoetry and other poems and see what happens. I really like the poets I have experienced on Omnidawn, so uh, whatever.

This morning I wrote 5 or 6 poems I'm pretty happy about and revised a few from yesterday.

Woot, as they say.

Just got back from the AWP Conference yesterday, four days of poetry. This was in Tampa. I had a minor accident in the rental car a couple of blocks from the conference which shook me up. Other than that the conference experience was aces. Of particular interest to me is that I met Dorothea Lasky, a favorite poet. She's really crazy funny in person, so nice and quirky. Her poetry is real dark, so this is very interesting.

I had been considering dropping out of the MFA program due to bang for the buck considerations and this was stopping up my poetry flow. I finally got to the point where I decided I want to continue and the poetry came flowing back. Ha, ha. Poets are crazy now.

Oresteia

Yeah, so I'm moving on to the translation of the Oresteia by Anne Carson, which should be a savvy, poetic version.

Also, I wrote a really crazed dream poem called Black and White about a silver screen B movie siren. It's real messed up, with UFOs, space aliens and a robot in a barnyard.  No predicting dreams.

I am uncertain about continuing in the MFA however. I write so much stuff, have so many goals that it seems like slow motion, writing a paper and 7 poems a month.  I sometimes write 7 poems in a day. Also, it just doesn't seem to be good bang for the buck, $11K a semester. I can go to 7-8 conferences. Mostly, you work by yourself without much feedback, which I can do anyway.