Chimera Song Mosaic
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Did I not promise myself I wouldn't blog about the process of a reluctant (yet again) return to blogging? Did I not, at least in some frame, vow to resist the compulsion to fill posts with lukewarm comments on things I have read?
Both would be good to keep. Think about it: why would anyone want to read about the hard means of revisiting an obligation? I wouldn't. I'm not so sure I can. Resist.
And those half-baked analyses of readings: too trite! If I really I have something to say about a text, I'll say it. But I don't think there's much love or purpose in tepidity. It just feels too much like a transparent effort to prove my worth to any readers of this blog--as if poets have nothing better to do than size up each other. (I'm not pointing fingers here; I'm just exploiting an insecure urge of my own.)
One more thing I shouldn't repeat: that I'm sure I'll write more when I'm deeper out of my element. I'm still in Houston (living a life 2 parts social, 1 part intellectual), and I don't plan to move to Argentina until mid- to late April. I'm embarrassed that I keep telling people I'm moving overseas--to Qatar, no, Argentina!--but that I can never produce the evidence when pressed with reality. That old friends have to ask: How's life in Qatar? What's it like to live in the Middle East? Is your Spanish improving (now that you're in Patagonia)?
Too, that my impulse never was to broadcast my future. I'm much more the type to keep such intelligence in my back pocket, unwilling to give into the ready credit of exoticism. But come on! It was too easy. There are some journals floating around nowadays with a contributor's bio that reads like this: "Deborah Wardlaw Pattillo's work appears in . . . and she blogs from Doha, Qatar." Don't believe a word of it!
Though I have blogged from the Middle East (not Doha but Dubai), it wasn't much in the way of writing, and I only spent a couple of weeks there. I have never been South of Venezuela in this Hemisphere. But all that will change in April. Okay; I hope so. Ojala que yo . . .
Friday, February 09, 2007
I tell you what.
I'll give you something to cry about.*
*Not an actual example of a poem.
