Is it possible, as I’m thinking right now, that the feeling of being importantly part of a “major adventure,” as my recent mathemaku has it, could be the only thing that can make life worthwhile? Many things can cause such a feeling—for me, at any rate. Being in the groove on the tennis court, as I wasn’t except for a point or two this morning, although I was on the winning side, thanks to my partners, in the only two sets I played. (I doubt if the feeling will be possible for me, except momentarily, in tennis until I get my left leg back. It still can’t seem to give me the thrust I need to sprint, although I’m optimistic that it will.)
Mostly for me, being in the groove while composing a literary work—as I never quite was during the work I’ve recently done on my reaction to Jake Berry’s essay. In fact, I’m in my null zone again because I couldn’t get into the groove working on that reaction yesterday in spite of a dose of APCs. Nor could I get a major adventure going anywhere else, or even one planned and possible, if not begun. On the other hand, toward the end of the day I did write a 240-word letter to Free Inquiry about the immortality of the consciousness. It was pretty good, but didn’t excite me.
It’s around one in the afternoon as I write this. I haven’t felt like bothering with anything since returning from tennis around ten, but realized I hadn’t done a blog entry. That I’ve done one a day for over a week now got me to the keyboard—gotta keep my streak going. Who knows, maybe it’ll get me going. I haven’t taken any drugs, by the way. Nor do I right now plan to—don’t have any confidence they’d do me any good after yesterday.
Okay, now to what I thought I’d write about here, something I’ve thought about many times but most recently just a day ago: that I really don’t know the work of many poets well enough to believe I could be a knowledgeably good critic of their work. I came up with a list of just eleven Anglophonic poetic forebears of mine—poets writing in English a generation or more before I that I feel I’ve studied enough to be an authority on. Not that I couldn’t (and haven’t) said good things about many other poets, just that what I’ve said was about individual poems or lines, not oeuvres—and if valuably insightful, mostly so by luck alone.
My list has nothing but standard poets on it, all major in my view and the world’s: Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Cummings, Roethke, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Williams. Coleridge and Shelley just missed. Maybe Emerson, too, except that he didn’t write very many superior poems. The only foreign forebears who have been as important as these to me have been Issa, Buson, Basho. I feel I can be, and have been, knowledgeably good about the Japanese haiku tradition as a whole.
By no means am I saying I have been or am capable of being academically erudite about any poets. Able to quote reams of a given poet’s work, for instance, or say with much certainty when any of the poet’s works was written or published, or even instantly tell the poet’s work as his. Knowing a poet’s work as a creative artist and/or as a critic is different from knowing it as an academic—and, no, not necessarily superior to it, although I prefer it.
I know a number of my contemporaries poetry quite well, but don’t believe one can be knowledgeably good on any poet until one has gone over just about all of it, which one can’t do with a living poet’s work.
Before leaving, here’s an announcement: yesterday I posted the first of the ten visual poems I plan for my new page, “Ten Superior Visual Poems,” along with my commentary on it. The poem is Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drifts.” Next will be something by some Hungarian.
