First, my thanks to the generous souls who agreed to take a look at the poem I was stuck on. You guys rock! (Please know that there's no hurry, though -- I doubt I'll have time to work on the thing until after Memorial Day. Sigh.)
Second, welcome to any readers picking me up via the feed at slisblogs.com. I feel like I should watch my mouth now, or something. ;) Y'all should know that I don't talk about SLIS stuff much here, or much library stuff at all, really -- this blog is devoted primarily to nattering about writing, or writing about nattering, as the case may be, with a side dish of dithering and blathering. If you are interested in contemporary poetry & poetics, click through to my blog and check out my links to many other (much more interesting) poet-bloggers.
(For those non-SLIS folks who are now scratching their heads, SLIS is the School of Library & Information Science here at Indiana U., and the SLIS Library is where I work & how I pay the bills that poetry refuses to look at. Damn poetry. Someday it's gonna take me out to lunch and pick up the check, I swear to god, or else it's getting kicked out of this house. Poetry is such a moocher.)
It is just over a month now till I head out to Provincetown for a week-long poetry workshop on "Vision and Revision" with D.A. Powell at the Fine Arts Work Center. I can't decide whether I'm looking forward to it more for the workshop itself or for just getting the heck out of Indiana for a few days. Both, I guess. P-town is one of my favorite places on the planet, but it feels even better to be going there with a purpose this time -- like I'm not just another tourist. Silly, I know. And I know I will learn a ton from D.A. Powell; I'm rereading Cocktails now and his use of language is just, well, wow. And it will be good to spend a few days studying with someone whose voice is so very different from my own. Hopefully that will help me to step outside my own work a bit and understand how to revise it -- not just editing, but re/vision, seeing it again with new eyes and different understandings. I plan to take a little stack of poems I feel more or less stuck on. Hopefully I'll make some headway.
Patty Larkin is on E-Town on the radio right now. Oh, this is so nice. I listen to someone like her and I wish I were a musician instead of a poet. There are things that can be said in the bend of a note that can't be said in whole volumes filled with words. Sometimes I think my poetry wishes it could be music the way a barking dog chasing geese into the air wishes she could fly.
5 comments:
You ARE a musician, Anne, I've seen the guitar cases. . . Garbo
Hah! Thanks Garbo ... but it doesn't count when the poor guitar cases only get opened once or twice a year.
Anne, I wish you would blog a little about your LIS position--I'm slowly making steps towards my own MLIS. Talk to me. Tell me what you love. Tell me the good, the bad and the ugly. (I'm leaning towards a school media specialist position, but sometimes I think the university library would be a great place, too.) Spill it!
xo
Suzanne, I will do that in the near future. Although my position is a bit odd, in that I've chosen to stay put in a town where MLS's are a dime a dozen, so I'm working in a support staff position that doesn't actually require the degree. (But it's in a library, and the stuff I learned in library school is actually useful.)
I do think libraries are excellent places for poets to work -- in my first library job ever, when I was an undergrad, the poet Daniel Bourne was my supervisor. :)
Anyhow, will definitely blog about this stuff soon! Thanks for asking.
Great! And if you want to instead of blogging you could backchannel me too-- sfrischkorn at hotmail dot com. I'm looking foward to the behind the scenes scoop. :-)
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