Just a Few Things
Check out my blogroll; I have added Erin Noteboom's Vivid, partially because she has been so kind as to link me, and the far greater part because her site is utterly cool, and her poetry blows me away. I like to go there to remind myself of the seductive, almost magical quality of well-placed words, because so often I forget. More on this in a moment. Her link replaces the link to my favorite G.K. Chesterton site, as that link pretty much made it look like G.K. Chesterton has a blog. And now I have a blog bunny...I'd love to see what a blog by G.K. Chesterton would be like. He would like the blog, I think, if he could be persuaded to get over the shock to his conservative sensibilities that the world of the computer would present. I'll just sit and grin here for a moment, thinking about G.K. Chesterton's blog; and then I'll move on.
The thing about words. In a high-school creative writing class I was once assigned a project called instant poetry. I can't remember the procedure, but it required one to think of one's favorite words in certain categories, redivide the categories, and make poems out of the result. It was a good assignment, because there was a structure to it, and yet the words were all my own. I remember shuffling the cards on which I had written my words, and looking reverently over them, and repeating some of them to my friend, who was in the same class. She didn't seem to be as enthusiastic as I was, so I asked her (thinking perhaps I was hogging the limelight somehow) what some of her words were. She said, "I don't understand why you're going on about it like this. They're just words."
I was shocked. Nay, I was horrified that my friend (who was quite a good writer in her own right) had this -- sacrilegious attitude toward words. I mean, just words?! It was the first time that I realized that one could actually step out of the river of language long enough to stop caring about it.
Unfortunately, I've found myself doing just that in recent years.
I don't blame my graduate English studies for this, not exactly. I value very highly the intellectual muscle and skill in rhetoric that I built up earning my B.A. and M.A. I love the feeling of a well-honed argument, like a hand-turned table leg, like a nail struck into place with one hammer-blow. And yet the part of me that still loved wading in the river of language just to splash like a child was sometimes frustrated, writing seminar papers. Of course, I told my freshman comp students that though they may love creative writing and hate academic writing, the latter was still worth learning; but I remembered holding the same sentiment myself in their place years before, and I couldn't help secretly wishing that argument could incorporate some of the uses of poetry. If I wrote with the parallelism of the psalmists in my critical arguments, I wished I could also write with their pungency as well -- and get away with it.
But time and work and illness all took their toll; and here I am musing on the lost magic of words -- of simple words: ask, tingling, crackle, purple, fern, canter, cantor -- we give thanks to thee for thy great glory --
Here I am thinking that I want to do something new. I want to take what I've known in my bones forever, and what I've learned at the hands of others, and create some new (for me) kind of excellence. But I am beginning, and I wish I had a teacher, or a guide; someone to play Virgil to my Dante. Not that I think myself as great as Dante, but that I think myself as much in need of a guide as Dante thought himself, both in writing and in life.
Except that maybe...We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.
I do not know. Meanwhile I will play with the shiny words.
Check out my blogroll; I have added Erin Noteboom's Vivid, partially because she has been so kind as to link me, and the far greater part because her site is utterly cool, and her poetry blows me away. I like to go there to remind myself of the seductive, almost magical quality of well-placed words, because so often I forget. More on this in a moment. Her link replaces the link to my favorite G.K. Chesterton site, as that link pretty much made it look like G.K. Chesterton has a blog. And now I have a blog bunny...I'd love to see what a blog by G.K. Chesterton would be like. He would like the blog, I think, if he could be persuaded to get over the shock to his conservative sensibilities that the world of the computer would present. I'll just sit and grin here for a moment, thinking about G.K. Chesterton's blog; and then I'll move on.
The thing about words. In a high-school creative writing class I was once assigned a project called instant poetry. I can't remember the procedure, but it required one to think of one's favorite words in certain categories, redivide the categories, and make poems out of the result. It was a good assignment, because there was a structure to it, and yet the words were all my own. I remember shuffling the cards on which I had written my words, and looking reverently over them, and repeating some of them to my friend, who was in the same class. She didn't seem to be as enthusiastic as I was, so I asked her (thinking perhaps I was hogging the limelight somehow) what some of her words were. She said, "I don't understand why you're going on about it like this. They're just words."
I was shocked. Nay, I was horrified that my friend (who was quite a good writer in her own right) had this -- sacrilegious attitude toward words. I mean, just words?! It was the first time that I realized that one could actually step out of the river of language long enough to stop caring about it.
Unfortunately, I've found myself doing just that in recent years.
I don't blame my graduate English studies for this, not exactly. I value very highly the intellectual muscle and skill in rhetoric that I built up earning my B.A. and M.A. I love the feeling of a well-honed argument, like a hand-turned table leg, like a nail struck into place with one hammer-blow. And yet the part of me that still loved wading in the river of language just to splash like a child was sometimes frustrated, writing seminar papers. Of course, I told my freshman comp students that though they may love creative writing and hate academic writing, the latter was still worth learning; but I remembered holding the same sentiment myself in their place years before, and I couldn't help secretly wishing that argument could incorporate some of the uses of poetry. If I wrote with the parallelism of the psalmists in my critical arguments, I wished I could also write with their pungency as well -- and get away with it.
But time and work and illness all took their toll; and here I am musing on the lost magic of words -- of simple words: ask, tingling, crackle, purple, fern, canter, cantor -- we give thanks to thee for thy great glory --
Here I am thinking that I want to do something new. I want to take what I've known in my bones forever, and what I've learned at the hands of others, and create some new (for me) kind of excellence. But I am beginning, and I wish I had a teacher, or a guide; someone to play Virgil to my Dante. Not that I think myself as great as Dante, but that I think myself as much in need of a guide as Dante thought himself, both in writing and in life.
Except that maybe...We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.
I do not know. Meanwhile I will play with the shiny words.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home