(no subject)

So tired.

Mother wants to take a trip with me somewhere this year. She's thinking maybe a cruise of the Great Lakes or a train ride through Canada. I just have to find something.

And I didn't sleep well last night - so kind of groggy and brain foggy today. You know that feeling you get when you've climbed about a million steps and kind of just want to collapse in a heap and there's a million more to go - that's how I feel today?

The Artist's Way talks about cutting out addictions which stymie creativity. Hmm. I'm addicted to social media (in which I include this forum)and chocolate. I tend to jump towards both when I'm bored and restless and depressed.

Started in the 90s and early 00s in regards to the internet and social media. First interaction? Yahoo Newsgroups, I think. I was on two listserves back in the 1990s, both copyright related, one for publishers and one for librarians, suffice it to say they had contradictory ideas when it came to copyright? One group would be fighting for ways to protect it at all costs, the other group was hunting for ways to get rid of copyright and provide free access at all costs. I remember being amused by it. The internet hasn't really changed that much in the interim - if anything people are more polarized on topics than they were then.

I realized today that it's been over thirty years since I've studied or written poetry? I think? It was somewhere around 1992? I think? Maybe 1990? I'm not good at counting. I gave up on poetry because I couldn't write much outside of free verse - because I suck at the meter and counting thing. Although I did very well in the poetry course that I took - mainly because most of it was subjective, and I could rhyme, and pull out deft metaphors. I'd say my poetry fit more within ee cummings and Slyvia Plath's style, than say Yeats or Shelly or Shakespeare. I studied all of it of course. I was an English Lit major in undergrad with a thematic minor in cultural anthropology. It just was all in the 1980s.

Long ago and far away. I feel like it was a different person who did all of this. Not me. Somebody else. Who was braver and dumber than I am. There's no way in hell I'd get on a stage in front of over 1000 people to read poetry - now. But I did in 1989. I don't remember why. I just remember doing it. And thinking it was cool. Now, I'm somewhat proud that I did it? But also bemused by it, and kind of relieved that I've lost contact with everyone who was there?

And I get snippets of memory here and there, sometimes so vivid that I can taste it. You ever have that type of memory - in which it's akin to stepping back in time, and voila you are there. You can smell, touch, see, and vividly hear everything for about ten seconds? And not always the ten seconds that you want? I mean I'd prefer a happy ten seconds, not ten seconds of painful critique, but my mind likes to torture me at times.

I don't know...what was seemingly important to me in my twenties, isn't now. And vice versa. It's almost as if I'm two different people? I can't eat glutens. I'm diabetic. I can no longer run ten miles, let alone one. And I'm fine with just reading poetry from time to time, but feel no overwhelming urge to write it - let alone perform it. I do however still want to publish my stories...whether I make money on them or not, I'm kind of ambivalent about.

***

By Billy Collins (who I think my sister-in-law's father knows personally?)

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

"I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means."

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins.

The difficulty with poetry is we want to analyze the hell out of it and beat it into shape, when sometimes it's best to just sit with it awhile, and let it sink in. To savor. Also if you can't think metaphorically? I'm not sure poetry works for you? I do think metaphorically - so it makes sense to me...for the most part.