Despite this experiment with blogging, I remain jittery about how computers have changed our experience of poetry, and our experience with each other, which is a bigger question that isn’t suitable to being addressed in something as ephemeral as a blog entry. Some quick thoughts though, from a computer know-nuttin, Harriet’s one and only dial-up blogger…

That is, his fine new poems in the Sept/Oct American Poetry Review. The poems are accompanied by a short interview that focuses on the way autobiography collides with myth in his poems--among other subjects, including how Reginald used blogging in the creation of his recent prose work, among which is his book Orpheus in the Bronx. Sorry--can't figure out italics. Too old for the phrase "shout-out".

I’m interested in spiritual practices and like to attend demonstrations of them, such as Catholic masses, which is the tradition within which I was raised and which still seems frightening to me, but also beautiful (the stained glass interiors, in such contrast to those rented office spaces I’ve looked into and seen people swaying with raised hands—I haven’t entered there, but would like to, though I suspect I’d feel extra tourist-y in this environment).

But I have been trying to pursue, as of the past few years, the practice of Lojong, or mind training, which derives from about 40 proverbs from the Buddhist tradition, You don’t have to be a Buddhist to mind-train (I’m not—too much vocabulary and enumeration) (though I liked hearing Uma Thurman’s father, who IS a Buddhist, say that when he got mad at Dick Cheney he meditated on himself as Dick Cheney’s mother, as she was sixty years ago, nursing baby Dick Cheney at her breast).

One of my main links with the literary world is via my mailman Ray. Ray collects defunct literary magazines, mostly gotten from Ebay. So far he’s loaned me a complete set of Hound & Horn, published at Harvard in the late 20’s and early 30’s, and some more recent TransAtlantic Reviews.

For the past couple of months I’ve had all of The Dial from the 1920’s sitting on my table. Many of the issues were edited by Marianne Moore, but the most poem eternal I’ve found predates Moore’s tenure. In the June 1924 issue are four Yeats poems, including “Leda and the Swan.”

Of late I have been occupied with real world concerns that have nothing to do with poetry, although everything has to do with poetry, I suppose. Everything is the matter, in two senses, the urgency and the raw material, as netted by a seine of words. This can lead a poet to feel not immersed in life, but rather combing life as she moves through it: has this poetic potential? No. And now it is evening, how about this feeling that the twilight is salting me like a rib steak? Oh wait, I think I’m having an epiphany. Let me see if I can have it in such words that when I write them down and sort them out, you’ll be…what? What am I expecting from you? I am an old-fashioned sort of poet. I want to do something to you the reader.

So we go through life in a blur of poetic assessment. When I was young, I trained to be a field biologist, but I proved to be a poor observer. Hey blackbird just sitting there, why don’t you do something?

Since there have been a few posts about the political poetry of Kenneth Patchen, I thought I would post a few of what he called his picture poems. These are from a book I own called Wonderings, published in l971, shortly before Patchen’s death.

At the swimming pool, I am an honorary old person—I get to swim with the senior citizens, who play volleyball in the shallow end and use the deep end for water exercise. Only a few people do the exercises, and they move over to let me swim, and I also try to do some of the exercises, though when I go underwater to check out what my legs are doing, I find they’re merely dangling like the cartoon swimmerets of a brine shrimp.

What does this have to do with poetry? The other day…

I tried to capture Pound’s Canto LXXIII (73) but the spirit of Ez must have been thwarting me because neither scanning nor capturing from the web would work. But there is a readable translation on the web, done by an Australian—the canto is written in Italian. The web site gives what seems like a good walk through the history of this poem.
http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/03/ka_mate03_ross.asp

I just finished Jane Mead’s new book, The Usable Field, and wanted to post a poem from it because I read with interest, chagrin, and both agreeable and argumentative impulses, the comments following Doug Powell’s post on Larissa Szporluk (it’s in the archive now, see “New Bat City.”) One reader made the remark that she found the posted poem “hermetic” and that touched off the blogostorm. I know I’m touching on the issue of accessibility, the discussions of which I haven’t seen yet (should dig in the archive, I know), but I was tickled to hear it described by one post-er as pies circling around in a display case at a diner.

I have pondered over this question, and was reminded again about it when the Harriet bloggers had a phone conference recently, and some kind of anti-Bush or anti-war entendre that was uttered by someone produced among us a knowing chuckle.

The other night, I rolled two miles downtown to a poetry reading—it was a lovely near-solstice night. Now that I’ve traded academia for a disability “retirement�? in a small town, the peripheral ephemera of poetry (well, except blogging) is not so accessible to me.

Hello, this is Lucia, I just saw my name listed and figured I better post something as the new half-time blogger. Blogger! Will this prove to be a big mistake?

I have more questions than statements, and I hope people drifting through can add their thoughts. Not having had much exposure to the blog world, naturally I am interested in the relation between it and poetry itself.