My first attempt at posting by mail has apparently gone to the bit-bucket.
The living room at my apartment is painted, but the trim's not up and everything I couldn't cram into the bedroom is in a pile under a sheet of plastic. I can't possibly work there tonight unless they finish before I get home, and then I'd just be rearranging furniture. Even that's unlikely, since work on these apartments is a second job for everyone on the crew.
Just in case the first post shows up, here's a little new content. I used to really like Merwin's poetry, and I worked hard to be able to do what he does. I think I succeeded, at least partially, but the result was imitation Merwin and getting better at it would have meant making better imitations. I think similar experiences might be behind some of the statements from anti-formalists to the effect that wanting to write in meter is wanting to write like, for instance, Tennyson, and behind that odd notion of "finding one's own voice."
But the last 700 years have amply demonstrated that accentual-syllabic verse in English can support any voice and any personality. If I may mangle terminology here on my lunch-break, learning to handle meter, a means of expression, is not like learning Merwin's or even Whitman's line, which are modes of expression for particular voices.
Blogged from webmail, so there's no title.
12:40:32 PM 
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