Saturday, October 7, 2017

10/07/17

best of times for me

Reading Andrew Marvell at Rutgers with Ann Baynes Coiro and workshopping in Advanced Poetry with Evie Shockley.  Along with my weekly workshopping with the US1 Poetry Collective in Princeton, I am in Maximum Poetry Overdrive.  These two professors seem almost too good to be true.  But they are true.

With poetry, there is always the DRIFT. By that, I mean that I start to wonder if I am starting to lose my mind a little bit.  I think most artists and poets get this sensation: that one has drifted just a little too bit far from shore.

Fortunately, my babysitting duties (not the right word, more like babysitting heaven) with my granddaughter Allison Jade Browning, keeps me tethered planetarily. Hanging out with a 16 month old brings the Earthly dimension to everything.  Keep it simple.

Allison, along with the three dogs and their needs and the two parakeets keep things very grounded. I also try to cook several times a week, take cookies to US1 Workshop and watch Larry David on TV. All of these things keep it real.

The poetry deal is funny. Funny. I submit poems and they all get summarily rejected.  So, you get that dichotomy:  write to be published vs. write to write what it is you want to say.  I am definitely erring on the side of saying what I want to say.  It's hard to even consider what might get published.  In workshop, I get some advice like, "Help your reader out a little more."  I am loathe to do this. I want my reader to follow me in my own poem, not the opposite.

There is the constant tug, when I am with others, of the commercial with respect to poetry. However, there is really NO COMMERCE in poetry.  Earnings-wise, like most art, it is a loser.  So why worry?  I try not to.

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