Entry 236 — A Day Worthless But Happy Enough
I had what seemed to me a lot of errands to do today. It was also one of my three tennis days a week. So I never expected to get anything much done. I have so far, and probably wont. (It’s a little after four in the afternoon.) I feeling lethargic, as I seem always to. But happy enough because I was able to run close to all out on the tennis court for the second time in a row. I’m not quite up to what I consider full speed, and I still have trouble when I have to push off on my left leg. But I feel reasonably able to play near my standard, which I would rate at slightly above average for my age. This is the main reason for my good mood.
My errands were getting milk and bananas (I eat one banana every morning), depositing a credit card cash advance for $500 in my bank account, dropping buy to pay my dentist my monthly bill, and stopping at my general practitioner’s to get a lab appointment and an office appointment, having missed two schedule for earlier this month, how, I don’t know, but–yikes–I’m getting absent-minded of late. Once home, I managed to write the times of the appointments down on a wall calendar I have for the very purpose but two often forget to use it.
My dentist has ordered my two recent collections of plurexpressive poetry, but I don’t want to turn them over to her until I written some notes to help her understand them, which is my next minor writing chore. I’ve been avoiding doing it these past two days, for some reason. I should be able to start on it tomorrow.
I had some thoughts on how much more important than subject matter in a poem techniques are, inspired by another me-in-the-minority discussion at New-Poetry. Can’t remember much of what I had to say now, but I do remember discovering that techniques are invisible; it’s their effects that we are aware of in poems. Ditto form. I contended that subject matter is too often the only concern of poets, poetry readers, poetry editors and poetry critics. Certainly almost nobody in the field considers technique more important in a poem than it, the way I do.
I also discovered that actually technique is everything in poetry, for the simple choice of subject matter is a technique. Subject matter is also everything in a poem.
One thing I said was that it is technique that gives the subject matter of a poem its meaning. I also opined that viewpoint is a kind of subject matter. I guess I’d divide subject matter into primary subject matter like the summer day of “Sonnet 18,” and secondary subject matter like Shakespeare’s view of the summer day in that poem as something fine but flawed.