Skipping past Writober and Nanoblomo . . ? Shit, I dunno. I'm as bored as you are.
Poetry
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Snapshot, with Very Little Context
Last Thursday evening, I was finishing up on the recumbent exercise bike (timer hitting 25:05), listening to Sonic Youth’s “I Love You Golden Blue” on my iPod Shuffle, and I used a collection of poems (Jen Benka’s a box of longing with fifty drawers*) to mark my place in the March 2007 Vanity Fair (the Michael Wolff article on Judith Regan). (Marking my place in the Benka collection was bookmark promoting abebooks.com.)
This is what my blogging life has been reduced to: a fucking Twitter post. And I HAVE a Twitter page . . . in addition to this blog (plus one or two others), a MySpace page, and a Vox site. I’m really not holding up my end of the whole navel-gazing bargain, am I?
* A little critique (this would be the context). I don’t know where I saw a link to this collection, but I think it was on a blog I’d read. Reviews seemed promising. Well . . . I deal with words and language and linguistics for a living, but I don’t usually enjoy exercises in wordplay as poetry. I don’t want to have to read this whole collection in one 20-minute sitting to GET it. I want a collection of poems that, taken individually, MEAN something. And taken TOGETHER, might mean something ELSE. Or something more significant. I dunno . . . this just seems like a cute (but SERIOUS) gimmick-as-political-statement. All around, very light. THIS is the kind of writing that inspires ME to write more. And I am. Just not HERE, apparently. (As an aside, I like how more thought went into this footnote than the actual POST. ROCK ON, context!)
Poetry • The Media • (7) Comments closed • Permalink
Monday, November 13, 2006
I Can’t Imagine This Pulling in 13 Million Viewers Each Week, Though
On the way to work, and badly in need of some Sudafed PE (apparently), I thought of a Network show idea. If I had any Photoshop skills, I’d roll you a title shot, but I don’t so I’ll just tell you: It’s like “Heroes,” but it’s “Poets.” See? Whenever the Earth is plagued with some kind of literary calamity, ordinary people develop supernatural writing abilities to save the planet from crisis.
This is the way I think of lots of creative endeavors. It would seem. Some people are just good; why work at it? Of course, considering the standards I hold myself to, I’m setting myself up to fail. (Actually, considering I’m not really “working at it,” I’m not setting anything up.
I blame Civilization III.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Finale (or FINALLY!)
I’m happy that McPheever won American Idol. What’s that you say? No, see, although TayHick was crowned “American Idol,” he has to record whatever aural compost the AI producers can shovel together. And that makes him the loser. Plus, the kids aren’t gonna like him anyway.
Meanwhile, over on Lost (which I was determined to watch before going to bed so as not to stumble onto all the revelations this morning), we got thoroughly mind-fucked and now I can’t wait to read Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly so I can understand what we saw.
In other news, I had a (very) long lunch after dropping my mom off for a doctor’s appointment. To kill time before picking her up, I grabbed a mocha and went home to listen to my supersize MP3 player (read: the desktop computer in our bedroom) and worked on some poems. I made the executive decision to put the half-dozen poems I have “in progress” to bed. They’re either finished or done. We gotta keep that creative-writing ball on the move, kids. And seriously, I was in my twenties when I started some of those motherfuckers.