30 Things

When I set out to update this blog once a day during in National Poetry Month, with little foresight and often late-night posts, it was probably inevitable that any enlightened literary critiques or in-depth thoughts on prosody would fall by the wayside fairly quickly.

Ideally, I would have had at least thirty solid things to say, with some time spent developing the ideas.  I was never expecting myself to compose full-length essays each day, but I would have reached a bit beyond the "tea with the Smiths" entries that used to populate my journals and which have, more or less, appeared in this blog this month.

And after writing the above, I tried to remember something I recently heard or saw online. I think it was Sarah Manguso talking about the difference between using the word "diary" and using the word "journal." She (or whomever was speaking) said that "diary" seemed like a feminine word, implying something light or trivial. But "journal" was more masculine. Trying to find the quote sent me researching, and I found this review of Manguso's Ongoingness in the New Yorker in 2015. I was especially interested in this quote from her book:

Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

I understand this. But in addition to being a witness of some kind of my life, and a chronicler of what happened (fearing that I'm apt to forget most of it), I know too that writing is how I think, and how I process experiences.  It helps me clear my head of chatter.

Even the idea of listing 30 things about poetry that I could have, still may, write about in this blog feels a bit daunting. But let's give it a go, off the top of my head:

1. Narrative versus lyric or is it really either or and where I think my poetry falls in those categories.
2. My favorite contemporary poets and why.
3. Traditional Welsh poetic restrictions and how they inform the poetry coming out of Wales today.
4. Why more novelists hold pets in their author photos than do poets.
5. When or whether it is advisable to use foreign words in your poems.
6. The pros and cons of putting yourself deeply in debt to get an MFA.
7. Competitions: rigged or arbitrary, but necessary?
8. My love affair with internal rhyme.
9. What draws me to reading mid-century male formal poets. [See 8.]
10. Whether writing a ghazal is cultural appropriation. 
11. Singer/songwriter Richard Shindell's deftness with slant rhyme. 
12. Is there a moral obligation to subscribe to journals before submitting to them?
13. Networking during a pandemic when you're an introvert anyway.
14. How long can you write the same poem over and over again, and why.
15. Will your family hate you if you write about them? Does it matter?

Ok. There are 15. Seems like enough for now. But I admit it: writing those, and writing the sentences that came before them, revealed to me that I do have interests that I have not yet explored. And writing is just like jogging, for me. When I don't think I can do it again, when I worry about the fact that I'm neither the best nor the fastest, and when I think how much my awkwardness is showing, once I start, I remember how to do it regardless. And I remember how much I enjoy it. And at least with writing, even though I may go places and see things, I don't have to wash my gym clothes afterwards.