mimsy and outgrabe

Sunrise as viewed from my deck. Not bad! I took a break from the blog when I traveled with the kiddies down to Virginia at the end of June, and then never quite returned to it after we came back. Part of this is because I've been busy with making/going to doctor's appointments that SHOULD have taken place during the school year, chipping away at the clutter in my house and attempting to right all the wrongs in my housekeeping habits, and sometimes actually working on those writing projects I mentioned a month ago.  But also: I just haven't had as much to say. I'm feeling a little quieter. I kinda want to curl up and disappear from the world. And by world I really mean people. I'm rethinking/revising not only the way I write but the way I approach the different facets of my life all the time, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed, as if talking about those changes will put them all in jeopardy. It's a crazy-person kind of paranoia, really. I mean, somet...

Get yer minds out of the gutter, folks! "It" refers to one's self, one's consciousness, the essential voice that one shares with the world when one publishes a poem, or an essay, or an article -- or an essay on poetry printed in a journal, such as this one by my friend Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books last week. I love this essay. It's beautifully written, introduces me to poets I was not familiar with previously, and speaks to an issue that's timely and relevant. Also, and more importantly, I think it does what an essay should do, which is similar to a function of poetry: to raise a question that weighs on the mind of the writer, to reflect on that question, to explore that question. It may or may not answer that question, but you follow the writer's process as he or she thinks . (This idea -- of the essay as a mode of thinking -- is the most difficult to teach in Freshman Comp.) Of course, as I said above, the author i...