Friday, June 20, 2003

Hello blogland. We have internet access in the new house now. It's big and full of boxes. My study is half set up, with a desk and the spare bed on one wall and all my books lining the other, plus two huge windows looking out on the street and another one facing the neighbors. It feels like it's going to take weeks to get completely settled, but Emily and I hope to accomplish a lot this weekend.

Got my contributor's copy of Fence on Wednesday and I've been perusing it. There's some excellent poetry in there by Martin Corless-Smith, Jason Zuzga, Eugene Ostashevsky (I love this guy! Who is he?), Eleni Sikelianos, Sarah Gambito, our own Jim Behrle, J. Eric Schwerer, and others I haven't read yet. What really makes the issue worthwhile is the essay by Kristin Prevallet (who impressed me with her intelligence and passion as a member of the translation panel I attended at AWP), "Writing Is Never by Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics." Among other things, this essay has persuaded me to seek out and read Glissant's book on relational poetics; it's also made me think that this issue of Fence might make a good textbook for my creative writing class this fall. It would expose them to some of the kinds of things that are being written right now, and it would also force them to rethink any preconceptions they might have about poetry as inspiration/metaphysical autobiography/etc. Also useful along these lines are the little essays they've collected from various writers and artists under the title" "'Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Newspeak': Reclaiming Rhetoric and What Artists Can Do Now" in which the respondents were asked to talk about the role of the artist in the face of media hegemony and collusion with the forces of empire. Some of it is quite provocative, some of it is smart, some of it is dumb, but it would again serve to show students that there's more to "creative writing" than mere self-expression. Q: Is it wrong of me to force upon my students a magazine in which one of my own poems appears? A: I don't think so. It might make poetry look more like something real people can actually do as opposed to something only found in anthologies.

I'm working again tonight at the Bookery; Fridays are slow so I may have more to post then.

No comments:

Popular Posts

Followers