Enjoying some things in the annual "humor" issue of Poetry. Report by poet Kay Ryan on her trek to AWP conference. Somebody's limerick poem on the world's religious sects. Great little poem for children by Richard Wilbur, about those words which have other words inside them (like uncle in unclear).

Puts the blogging in a different perspective. Feel shriven today, like an old bloggarrulous crackerbarrel crackpot. Guess I should read more magazines. You can talk about poetry in the abstract only for so long (I think I should go in the Guinness for that). Those who want to be serious poetry critics have their work cut out for them : so much poetry today is seriously un-serious (witty). Verbal feuerwerkerei. Have to sift through the pretentiously tasteless & the sleekly facile, the Alexandrian slosh of the iron-browed Goliath.

Listened to Franz Wright interviewed on NPR this morning ("The Connection"). Enjoyed the poems he read very much. Synthesizes "wit" or pithy statement, with something like his father's "deep image" - the patient, sensitive evocation of an image of nature suffused with feeling. I like the way such images sort of hover, half-autonomously, within the flow of the poem's discourse. This was one of the things which initially attracted me to Mandelstam, too. I think this effect goes way, way back, linked both to the riddle and the folk song.

Was struck by his comments in response to a caller, in which Wright underlined how important to him were values of clarity and accessibility. Said something like, if his poem didn't seem accessible to just about any reader in the world, then he felt there was probably something wrong with it. What a contrast to the claims for "post-avant" experiment vs. mainstream, etc.

Equivalent today to the Homeric catalogue of ships is the list of poets' names. "Poets such as [blah, blah, blah]. . ." Does this mean poets have become dinghies? Part of a flotilla? Part of one big ship of fools, christened "Fame"?

Reading a book about Joseph Cornell & listening to bloggers talk about childhood books & memories. Would like to consider again the concept of "metaform" I was working on here a few weeks ago. Metaform as the interiorization of experience & its recapitulation in a finished, unique work of art. Originality.

But I guess there is a more impersonal conception of what a poet does. The originality expressed in wit & the ability to combine & assemble & respond to events. Spontaneity.

But the sameness, the grinding chorus of pinwheels, jukeboxes & slot machines. Fetishizing the photomontage. As opposed to the patience of the painter. Time seeps into the canvas through mornings & afternoons & evenings outdoors.

What is an artist? Somebody who has detached him or herself from the wheel somehow. Is standing still & time is seeping out of them, bleeding at the edges.

"Providence. My Providence."