There is a wire fallen down onto my mailbox today. I called the town's electrical office and they tell me they think a truck--I'm assuming one of those semi-trucks--came through and ripped out a bunch of wires along this stretch of road. The wire is a FIOS wire, and the company's been notified, but apparently don't seem to be in a hurry to fix it. Hang it back up. I don't think I'm getting my mail today.
Got two rejections yesterday--one read, "Dear entrant"--entrant not even being capitalized. You know it's not good when the letter starts out that way. But at least I can send some stuff back out now. I figured if I complained about (see previous post) maybe I'd get some kind of karmic action out of it.
Reading Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey. Many bloggers have been commenting on the book--Molly Spenser, for one, and I had begun it but put it down somewhere and then, you know, other books get in the way and you've forgotten about it. I am enjoying watching her think on the page--exploring her biases against the use of poetry and advertisements, for example, and coming to the realization she doesn't quite know how to feel about it. One thing that made me smile that she wrote: "All we can say in defense of our insane tribulations is that they were an act of love--a supremely sentimental act--an act of causeless emotion--that made us commit embarrassing gestures" (51). Poetry being an embarrassing gesture. Maybe that's why it's so hard to teach, so hard to talk about in general.
I'm trying to decide whether to try and write every day--write a poem, that is--or just keep writing in my journal for June. I have this back and forth every month it seems: the effort to write seems to me to be good practice, but that expectation is high and the fall, the fail, can be quite hard. So I don't know.
How to Go Extinct
Caroline Manring
A bird’s mouth is its gape.
As when
young beg.
No one let us go awry;
we just got some heavy focus on
& failed to write
home.
We found a pasture
& delivered ourselves
into it
unprepared. We found
things happen
before our hands
untwist
the wire.
No comments:
Post a Comment