Blistering

Stepping back a moment and realizing I'm so upset because I have nobody to talk to about poetry amuses me a bit.

Through my usual blog reading I stumbled into a two month old discussion about rules in poetry. Some of my anger comes from the use of "discussion" to describe what happens in the blogosphere. My favorite kind of discussion, and in my opinion the most useful kind, has a finite number of people in a shared space for the duration of the conversation. An internet discussion takes place on several pieces of paper with no continuity in the audience and little sense of dialog. Reaction and feedback are important to me, and those values are harder to hang on to in the virtual realm.

It strikes me that the party I was at last Saturday was (in a couple ways) a good simulation of an internet discussion. There was a lot of background noise that hindered clear communication, and many forces begging for attention. I can't count the number of times I had to step away from a conversation for a moment and the other participants disappeared before I could return.

I have achingly strong opinions about poetry and I want someone to try to persuade me that these opinions are misfounded. I feel that rhythm is an essential element of poetry and want someone to show me how to find it in poems it's not evident to me in. I feel strongly that anyone should be able to read aloud a poem and be able to naturally give it the same flow that the author would. Most importantly, I have a stranglehold on the belief that line breaks and stanza breaks are invisible punctuation, and if it's easier for me to read your poem when I take out the breaks, you're doing it wrong. (And if I hear a poem and completely miss when putting the breaks in, you're doing it wrong, too.)

Someone sit me down and go over some examples and prove that I'm being a simple minded commoner and here's now to read these things properly. Not that I want to be condescended to; I just want to find out what you see in those types of poems. Is it really just chopped up prose, but nobody publishes or gives prizes to artful paragraphs?

Be still my heaving bosom.

If someone said to me, "Didn't you get worked up about this a couple weeks ago, too?" I would not be able to answer with confidence, but I wouldn't lay odds against it. I'm going to keep getting worked up about this until I get a satisfactory discussion about it. That satisfaction may not come from the web, I realize. You poor, helpless readers.

Of course, I could write an email to a blogging poet and ask them to help me, or bring it up in the comments of a related post, but I don't know any poets well enough to go to their homes blogs upset and be that emotional stranger. I am emotional about this. Plus there's still that block about not hearing the text properly in my mind's ear.

(Also, Universe, if this kindly soul that leads me kindly through the fields of poetry could also look over some of my verse and help me gain some objectivity about it, that would be lovely.)

Moving on.

I am achingly in hermit mode.

At least I was achingly in hermit mode two hours ago when Reagan went to bed. Beyond being the insular self concerned only with my own whims, I also had a profound "lost-my-way" restlessness, and spent 20 minutes or more trying to properly explain myself to sleepy-Reagan. The metaphors started out in the vicinity of not being able to hear my own true voice and ended up close to "the road turned but I kept going straight and now I'm lost and disoriented with no sense of direction".

Earlier, during the last tea-break of the day, I took my mug and went into the backyard to sit on decorative rocks and look at the moon. My ipod was with me. I tried listening to the Fresh Air podcast I'd been folding laundry to, then tried listening to a favorite song. Neither of them felt right. Considering the lyrics of that song are

Time and space stretch out before you
And the universe implores you
To take your place
Amongst all things
And to see what the morning brings
To your own self be true
There's nothing more to do

that's saying something.

Even with my headphones off, I couldn't find peace in the moment. The feeling I was missing something--an opportunity, a piece of myself, who knows what?--persisted.

The anxiety only subsided noticeably when I was in the middle of this post. It started retreating well before that moment, but I didn't realize at first, being too busy concentrating on the five day backlog of blogs I was sifting through.

It is paradoxical that dipping into a medium that gets me so riled up on one front (see the first part of this post) could also quell me so well on another. Recent restlessness and disconnection is blamed on my lack of "internet study" in the past week. Hopefully it sticks.