Currently reading:: Dissonance, if you are interested; Poetry and Pedagogy

An early morning in early September. It's been long since I have written anything here, and in a sense it's quite pleasant to think that here it is, all silent again. The summer was spent completing a manuscript for my MFA thesis, which was defended successfully on the 21st of August. With a few manuscripts now in pocket and none in print, it feels like it may be time to ship them out and hope. Twenty-six is a proper age.

To this end I've been researching various poetry prizes, presses, and so on—the lists are exhaustive and exhausting, and one wonders what any of it has to do with writing. But a writer will want an audience, since thinking alone changes nothing.

Still, the year ahead will turn on critical and pedagogical concerns rather than poetic. Now that I'm "just" a PhD, I have an A-exam to read for, with all its attendant reading and annotated bibliographies. The library and I will become familiars again. It's really astonishing, and sometimes daunting, to even allow oneself a sense of how much work has been done and is being done in a given field. But so far so good—per the good advice of a friend, I am trying to get through 2-3 volumes every half month, though even that is a little challenging while I am teaching. This semester I've designed my own course, something of a cross between typography, poetics, and poetry.

Not many students now seem enthused over poetry. Why? Must poetry and academia be always so marginalized? How can we give it legs. How will it change.

One of the primary questions of the course is the relation of visual and verbal arts. The last unfinished segment of this most recent manuscript is a landscape painting, for which I will visit a mountain and draw from observation. I do not know what is possible any more

The blank is ripe for painting