crit, teaching, frustrat

dylan & i have been playing around with the writer's path issue. Is it purely creative? Does it involve teaching? You can scroll down a few posts and find the dialogue in the comments box. Although I found myself defending criticism there, today, after reading some, I am finding it an occasional joy read. Talking literary crit here, reviews, that sort of thing. Maybe just my mood, but I prefer this discussion to take place in an orality, whereas poetry for me - and prose too - works so much better on the page (with rare performative exceptions). I relish books, and a good book of essays can easily slip in there. But I am tiring of online crit, maybe in part since I look at it at work, not a place where I can do too much of that type of thinking - and have been coming home tired lately.

So I am reading Cadillac Desert. Hands up if you've read that one. An amazing saga - so far - about the role of water in the development of the US West. And, for anyone curious about the actual trails of corruption in our civic sphere, and how our government, for all extents and purposes, is a modified oligarchy (which you are free, by accumulating and exercising massive power, to join), this book provides fascinating webs of syndicates of newspapermen, railroad tycoons, judges, government agencies, politicians, real estate developers, all in bed together to "herd" and "farm" (ie "milk"), the poor and middle class. Its simply the way the system is set up to run, and the checks and balances only push it out of public view and contort it into more bizarre, far-fetched forms. It is a wonderful, if horrific, litany of delusion, attachment, and suffering. And, evidently, nominated by the Modern Library as 1 of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century or some such title guarranteed to keep it in undergraduate courselists for the forseeable future. Well, it deserves it.

Have nots: have not been reading poetry, writing poetry, editing poetry, reading manuscripts of poetry, but have been thinking about it, as in at the bar after a spat. Should i go home to the tyrant? Fuck you poetry, you're ruining my life! Just maybe. The real tyrant is my sense of responsibility. If I feel responsible for reading and even publishing (let alone understanding) the stuff, pretty soon I spend a lot of time trying to get far, far away from it - no fun. And I know I am not alone. A re-connect, or a dis-conect is coming my way. Any bets? I think/know I love writing, but at times that becomes so extenuated, so buried in mental drifts, eddies, storms, tsunamis. The landscape is shaped by all this - eroded soil, up-ended homes, dead cattle on fallen trees.

And the landscape is shaped by my exaggeration of it, I may just be dealing with an messy psychic apartment.

Hoover it nicely, folks.