THINKING COUNTS



In this week's Widely Read Magazine I discovered the publication of a poem by someone with whom I went to poetry school. This someone was not a someone who was my friend. S/he wrote lots of poems of the look-at-me-I-am-so-cute-and-sexy! free verse confessional variety, and being that s/he WAS both cute and sexy, consequently got a lotta play. I do not write these kinds of sexily confessional poems, despite having gone to the MFA redoubt of such poetic making. My poems are a bit more ... formal, in both content and style.

Indeed, I rebel against the hegemony of the confessional free verse narrative, mainly because I am not a narcissicist, and also because I think that the Romantics and their swoony lyrics have just about now had their due. Nonetheless, my poet-acquaintance just published in the fucking Widely Read Magazine. Gar! Envy!

And this discovery occurred as I was also reading Hollander's The Work of Poetry, and thinking, fuck. Just fuck. Hollander's book is useful for my own critical work, but it made me realize: I miss making poems like I can't even explain. All the quiet space within me is devoted to writing my "book" and there is simply no room in there for poetry this summer. I don't know when there WILL be room, and I am trying very much to trust that such time will come. And soon.

And oddly, I also got a letter from the Girlfriend of My Youth, who lives in Neighboring State. I haven't heard from her in months, if not years. GMY is single, having parted ways with her own longtime GF. And GMY reported that she is actively trying to get pregnant, turkey-baster-style, with sperm-bank donations. I find this fascinating and a little nuts. It's totally something she would and could do. And she'll be a rockin' mother. But man! That's so expensive! And going the pregnancy route solo is ... brave as hell.

TF keeps saying, "you finish this book, then you get to do what you want." That might mean writing more poems, or egads, getting hitched with TF and trying to have a kid together. I mean really. No pressure or anything.

So I keep "working" on my "book." I am remembering a thing that Beloved Adviser told me when I first began dissertating: "thinking counts." It counts as labor, because it IS academic labor. Writing isn't just the time spent with the ass in the chair--although the ass-in-the-chair is by far the most important part. Writing can't happen without lots of reading and musing and wondering and note-taking. I am telling myself this in an attempt to feel less guilt about how slow my progress is.

The "book" is its own kind of generation. Slow and strange and steady.