life in a box

Now that I've chased away my readership with yet another WEIRD blog entry, I will pause at the end of Monday night to address the blog spirits or poltergeists or extremely hardy souls who venture to adventure with me one more time. My title is borrowed from a recent blog entry by Gwen. It also reminds me of a song by Alice in Chains called "Man in a Box." Though I'm the wrong gender, I have identified with that song at times, been known to turn it up loud when it comes on my car radio.

SO, the exceptionally hardy reader of this blog entry is wondering, WHEN do we get back to poetry??? Probably not until the ECE joins with the family picnic on the 4th and the grandbaby's first birthday as a Polaroid memory (or is that supposed to be Kodak???) Oh, I suppose I could share heartwarming stories of my progress on the ECE. This morning I woke up to the sounds of an intruder in the kitchen. Not to suggest that I had no clue as to who this intruder might be. Yes, my girlfriend's schizophrenic son, whom I mentioned in my last blog entry, a young man who has been repeatedly politely asked by his mother to PLEASE knock and wait for a response before coming in. He had emptied the refrigerator of everything but a few science experiments, and there were pots boiling on all the burners and there was something in the oven which smelled vaguely like charcoal. I said: "Ian, what the BLEEP are you doing here???"

Tomorrow, should I detect anything with my schizophrenia detector upon rising and shining, I am cleared to make a pleasant call to the local precinct, letting them know they should sent someone from the CIT team --- cops specially trained to deal with the mentally ill.

So what does all this have to do with progress on my ECE??? After Ian left (neglecting to turn off the burners), I sat down and spent a few amusing moments considering the work of Eleanor Lerman.

The poetry of Eleanor Lerman IS, after all, amusing; I don't know why I sometimes think or say it's not, except that of course I know why, it's because when you eat drink and breathe someone's poetry (I never intended my ECE to be about only one poet) it can start to feel like your own, and I, for one, do not always feel so terrific about my own work.
Lerman is not a well-known poet and I feel self-conscious writing about her --- my ECE may well be the first critical writing of significant length that anyone has done on her work, and that's sort of a lot of responsibility for an actual nut like me to take on.

Yeah, for example Lerman's publisher, Sarabande books, has expressed interest in seeing the finished essay. Gawd, I just want to hide behind the refrigerator. As any reader could tell from reading my blog, I am very shy and slow to reveal my opinions. Would Spalding let me adopt a pen name when I turn in my ECE??? Maybe the nice folks at Sarabande will have forgotten my name by the time this essay is all MLA-ed and approved.
That's if all that good stuff happens; before it does, I'm going to have to
spend some more quality time with Ms. Lerman.

But now before signing off on this cyber-document, I should think back to the title of my blog entry: life in a box. Do I live in a box? Do we all live in invisible boxes? Oh, hey, this is all a little mystical or deep for me. Yeah, we all have our limitations, and we all have limits imposed on us. Big deal. If these things weren't true, each one of us would be the Universe, or God, or something.

I will need a box to hide in. Instead of hiding behind the refrigerator, I should hide inside it. If I can figure out how to do that, I can surely figure out what to say in the homestretch (last ten pages) of my ECE. I want to thank anyone who has born with me through this and other nutty installments of purple prose in the actual nuthouse.

--- Harriet.