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For silence came
Feb. 13th, 2012 01:21 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -5. High today: -3. Might have been the last decidedly cold day of the winter (of a very small handful) yesterday. We've been getting some lake-effect snow off of Georgian Bay yesterday and today. It's unusual enough to get any appreciable lake-effect in Toronto, but it's especially unusual to get lake-effect off of Georgian Bay at all this late in the winter. Normally it's frozen over by now. The EC ice maps are showing open water right across all the Great Lakes.
I think I might like to be a poet when I grow up ... if only I could think of some poems. Listening to a rather random retrospective of Leonard Cohen on the CBC last Sunday and this--there's something he said about how lyric poets run out of steam in their late 20s or early 30s, and then they have to either find a new way of writing poetry or quit, that resonated with me a bit ... but a bit not. Frost published his first book of poetry when he was 39. When I was younger, I used to wonder if I would manage to write anything worthwhile before I was Keats's age when he died. Anyway--I knew early on, when I thought I was supposed to be a Writer, that I couldn't be a novelist because I didn't have the ideas in me. (I've probably said something before about how teachers can lead you astray at a young age by mistaking skillful writing for "creativity".) It never occurred to me then that I could have the same problem about poems (in addition to all the other problems I have about poems). Last week I was walking around the pond thinking about the asters again--plowing and plowing that ten-acre field until the convolutions run parallel with my own brain....
These big poets, though, they all seem to have such big lives. (Of course, the thought of being a writer of any kind now brings close in train the thought of "hustling"--and I keep coming back to the problem of how much you can manage to do if you lack that bigness. Eh, it's a question of thumos, again.) Cohen, well, he may be a special case, but Frost--before he was a Poet, he was publishing short stories about chickens in magazines for chicken farmers, of which he was one. (Last week a student who was in one of my classes a few years ago dropped by my office and told me the last time he was talking to me I was thinking of raising chickens. "That particular plan didn't work out," I told him.)
Sometime lately I shifted from wondering how I managed to write all those eljay posts back there six or so years ago (!--would you even have thought then that eljay would still exist now?) to wondering what in the world it was I was writing about. So I went back and read some of them yesterday. Reports on random stuff I'd read, it seems like, mostly. I had thought that maybe I was reading more worthwhile stuff back then, but it seems like I was mostly worrying about the possible worthlessness of much of what I was reading. Which is a bit perversely reassuring. (I read something today that Leiter linked to--this--which I was thinking of saying something about here. Something about the business of being an Academic vs. being an Outsider, and my somewhat complicated relation to that, teetering on the edge of inside and outside. But, eh, what's there to say about it, really.) Well ... I do re-learn a thing or two going through old posts, such as that Frost has a poem about a buried brook. Maybe I'll forget that again, and in a few years I'll remind myself by reading this post.
Oh--two keys on the piano broke last night, and I was sad, but then I fixed them this morning with a knife, and I was happy. But then they broke again, and then I fixed them again, but they'll probably break again. And so on.
Hey look, that's like a William Carlos Williams poem:
Last night
two keys
on the piano
broke.
And I
was sad.
This morning
I fixed them
With a knife.
And I
was happy.
And they broke again.
And I fixed them again.
With a knife.
Probably
they'll break
again.
Is that a poem? Yeah, it's not one of my poems.
I think I might like to be a poet when I grow up ... if only I could think of some poems. Listening to a rather random retrospective of Leonard Cohen on the CBC last Sunday and this--there's something he said about how lyric poets run out of steam in their late 20s or early 30s, and then they have to either find a new way of writing poetry or quit, that resonated with me a bit ... but a bit not. Frost published his first book of poetry when he was 39. When I was younger, I used to wonder if I would manage to write anything worthwhile before I was Keats's age when he died. Anyway--I knew early on, when I thought I was supposed to be a Writer, that I couldn't be a novelist because I didn't have the ideas in me. (I've probably said something before about how teachers can lead you astray at a young age by mistaking skillful writing for "creativity".) It never occurred to me then that I could have the same problem about poems (in addition to all the other problems I have about poems). Last week I was walking around the pond thinking about the asters again--plowing and plowing that ten-acre field until the convolutions run parallel with my own brain....
These big poets, though, they all seem to have such big lives. (Of course, the thought of being a writer of any kind now brings close in train the thought of "hustling"--and I keep coming back to the problem of how much you can manage to do if you lack that bigness. Eh, it's a question of thumos, again.) Cohen, well, he may be a special case, but Frost--before he was a Poet, he was publishing short stories about chickens in magazines for chicken farmers, of which he was one. (Last week a student who was in one of my classes a few years ago dropped by my office and told me the last time he was talking to me I was thinking of raising chickens. "That particular plan didn't work out," I told him.)
Sometime lately I shifted from wondering how I managed to write all those eljay posts back there six or so years ago (!--would you even have thought then that eljay would still exist now?) to wondering what in the world it was I was writing about. So I went back and read some of them yesterday. Reports on random stuff I'd read, it seems like, mostly. I had thought that maybe I was reading more worthwhile stuff back then, but it seems like I was mostly worrying about the possible worthlessness of much of what I was reading. Which is a bit perversely reassuring. (I read something today that Leiter linked to--this--which I was thinking of saying something about here. Something about the business of being an Academic vs. being an Outsider, and my somewhat complicated relation to that, teetering on the edge of inside and outside. But, eh, what's there to say about it, really.) Well ... I do re-learn a thing or two going through old posts, such as that Frost has a poem about a buried brook. Maybe I'll forget that again, and in a few years I'll remind myself by reading this post.
Oh--two keys on the piano broke last night, and I was sad, but then I fixed them this morning with a knife, and I was happy. But then they broke again, and then I fixed them again, but they'll probably break again. And so on.
Hey look, that's like a William Carlos Williams poem:
Last night
two keys
on the piano
broke.
And I
was sad.
This morning
I fixed them
With a knife.
And I
was happy.
And they broke again.
And I fixed them again.
With a knife.
Probably
they'll break
again.
Is that a poem? Yeah, it's not one of my poems.
