Introduction, Foundation

I like to be inundated with and overcome by feeling. Suddenly the perfect word in the perfect place, and the top of my head feels like it's been unscrewed a little bit, and somehow this is overwhelmingly pleasant. It's instances like these, where things really work, that get me going, that motivate me to look closer, and to try to create my own. I try to make little universes whose contents bash against each other and cause emergencies with consequences for everything else in that space.

Thing is, art asks you to pay attention.



I've been writing since I was in gradeschool, and drumming for the last decade, but I've only considered myself an artist for the last two years, since I really started paying attention, on a conscious level, to why certain moves on the page make me react the way I do. As a Master's degree candidate in poetry, this is par for the course, though it's still challenging. Most reactions don't occur consciously. I find that I can be more articulate about what art is inspiring in me on a subconscious level when I attempt to pin those shifty, nebulous impressions down onto the page, with language. I can make the unconscious conscious via writing, and this helps me understand both what I'm feeling and why I think I'm feeling it.

But I still wonder about why I feel the way I do about certain authorial choices.

Why do I resist certain types of instability in poetry and privilege certain others? Why do I resist narrative so damn much and privilege places that make me grasp at little details? What makes a narrator sound coherent? Fragments versus sprawling sentences? When does passive voice work? How to describe without losing momentum? What the hell is momentum anyway, and how does one build it? When does a form succeed, and when does it restrict or undercut the rest of the poem? What characteristics make THIS and not THAT an exciting poem for me? Questions that arise, answers that do not, may not.

So I want here to pretend, for a bit, that I am in fact a poet-scholar. I want to investigate my impressions, be articulate about both how I feel and what is happening in the poem that I think makes me feel this way. Same goes for what I'm thinking the poem means (if I can detect that it's trying to mean or argue something) based on choices the author has made.

I will challenge myself as a reader to inhabit aesthetics that may be foreign to me. I will attempt to inhabit new spaces, and roll the experience of inhabiting them around in my mouth for a while, for better or worse.

More simply, I want to write about poems and the experience of reading them from an artist's perspective, because I think doing this will help me become a better writer myself. With this in mind, it may be easiest to think of this blog as an art-journal of sorts. Poems will be presented as examples, and I will work my way through them. Or I'll muse on certain articles of craft. Or I'll wonder aloud about things that me make wonder. Not enough wonder in the world. I like wonder. It's an admission that I do not, in fact, know everything, and that the world is still interesting and possessed of the potential to amaze, like when I was younger and there was still a little mystery in everything. I want to reclaim that, and to use it productively.

For reference, I will be taking definitions, terminology, and most highfalutin concepts from Tony Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun, Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days, and Dean Young's The Art of Recklessness.

I hereby give myself license to not know what I am talking about and to sally forth into the abyss anyway.

-J