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LlamaLesley
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Name: Lesley
Metro:
Gender: Female
Interests: Poetry, llamas and llama dictionaries, living to tell the tale of graduate school, loathing Pennsylvania weather.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
AIM:  amoebastan606
Member Since:
5/5/2005
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| brief kansas updateso i've been in kansas for a couple of weeks. i've been dying to get back to pennsylvania, though, because it's my space; i do things my way, on my schedule, and i don't find ants crawling on my computer or in my food there (my parents are having an infestation problem because of all the rain). i've finally hit that age where i can't stand to be around my parents for longer than about an hour, and even that's a bit of a trial. i need to be living alone, not in their guest room, constantly listening to the tv blaring.
ugh. lawrence, sadly, isn't home anymore. state college isn't home either (though i have been missing my friends there). and olathe is home least of all. i'm ready to be out of school and settled somewhere. it's time to go on and get the hell on.
besides this, all is well. 
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| Metaphoric Landscapes Symbolizing Numinous Desires for Liminal Subjectivities, and Other BullshitI'm spending this afternoon reading a book on contemporary experimental women writers. This is a book of criticism--a collection of short essays on different poets written by various scholars--and it's far more painful than I imagined it would be when I chose it for my book review.
The style of criticism is not my favorite (not that I'm a big fan of criticism in general), but the worse part of the book is actually the poets themselves. These are people I have wanted to align myself with, poets I want to know and possibly emulate, but the stuff they write just seems awful.
The problem, I think, is that they've been educated in a certain way. They're close readers, just like me, just like almost everyone else writing and reading poetry these days. But close reading didn't exist back in the day; intelligent, conscious reading did exist, but readers weren't quite so trained to track ideas and symbols. They read for the beautiful surface of the poem, or the moving story of the poem; the subtler motifs and symbols were treats for other poets and for repeat readers.
My point is that many poets today write not for the common reader, not to entertain or please through the beauty of their work; they write to construct a complex web of symbolism about gender or politics or race or philosophical inquiries of being that can later be pulled apart by scholars. Their subjects are not something felt or found in the world, but an ideology that can be imposed on the world they are not writing about.
What works about poets like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Keats (perhaps my four favorite old-timey poets) is that they wrote for beauty, for effect, for the pleasure of a skillfully constructed image and a clever turn of word. Their poems worked (pardon the mostly-dead metaphor) like a flower: yeah, the poem is good looking on top, but the thinking behind the poem, the stem and leaves and root of the thing, have to be rich and complicated enough to sustain that beauty. The working bits of the flowers are what scholars are still writing about today; these bases are the complicated philosophies and assumptions and personalities of the poets that subtly inform the surface of their poems.
But I feel that many contemporary poets have allowed themselves to be ruined, not enlightened, by their own education. They work to create a political message to their poems, a clear theoretical stance or system of symbols that their theorist friends can pick apart with glee. But that's the equivalent of growing a very uniform and nutritious plant with a firm stem and leaf and root system that doesn't flower at all. What's the point? Why not just write prose? Why not just write theories, arguments, and philosophical tracts?
Even after my two years in graduate school, I still firmly assert that poetry is an art, an art that is about pleasure, emotion, engagement, surprise, and a new way of seeing. And I refuse to write anything that does not have the potential to burst into bloom.
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| Good grief!So I never expected that my abandoned Xanga site would still be getting footprints three months after I stopped writing in it. Who knew? It's been a hectic semester--miserable in some ways, okay in others. The past few months have felt sort of transitional, as if I'm waiting for something to happen. And I guess I am: I'm looking forward to the summer, I'm excited to get started on the book of poems I'll be writing next year as my MFA thesis, and I'm preparing to get out of Pennsylvania less than a year from now. Some days I think, How long have I been in school again? Hmmm. Oh, yeah, FREAKING FOREVER. I'm ready to be done with it. And I'm ready to feel like a writer, uninhibited by workshop and teachers who want to mold me into a little replica of themselves. Anyway, I'm reading about Harryette Mullen right now. She has a poem in Muse & Drudge that alludes to a line from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, but the poem is also an ekphrasis of Manet's Olympia. The painting is interesting in itself, but I'm fascinated by how different artists have riffed on it. So here ya go. In order of appearance: Olympia, by Manet; Manet's Olympia, by Mel Ramos (1974); Second Life's Open-Source revision of Olympia; One Night in Paris, by Geoff Flack; Olympia, by Lisa Fittipaldi; Man of Leisure, King George, by Kayti Dirdriksen; and Manet's Olympia, an automata by Paul Spooner.       
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| The First of Winter BreakMy trip back to Kansas was painful, much more so than I could have ever imagined. Somewhere along the way last semester, I lost my old home. Excluding my mother, I felt like every relationship in my life was either damaged or just grown out of; like my jeans from high school, people didn't fit as well as they used to, or else they tore a hole that I'm now left to mend. It was all rather heartbreaking, and all rather too much for one short week. In Pennsylvania, then, can I claim my new home? And does it make any sense to do so, when I only have a year left here? I got back to State College late yesterday, just in time for the new year. I've never had a New Year's Eve that was fun or even straightforwardly pleasant. The best one I've ever had was probably last year, and it was bittersweet, full of friends I was spending a few stolen days with, friends whom I don't see anymore, and an ex-boyfriend that I wasn't sure I'd ever be with again (though Charlie and I did manage to get together a few months later and are still together). Besides last year, most of my New Year's Eves have involved watching movies in the basement with my mother and feeling mortified and depressed. One year in high school, my thirteen-year-old dog Fred died at 3:00 a.m. on New Year's Day, and I could hear her whimpering late into the night. That memory is enough to make me feel like New Years is just another cold night when old dogs die and we all become aware of what has been lost in the passing year. Overall, it's a day I've grown to hate; like Valentine's Day, it's a liquor-sodden orgy of communal loneliness, a holiday one must defend against with the presence of friends and lovers (or at least someone to kiss when the ball drops). It's either a massive disappointment, or a massive dose of drunken melancholy that only makes us hate everyday life a little bit more. That being said, I've typed out enough poison for one day, and I'm done being morose. I hope it's all out of my system because, no matter what, I'm off to buy champagne. | | |
| The Rest of the Semester- 5 sets of student poems to grade
- 18 final revision projects to grade
- 18 course grades to total and submit
25 pages of memoir to revise15 minutes/8 pages of conference paper to write and present- 20 pages of seminar paper on space and gender in Donne to write
- 5 poems to revise
- 2 pages of commentary to write on poetry
1 poem to memorize and recite- 3 short, delicious days
I am totally laid back right now!  Oh, and to answer the Xanga question of the day, I totally work to avoid failure. I'm extremely anxiety-driven. But at least I get to enjoy the accidental perks of success along the way.
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