Quietly, while no one was looking, I’ve slipped back into poetry mode.  Shutter your windows and lock up your ampersands; everything that I can reach belongs to me.

A bit of a polyglottal thought today, as I was originally going to make a post o’er at my genre blog; Myspace is suffering from one of it’s intermittent half-hacks this morning, however, so I thought I’d make a premature attempt to tackle one of my Great Themes.  Then I got some fruit juice in my system and thought better of it.  In its place, some jotted thoughts on reading.

First, the perils of the Wiki.  I know many folks consult the English job search wiki, and it is without question a formidable resource in the arsenal of the job seeker.  I only became apprised of its location about three weeks ago myself, however, and I’m glad that I’m a latecomer to the game.  Even as a sideline reader I find myself unduly fascinated–not only by the maddening vagaries of the academic job market but also by the collective sensibilities of the job seekers.  Were I to return to the search, I don’t know that I could responsibly manage the impulse to monitor.  The wiki seems to superadd a layer of knowing communal anxiety to what is already an excruciating process; knowledge, as it turns out, isn’t always power.  Nor is it half the battle, no matter what G.I. Joe might think.

As way leads on to way, I got to thinking about the act of critical reading more generally.  I’ve mentioned here before that I anticipate the completion of a volume of poetry in the next year or so, and I had the good fortune to sit down with our two resident poets, Jeffrey Bean and Robert Fanning, and grill them for insights.  They were kind enough to make time and offer me their sense of the process, and I go into the next stretch armed with a better sense of ends and objectives.  Because I process information oddly, however, I also hatched a new imperative that will apply to all my writing, at least for the time being.  I think I need to free my readers and release them back into the wild.

Don’t get me wrong:  I have five kindly readers, the kindliest on earth.  Part of the reason I send them my work is that it gives me pleasure to do so; the feedback has become something of a secondary effect, incidental to my attempt to do my readers proud, to let them see the finest manufactures of my mixed-up mind.   Only recently, however, have I come to recognize more fully the odd obligations that responsive reading entails.  When push comes to shove, I’d rather not subject my readers to them.

I don’t think I’ll elaborate, as it’s a newish thought I’d like to let stew in my cranial crock pot for a spell.  I will, however, own up to a neediness I need to overcome, though I think such meta-needery is part and parcel of the act of writing in isolation.  Since my writing was a private act for such a long time, the desire to be read and heard is new to me.  Given my proclivity for self-possession, I have a tough time making sense of that desire.  Writing with a sense of readerly needs is central to my practice, but my needs as an author (with all the wiggedy connotations of the term that I have yet to accept) are newish variables in my little equation.  They are something like an alien presence, and I’ve seen enough movies to know that I ought to dissect them and steal their technology.  I am nothing if not a product of the times.

In any case, I ought to be writing, so write I shall.  What I’ll do with that writing, however, is anybody’s guess.

Today I wrestled with prospective title lines for a good five minutes.  Shall I entice the wayward surfer with a quote from The Big Lebowski?  Shall I purposely misspell and weave a web to bedevil those prone to typos?  Or should I sift my Rilke and Nietzsche, looking for something jubilant and life-affirming in their explosive prose?  My mind, as you can see, is filthy with rhetorical questions…and a bit on the florid side.  It is, alas, not yet properly caffeinated. 

The title I settled on comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I Dreamed I Moved Among the Elysian Fields.”  It is the kryptonite of all poems, insofar as any man who hears it read by a winsome woman will likely smooch her, if not propose to her.  Use this knowledge with caution, dear readers, lest ye find yourselves inadvertently betrothed to passers-by.

Anyhoo, what struck me this morning that inspired me to seek out such a mighty title was a powerful contrast.  On the one hand, I had the unfortunate duty of writing a formal letter to a student at semester’s end; as you might imagine, the news I had to send was not especially pleasant.  The process, as always, was painstaking and laborious, as I wanted to make sure the student understood that the decision involved was a matter of policy, not a summary judgment of his character.  On the other hand, however, I have been working a poem, and while the process has been slow, it has been consistently surprising.  I had a scheme and a line or two in mind, as usual, but the improvisational content has been, for lack of a less impressionistic term, astonishingly willful. 

I had planned to ease my way back in to writing poetry, to work on an idea that had been percolating for quite some time, and my vessel of choice for the project was, as is so often the case, the congenial blank verse sonnet (for reasons I’ve discussed in prior posts…probably).  I had a starting point in mind, a subject with a predicate yet to be determined, and the line naturally resolved itself in five tidy iambs.  I was feeling pretty chipper, getting my legs under me.

And then the poem began doing what it damn well pleased.  It wasn’t a demented fiesta of automatic writing or anything like that, but it was far more rampant and sure-footed than it had any right to be.  The allusion to Whitman?  A natural, inevitable thing.  The wiggedy word choice?  Unquestionably sound, however odd it seems.  The 13-syllable line?  Enjambed and irreducible.  I’ve got work yet to do–I can’t even tell if it’s going to be a sonnet anymore, which makes the endgame unknowable–but I trust that ”the green fuse that drives the flower” is firing just as it should.  That’s a pretty strange place for me to be. 

Earlier in the summer session I attempted to describe the backward tracing involved in Romantic aesthetic theories, the tendency of some of the writers we were dealing with to distinguish fancy from imagination, to advance explanations that accounted for the original poetic impulse.  The more I write, however, the less certain I am of my own sources of inspiration, the less interested I am in explaining them.

If you ever find yourself feeling adrift in the attempt to make sense of your own work, a modicum of Millay can be most efficacious.