I haven't been writing or even reading much poetry for a while, and this blog is obviously suffering from neglect, but I usually sleepwalk through the summer and didn't think much of it until I started driving home from work in the dark without a line in my head.
I have been reading. Jaques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence gets at least twenty minutes a night, Orwell's collected essays get about half that (gonna be a long row to hoe), and I've read the first eight Anita Blake novels from Laurell K. Hamilton. They're really good, but don't waste your time on her fantasy novels. I've also been watching the Buffy DVDs. And damnit, why can't poems today be just as entertaining and moving as Joss Whedon and William Shakespeare? Joss is no Will, of course, but he's a hell of a lot closer than Seamus Heaney is.
Part of the problem is that most poets, myself included, don't tell stories anymore. I try to ground my little lyrics in a narrative moment, but a sonnet just doesn't have enough time to really get to your backbrain. No one writing long poems seems to give a shit about character or plot — well, no one is too strong. There's Vikram Seth's wonderful The Golden Gate, Fred Turner's two sci-fi epics The New World and Genesis, and Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool, but only the last is less than 15 years old.
So what's to do? I want to work on something long, maybe in ottava rima, and I don't have a clue about how to get going. Maybe I'll inflict my attempts on the few readers left here. Waddaya think?
Update: The New Republic has a review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an astonishing alternate history novel by Susanna Clarke. This book really started my current disenchantment with lyric poetry. Sacha Zimmerman, the TNR reviewer, quotes the book:
"Such power! Such inventiveness! English magic today lacks spirit! It lacks fire and energy! I cannot tell you how bored I am of the same dull spells to solve the same dull problems. The glimpse I had of your magic proved to me that it is quite different. You could surprize me. And I long to be surprized!"
Read "American poetry" for "English magic."
8:17:44 PM 
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