Month: May 2003

As soon as my head clears, I’ll make a plan, I always think. In the meantime, I buy fake flowers.

Five more days of rain slated. Mercury still retrograde through June 5.

What do Kasey’s categories mean?

Anxious.

Here’s something I wrote to Jordan on “psychological” “criticism” (sorry JD, I know you don’t like scare quotes, but I dig them. You might even say I “dig” them.) (Indeed, “commentary” or “reading” are far preferable terms.):

It’s CONTEXTUAL criticism, situational, only the context is inside and between people. How can “the social” NOT be considered to be what is inside and between people as much as whatever “external” forces and strictures we deem it to be? All these fucking false binaries make me want to… sigh, I guess. I wish I had time and space and half the brain to be more critically concise about tearing them down; that takes some serious philosophizing tho. I guess I only can do that poetically right now, brick by intransigent brick.

Like just about everything else I say, this smacks of a kind of femme-y essentializing. That is, the men have always known how to talk rather well about what they perceive to be outside. Outsideness (Camille Paglia mentions the arc of male urine, etc., shooting out into the world). They have a harder time with what they see as “insideness” — what Gary called last night, “processing.” Marianne and I can talk for hours, for example, without the slightest sign of fatigue, about the nuances of relationships and perceptions. I asked Gary, would it be easier to talk about your emotions if you thought about them as something outside you, something rare and obscure perhaps, that you could collect?

This is the fundamental difference in approach between an “Elsewhere” — analysis mainly of Things Outside — and a “Ululation” — Internal Roilings escaping bodily through vocalization.

Two headed pure love monster! Maybe, yes, but with very different sorts of heads. Hee hee. Jim, I love it.

I have to work focusedly on developing a class I am teaching at Pratt today and not allow myself to be seduced by bloglandia.

But I do want to say a word about what Nick has been doing at Fait Accompli — these early notebooks of his are making my jaw drop, as did the piece about poetry he posted a few days ago. Nick, sometimes I just want to lift you up out of the crowds and hold you high for everyone to see!

The difficulty of just getting on/by/through/over can not be overestimated.

Does psychology come out of structure or does structure come out of psychology?

I was just asking Gary the other day when people were going to get over the injunction against psychologically-oriented lit-crit. Then Jordan mentioned it today.

When you actually KNOW the poet it’s hard *not* to bring psychologically motivated readings to their work.* And it seems… like I know… a lot… of poets.

*We do this, for example, in bars and cafes and after-reading events all the time. Just not on paper.

A separate poem blog because it’s like making a book of poems. I used the integrated style for a while but found myself writing more anecdotes and “koans” than poems.

A poem blog based on this principle: “Build it and they will come.”

Creating a space to fill up. Doesn’t that seem fairly obvious?

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

My friends, I have done it, the copykitty thing… I have started a poem blog: prrrowess.

I fully intend to prettify the template. For now, it’s excruciatingly simple.

OK, gotta get ready for work!