Busy Signal

I had absolutely no intention of creating a blog today. I tried to register so I could make a comment on Stacia's blog and suddenly blogspot.com was prompting me for a title for my
blog. I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS, I said meekly, but no one was listening. Yeah, I'm
one of those 3rd semesteers who must eat ECE for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Well, at times
like this in the past I have had various options, and one of them is to "make the best of it."

I think the comment I spent all of about five minutes typing for Stacia's blog has probably
been erased. FIVE MINUTES OF MY PRECIOUS TIME, down the drain. So by way of intro-
duction to this blog I had no intention of creating, I will attempt to re-construct my comments,
as they are apropos of something.

Or, no, I won't try to duplicate what I said. I'll try to make some statements which are a response to all the blog-reading I've done in the past couple of weeks.

Stacia and Gwen were talking about the pros and cons of writing about "family stuff." Jae was
talking about the questionable value of "accessible" poetry. I am a poet who tends often to write about family stuff, and who most often writes accessible poetry. I think a good ten percent
of my poetry is accessible narrative poetry about family stuff. Maybe even twelve percent.

Obviously, not every poet is striving to live the Socratic "examined" life through her (or his)
poetry. Some would contend that poetry is an art form, not a form of therapy. And accessible poetry is not "art" because it "dumbs down" the reader. The comments on Jae's blog included
the expressed desire to credit the reader with intelligence, to give him (or her) some work to do.

Back to family stuff, especially negative family stuff: Plath avoided writing it, but then it all came out at the end of her life. I'm not saying there's a lesson in this; obviously we are not all "disturbed" like Plath. I do agree with Gwen about balance. If writing about negative things
is a way of "exorcising demons" --- is that using poetry the wrong way? I don't think the choice
of subject matter is what makes a poet healthy or disturbed. One can write about horrific stuff in a balanced, sane way.

Back to accessible poetry: on the one hand, one might write it if one wants a larger audience than just fellow poets. For example, I wasn't going to write something emulating Pound's Cantos when I was memorializing a friend who had committed suicide, in a poem which I read at his funeral. On the other hand, I admire clarity in the work of other poets, I began writing poetry only after I had read poetry that spoke to me, that was about real life, that didn't give me a headache as I tried to figure it out. Sometimes the material a poet chooses to write about is very complex, and it is a challenge to convert this material into an accessible poem.

I don't mean to sound defensive. I think there's a place in the poetic universe for the kind of poetry Jae prefers, I hope there's a place for my stuff as well. There have never been more poets than there are at this moment; we can reject what we don't like, keep our eyes open for stuff that grabs us. Reacting to what we don't like is important in the development of our personal aesthetics.

--- Harriet, who is too busy to have written this.