Saturday, January 24, 2009

Back from the Midwest


IMG_0130
Originally uploaded by odelapaz.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I feel like I've been on an eating tour of the Midwest.

This is a shot of Hodak's chicken platter which was crispy and tender, but a little under-seasoned for my taste.

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Taught my first pair of classes since my reading tour. The students seemed more unprepared than usual. A lot of kids didn't read, so I'm thinking of giving 'em a quiz on the first 220 pages of China Men. If you're reading this, students, you've been warned.

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Been thinking about long poems and the problem with 'em. I've been writing these narrative poems where the epiphany or the epiphanic moment happens towards the end and is partially the result of time and distance. The trouble I'm encountering is that the long poem seems to be a long meandering quest for an epiphany and that one can't just launch into an epiphany in a long poem, otherwise what's the point?

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Backtracking a bit. Hung out with Rodney Jones, the dude who selected my first book for the Crab Orchard Prize. My god, he's funny. Anyway, it was good reading the newer poems to his class. I'm not the same point I was.

It's funny, but I wrote prose poems, I think, to figure out lineation. Now I think I've figured out my lines and the way I want to use the line.

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Current Spins:



Andrew Bird. This isn't from his new album, Noble Beast, but I've provided a link to a streaming broadcast from NPR.

1 comment:

A. P. Bucak said...

Well, if you think of a long narrative poem as having some things in common with a short story--you might think of it as being more like a series of epiphanies, one leading to the next. Or even a series of actions (which prompt epiphanies), one leading to the next.