Reading a few hundred pages of my own work was a very curious experience. There's one limerick (it's actually in my Master's Thesis) —
A fastidious tart named Ramona
Met a lively young man from Verona.
She smiled at his bread,
But instantly fled
When she saw what he did with bologna.
— two haiku, and a lot of poems like this one —
On the Extinction of Dragons
She dreams in summer heat
Of dark-thighed girls
In two-piece bathing suits,
Of smiling boys
Who slide sun beneath
Their skins with oil.
Alone at night, she prays
For wrath, for terrible
Lotteries, and chains,
For waiting alone
In wedding dress,
For burning tongues.
She wakes before dawn,
Remembers St. George
Killing the last one.
She dreams of knotted arms,
Knots her white veil,
Her white, burning rosary.
Maxine Kumin wanted the first stanza to end "Who, with oil, slide sun / Beneath their skins." Twenty years later, I think she's right. And Stephen Spender was right that this poem, while not quite technically incompetent (he was kinder), was a lot of noise about not much. Lew Turco, on reading my first sonnet (mercifully no longer extant) said "You're a pretty literary guy, aren't you?" I took the lesson to heart, I hope. At any rate, at West Chester this year he told me he likes this awdl gywydd:
Arse Poetica
Full of myself as I was
I told a dozen bold lies
About my poems while she
Sat by me. I watched her thighs
Cross and uncross and I thought
"She's really hot for me," dead
Sure when she stood up she'd take
Me, she'd break my back in bed,
And I'd break her yearning heart
With my magic art and deft,
Hard, heavy penis. She yawned,
"I'm not fond of fools." And left.
One of the oddest things about reading my stuff was realizing just how much of it has been seen and commented on by established poets whose work I've admired, and how much I ignored almost all of them except Lew Turco, whose poetry, to my shame, I hardly knew until the last five years or so. Everyone would tell me "this line is a little slack" or "you're telling too much in this poem," and suggest a change here or there, but Lew is the only one who insisted that there were skills to be learned and work to do that had nothing to do with "finding a voice" or, worse, post-modernist nonsense about "the autonomy of the text."
My friend Robert Allen (editor of Matrix) once told me that he revised by casting poems into entirely new forms, and I had Lew's little red paperback The Book of Forms (it's become quite a large book these days). It's cringe-making to read how badly I managed — for years! — what I thought were metrical poems, but Eratosphere helped, and my two stints at West Chester have been an inspiration. I kept at it, and I'm pretty pleased with what I can do these days, though the more I can do the more I see what others do that I can't yet manage. That's actually encouraging, just as it's encouraging to me as a mandolinist to finally hear just what David Grisman does on "li'l Samba" and therefore have something concrete to work toward, and the expectation that when (if!) I can manage it I'll be able to hear yet more to work on.
One thing I'm not pleased with is pretty starkly revealed by looking at the dates of the poems and drafts. I've learned to write almost at will: my wife expects poems on certain occasions, and she gets them; people ask me for a poem and I write it; I announce here that I'm going to write a sonnet a day for a while and I do it. But those dates tell me that there are long periods when I do nothing. It almost looks like I'm mildly bipolar, but I certainly don't feel that way. I don't believe in inspiration, or at least not in waiting for inspiration, but I seem to need some external or arbitrarily self-imposed impetus to do any work. So help me out, will you? Set me assignments — use that Request a New Poem button on the upper left. I've got a few left over from the New Sonnetarium days to start with. Hey Ivy, the Wife of Bath is hard to shoehorn into a sonnet, but I'm trying again.
Laurable's back (hurray!) and over on the left you'll find two new (to me) blogs: Stuart Greenhouse at the world a letter and Jeffery Bahr at Whimsy Speaks. Both are well-written and refreshingly undogmatic.
4:22:37 PM 
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