Changing Up the Blog (which is similar to that impulse when you shake Boggle)

For the past four years, I have been reading the old stuff, starting with Beowulf and bulldozing onward. Cramming it in. Analyzing it. Call it overcoming a crappy education. Call it inferiority complex. Call it the “historical sense” as T.S. Eliot does. I would agree with the Old Eliot here and say the historical sense was my motivation. Once I decided to really turn my life over to writing poetry, I wanted to know exactly what has come before, why, and what beget what. That Adam and Eve thing we can’t quite shake. Genesis of everything. Eliot describes it a bit more formally: “… the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his country has simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” It’s been a wonderful endeavor to say the least. But now that my two exams in poetry are over--one over the entire genre since Beowulf and the other on the 19th century (all those Romantics and Victorian poets that the Modernists and our contemporaries respond to)--I feel like I’ve earned the right to say, Good Job. Now, I can go back to my old love of reading contemporary work with the same vibrato. (It’s not like I ever stopped reading it, but to read all the old greats…. Well, time is time. And I can’t manipulate that bitch no matter what Red Bull tells me.) And it’s not like I will stop re-reading the older works, especially since there is still a lot out there to read, re-read, and discover. But yeah, it’s time to change up the ratio again. And in celebration of this, I’m changing up the blog. Each week I will review a contemporary poem or song. Just one. By focusing on one poem a week, I can slow down this blitz-stream of information we have whizzing by us all the time and give one poem some old-fashioned quality time. I hope you enjoy it with me.