I am working on revisions for Kathy Graber’s class this weekend. I have a difficult time of it. Prose, for me, is simpler to reform. I can spot a stray sentence-hair that needs plucking. With poetry. Those stanzas. Fragments. Well. This is work. And often, as I’m sure you could tell from some of last month’s offerings, with poetry I dash ’em off––and they are or they aren’t––and then I want to just be done with them (embarrassed). Sometimes I think there is something inherently disgusting about commitment, whether to a particular work or to a cause or even to (well).

[Meanwhile…] String theory holds that sub-sub-atomic particles are comprised of vibrating strands, essentially. To think of it: the entire universe, and all of us, singing all the time, engaged in a colossal hum that we fail to hear. (Wasn’t it Benjamin Disraeli who said that the great tragedy is that too many people die with the music still locked up inside of them?) I still feel that, in writing poetry, I am singing along to a song that I don’t entirely know the words for. I wonder how much of writing, and the composition of verse in particular, is instinctual; how much we just need to trust our gut and Johnny Guttschall throwing up his hand and commanding us to be captive. So we will; and must be.

Like a quivering string inside a neutrino: fragile, delicate, beautiful––reflecting the human condition which it precipitates.

(But I think, too, that I wish to be revised, again. That in some way I have been this semester. That maybe poetry was a part of that, too. That all art aspires to music: so, too, I.)