Frustration...

Sometimes I don't understand the point of a poem.  I can flit and float about, word-play the ever-living shit out of a thought or a feeling or an interaction or a situation, but how do I wrap it up?  How do I get out of the poem?  End on an image.  But what is the point?  What should the poem be?  Do I need to create some sort of narrative?

It's just frustrating.  It's frustrating to feel like I can only get so far with a poem.  I can come up with the dopest image, fragment, whatever, with all of the swagger, all of the attitude, grit, guts, everything, it's everything!, but then I can't find my last image, can't find the meaning or purpose, the depth, the layers that are needed to make me cry, my customary reaction to a finished poem.

I need to keep writing.  I need to keep trying.  And failing.  And crying.  And just, I just need to keep going with it.

On the way to Iowa...

I'm on the way to Iowa for a friend's wedding before I return for my last days of Denver.  My dad is driving the Plymouth Voyager and I'm sitting on the side where the sun glares through the window, a slow roast to my death like an ant underneath the microscope.  But morale is high.  My dad's window keeps inching down its post despite his inventive use of a doorstopper, wedged just so, so the breeze feels nice, however loud it howls.  We got to talking about Romanticism, so now in the silent aftermath, I've taken some time to reflect:

Today has been a good day to get back into romanticism.  On the drive to Iowa, the conversation between my dad and I eventually shifted to my summer class.  There's nothing like being forced to articulate the importance of a literary period to familiarize a person with her areas of weakness.  But it felt good to try to verbally flesh out the social, political, and economic climate of the period.

A few questions or thoughts:

Great art seems to either be reactionary or anticipatory to the zeitgeist of the time.  It must also, however, have a sense of timelessness.  It must be connected to universal concerns across time and space.  There must be some sort of push or pull against society.  It must be sensory.  How can an artist move an audience? What does it mean to be moved?  It means there is an engagement of the senses.  Voluntarily or more often involuntary, the observer experiences a shift in feeling/awareness/perception due to the experience of something sensory.  There is an interaction, then.  The piece of art is created as a sensory object and triggers a sensory experience for the viewer.  So, experiencing great art, then, is both an interaction and a look in the mirror, a paralleling of emotion even if the emotions experienced or evoked are disparate.

I read this last part to my dad to get a sense of how it sounded and he said it gave him a headache.  How fitting!

Coffee table Blake...

 

Oops...

Oops I almost forgot to register for this class!!

But I've done it.

There's no turning back now.

Distraction...

Today's Romanticism distraction.  Not too shabby.

University of Iowa's Massive Open Online Course...

Speaking of poetry, I signed up and must remember June 28th-August 9th.

University of Iowa Launches Creative Writing MOOC Series

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Brain storm rant nonsense...

I've been trying to find connections between myself and my time and that of the Romantics, but this is more just a rant about the now:

I'm a little bit sad at the moment because I'm worried about great art.  People seem to care less and less about poetry because they aren't taught to value such a thing.  Whereas poetry in the Romantics' time seemed to be cherished.  Those poets were writing for people aside from the elite and the impact of their writing seemed to be explosive.  When a poet today publishes, there is nary a whimper.  When was the last time I heard about a poet making waves?  Never in my life, that's when.  Poetry's reputation is just bad.  Poetry is the nerdy kid at school.  Poetry has no cool factor, no swagger.  Poetry is aligned with that which is difficult.  A strain.  Too much thinking.  "I don't get it."  "It's too hard."  OR, my favorite, "I could easily write that myself, how simplistic."  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

And while some of my writer buds say that it doesn't matter: "we're not writing for that audience anyway"...I just look at them and shake me head.  That kind of thinking makes no sense at all.  Who else would we be writing for?  Do I really want to write for some pretentious asshole who thinks Joyce is God in heaven?  Absolutely never in my life will I write for that guy because heaven forbid, I am a part of that audience.  However many books I read, however many degrees I accumulate, I will never align myself with the elitist academia freaks who purportedly value all that is truth but dismiss the audience right in front of their faces who scream the truth every day, all day.

I guess I just want to know if it is even possible to change the world with poetry anymore.  Does a poet just have to be good enough?  Does he just have to write about the right thing?  Strike the right chord?  And how does one get poetry to the masses when NO ONE is reading that stuff anymore?  Will poetry ever be valued again?  How can poetry evolve to appeal to an audience other than the people whom I hate with all of me? 
ALL OF ME ALL OF ME ALL OF ME.