verve

I have been sitting here all night, fighting with the internet, chatting with a poet friend/classmate on facebook, watching Grey's episodes online (when the internet is working)and now it is 11:56, past my bedtime, and I'm not sleepy, but I am tired, and I do have to get up in 5 or 6 hours depending on whether or not I want my hair to look decent tomorrow, but I haven't done any of my homework/grading, and I've figured it's safe to put some of it off until tomorrow night or the next night, but a lot of it (writing a sonnet, revising a poem, reading some Dante) needs to be done by 3pm tomorrow, and minus the time I'll probably spend sleeping, I only have 3 free hours between now and then and usually trying to write in fixed form takes me a really, really long time, and I keep thinking that Anne said I don't have to write the sonnet because I did okay on the sapphics, but it would be good for me anyway, and I'm wondering what's up with this never-ending run-on sentence?

I took my birthday weekend off, officially, but the truth is I've been phoning it in for a couple of weeks. Why? Who knows. Winter doldrums kicking in early? Mid-semester burnout? General laziness? Can't quite put my finger on it. Just know I haven't had much verve lately.

Speaking of verve, Anne also told me my poems have no intensity/focus/urgency. I'm supposed to be revising to find the moment of urgency/intensity/focus that is at the root of each draft. When she said this to me last week, it sounded profound and right and productive and now it just feels heavy and sad and impossible. Oh, she also said I have a small vocabulary. boo.

and now I'm good and depressed and ready for bed. I'll do what I can tomorrow and what doesn't get done will go on the permanent record of things-Sara-didn't-do-well-enough-according-to-her-own-stupid-standards which I think all perfectionists have except I'm a lazy perfectionist and even though I want everything to be perfect I usually don't get there.

self-pity, it's good for my art.

My new (poetry) diet

So, I had a meeting today with my workshop prof, Anne Winters, who I absolutely adore. Her critiques are often scathing, but she is funny, whip-smart, and an invested teacher.

...but, she put me on--what she calls--a poetry diet. Said I'm not allowed to read any more contemporary poetry until I catch up with the canon. I'm supposed to (re)read Bishop, Yeats, Lowell, plus Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Balzac before I read another contemporary poem. And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. There are more names, collected works, giant novels, etc.

Don't get me wrong. I need to read more classics just like I need to eat more vegetables. But if Yeats = broccoli, then Leilani Hall = sour patch kids and A. Van Jordan = potato chips. Broccoli is good, but some days only junk food will do.

***

PS - I'm sorry for the bad metaphor, especially at the expense of two of my favorite contemporary poets. The point is, these are things I just can't resist.

What I'm Reading #4

I have a short list for some reason this week. I think that means I've been busy.

Winters, Anne. The Displaced of Capital. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Winters is a thoroughly urban poet (she visited class last night and said that to her, nature was a tree growing out of a grate in the sidewalk!) which is something quite foreign to me, but is absolutley captivating. There is something in the way she describes New York city that makes it feel organic rather than man-made.

While some of the criticism I read praised the series "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" above the long narrative poem "The Immigrant Woman," I felt quite the opposite. The sonnets were interesting, but "The Immigrant Woman" was captivating. Snapshots of New York's architecture, of grad student life, of a woman and her daughter living in a tenement, of a friendship that grows and withers--all these things are presented with the right amounts of drama, of detatchment, of detail. I could read this poem 1000 times and not grow tired of it, I think.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Bantam Classics, orignally published 1776.

I'm just starting to dig into this one, so forgive me if I'm short sighted. The back of the book says Smith "provided the first--and still the most eloquent--integrated description of the workings of a market economy." I'm only to the chapter where he describes the invention of money, so... (seriously--he spends 10 pages explaining how much a schilling weighs!)

What's strange here (for me) is the complete lack of political correctness. There are civilized folks and there are savages. People who don't have a specialized skill are likely to be "slothful and lazy"--and it goes on. What he's describing is the division of labor, and the advances that this has made possible. Of course, he seems to be pretty accurate (if you take away the bias) but I'm absolutely at a loss as to what we (a group of first year PhD students in English studies) are going to have to talk about. A classmate of mine who "gets" this theory stuff has directed me to davidharvey.org and Marx to contextualize. We'll see what happens.