3rd day of independent study.

Adjusting to MFA solo activities after the high-pitch of the residency in Vermont. I seem to have seamlessly entered this new phase - it is simplified by the circumstances of 1) no job  2) no classroom courses to manage. I follow my own nose pretty much and hit the five deadlines for 'packets', poetry writing and critical essay writing.  I could do this in my sleep, but am pushing myself as much as possible to up my game in both areas. I have additional writing goals and also have a pretty significant reading list to wade into.

My first packet is Feb 1. So, I'm looking forward to that. I am tip-toeing into aesthetics reading (and thinking) and working extensively with my journal. I am three days in. Pretty good. Really getting some mileage out of Edna St Vincent Millay.

Reading List  

1. Ovid – Metamorphoses, Robert Graves Mythology
2. King James Bible
3. Aeschylus – the Oresteia
4. Catullus – the Poems
5. Chaucer – Poems (other than Canterbury Tales
6. Sonnets – Sir Phillip Sidney, Shakespeare, Edna Millay: Collected Sonnets, Petrarch, others
7. French Poetry (French Symbolists and others)
8. Ai: Vice: Selected Poems
9. Kay Ryan
10. Annie Dillard: the Writing Life
11. A.R. Ammons: Garbage
12. Terrance Hayes: How to be Drawn
13. Richard Hugo: Triggering Town
14. Larry Levis: Selected Poems
15. Philip Levine: The Simple Truth
16. C.K. Williams: Tar
17. Max Jacob: Selected Poems
18. Nicano Parrar: Poems and Anti-Poems
19. Ada Limon: Bright Bad Things
20. Amy Clampitt: Selected Poems
21. Natalie Diaz: When My Brother Was an Aztec
22. Donald Justice: Collected Peoms
23. Alberto Rios
24. Juan Felipe Herrera
25. Gary Soto: Collected Poems
26. Etheridge Wright: The Essential
27. Charles Wright
28. Garrett Hongo
29. Victoria Chang: Barbie Chang
30. William Stafford: 100 Essential Poems
31. Carolina Ebeid
32. Kelli Anne Noftle
33. Amy Lawless
34. Carol Ann Duffy
35. Douglas Kearney
36. Major Jackson

Aesthetics, Poetics

1. Aristotle Poetics
2. Critical Writings: Apollinaire
3. Heidegger
4. Derek Attridge (Meter and Rhythm, Quantitative Verse)
5. Babette Deutcsh: Poetry Handbook
6. Mary Oliver: Poetry Handbook
7. Ron Padgett: Handbook of Poetic Forms
8. Jane Hirschfield: Nine Gates (Entering the Mind of Poetry)
9. Best: Cognitive Psychology

One of today's draft poems:  Winterfall, shattered sky

Let winter find me if it will

wind snow ice

everywhere

miles of white horizon

gray sky black-edged clouds

Let winter pursue round and around

your silvering senses blocked

to ice-cannon you to a legibility

you were aftering in laughter

where the emptiness is filling up

Let me find winter in my eyes

goggle-clad searching lens-like

thing-unknown thoroughfare time

blurring white sibilant mist

things transformed silent

You do see things not there, really

air phantasms arcing invisibly invincibly

your ancient visions of paradise

suddenly splintering vertically

will you note that you know not

deifications as they pause

and I think you and I know

the nature of things not churning

as snow kingdoms slowly fall

shards filling skies straightening

icily lofting our practical sheets

like a waved blanket over a bed