Finally, Just a Few Links to Think About

No drafting this week, since as soon as I post this, I'm off to school for conference duties. The conference ends on Saturday afternoon, and I plan to sleep all day Sunday. Will be back to drafting next week.

Until then, here are just a few links to continue the conversation:

Joshua Corey contemplates the differences between writing poetry and writing a novel. Here's what hooked me: "The pleasures of poetry are the pleasures of simultaneity. I read a line of verse, and it's like a chain reaction of little detonations: the sound play, the layers of reference (in the line's structure, diction, proper names, etc.), the manifestation of images, and the instantaneous revisions of the preceding lines created by the double-jointed syntax made possible by line breaks."

The blog from 32 Poems has a great interview with Ann Fisher-Wirth. I attended a reading last year at the Arkansas Literary Festival where Fisher-Wirth read from Carta Marina. Fantastic. Her answer to a question on accessibility and the poet's responsibility contains this: "However, as a professor I take very seriously my opportunity to open poetry to students, and open students to poetry. All infants and children love poetry; it is bred in the bone. It is a great wrong that so many aspects of our culture stifle children’s appreciation of poetry as they get older. So I look upon my teaching as excavation. The love of poetry, the understanding of poetry—they’re down there, somewhere. The evidence is that even people who never read poems turn to poems to help them affirm and commemorate life’s great passages: birth, marriage, a society’s great tragedies, death."

Time to put on my other hat and tip it toward those strategic duties.