Break, Blow, Burn

I feel I should know more about poetry. After all, I was an English major, and every time I turn around I seem to be reading something. But my education here is sorely lacking. I took right away to Keats, I seemed to spend an entire year in high school reading Eliot, cummings always went down easy, and of course I could do a few leaves of grass every now and then (or even the odd Howl) and enjoy the sway and fire and the sheer words of it all, but mostly I have always been, so to speak, prosaic. I write with a beginning, a middle and an end, and while I like a phrase to fall trippingly from the word processor, I don’t get hung up on it. I love plenty of prose stylists (I consider Nabokov’s elegance to be often staggering, for instance) and I’ve got Ars Gratia Artis tattooed on my person somewhere (right below the “Mom,” if I remember correctly), but as I say, poetry has never been my thing. Worse, I’ve always felt that much poetry eluded me. Not so much that I didn’t get the point of it, but I literally didn’t understand what the poet was saying. Now it’s one thing wrestling with Pound Cantos full of mythical references and finding yourself pinned to the matt, and another thing altogether staring at plain old Wordsworth and having nary a clue to what this dog is ranting on about (except, of course, you know it’s got nature written all over it). If that’s not a gap in my education, I don’t know what is.

Break, Blow, Burn is pretty much little more than class lectures on warhorse poems, wherein the instructor explicates the content (i.e., tells you what’s going on) and explains what the poet is trying to do. This is the plot, and this is the theme, in other words, which is how stuff was always broken down in elementary readings of texts when I was a larva. Paglia goes through a few conniptions about poststructuralist analysis (which she categorizes about as highly as donkey poop), then gets down to the business of telling you what these poems are all about. Occasionally she gets a little carried away, but not in a bad way. And the selection is quite canonical, so even when you’re less than taken by the analysis, you still get to reacquaint yourself (or, if you’re young enough, just merely acquaint yourself) with the poem, to read it a few times, to run it through your brain. This is not a bad thing. One should know something about poetry if one considers oneself to be educated. If you’re already a student, of course, then this would seem like just more work at the wrong time, which I understand, but for an old fart like me, this is a good thing. And even if you are a student, and all exhausted from studying all kinds of useless crap all day, you still need to know about poetry (which is a lot less useless in life than plenty of other subjects I can mention but won’t, but just as a hint, I haven’t used quantum chemistry out of the classroom since the day I slammed shut the textbook, and I haven’t missed a minute of it, nor found my life lacking in any way as a result, and in fact my guess is that in the dog’s age since I learned whatever it was that I learned they’ve changed it all anyhow, as they have with subjects I enjoyed much more, like linguistics and anthropology). So, a new book added to the recommended reading list, not for forensics, but life in general.

The other nice thing about the book is that it is in small pieces, allowing me plenty of time to feed the new iPod. It arrived yesterday. So nice. Yeah, I heard a rumor this morning of a 120 gigger, but Jeesh, everything always gets bigger and faster and cheaper the minute you buy it. My old GrandPod was a 10 gigger that I never filled past 5 gigs, so I’m not exactly worried that I won’t have enough space here. Since I’ll only dabble in video, as I’ve said, just because it’s there, that won’t be an issue. Mostly all that’s available are TV shows that I’m perfectly happy watching, uh, on TV. There are a few videocasts that look like fun, though, and coming attractions might be entertaining, but let’s face it, I won’t have much time to look at this stuff (I’m not like LC, for instance, taking the train from Lexington to Dubai, with plenty of time for and need of entertainment). Not that I’m trying to justify or rationalize wasting all that money… It’s toys, damn it. People need toys. And progress. Why, I remember a time when if people wanted to listen to music, they had to listen to these things called CDs. Talk about ancient history!