Friday, February 26, 2010

You're Not A Total Idiot

For the past month or so, I've been working on a longish essay about someone's poetry. I've never really done anything like that before, other than what I've done here, but I never quite dipped and dived into writing a long essay. (I'll tell you about the poster-board essays another time). It was quite the process, trying to first describe what someone was doing in their poetry, then trying to say why it was good.

Anyway, I ended up turning in a rather long piece, which had to be trimmed. Something that was cut was this sort of line that I was a bit proud of. When you do what you do, do you try to get away with things? All my poems have something that I try to get away with, something I sneak in there, something that only half-way fits but still adds a little hip, a little flavor. In the essay I just wrote, I was discussing something the poet was doing and I described it as: the limitless blank of what poetic language can do.

I rather like the thought, the limitless blank. I can't exactly think of what I would fill in the blank without making an annoying list. What would you fill in the blank?

2 comments:

Cindy said...

Snow. Flowers. Clouds. Piano bridges.

Farrah Field said...

You're so wonderful.