This is the strangest introductory post I've ever written or tried to write. Typically, I'm not short of words when it comes to blogging--like most of my generation, I have a lamentable tendency to blather on and on about my own navel lint. However, this is the first of my (alas, many) blogs that actually is serving a purpose for me, other than digital repository of the ramblings of an empty mind.
I first got the book The Ode Less Travelled from my local library, oh, a couple of years ago. All I had to do was read the Foreword and I was hooked. I promptly took the book back to the library (early! I thought the clerk would have a heart attack) and hied me over to a big box bookstore and bought a copy. I knew it was something I wanted to own, to study at my leisure.
As the inestimable Mr. Fry states in his Foreword, I was never taught how to write poetry in school. We actually, in typical, half-assed, American-style educational fashion, didn't even have chapters on reading poetry. The closest we got was a section of Beowulf, which still ranks high on my list of favorite stories evar. But I'd never been in sniffing distance of Keats, Byron, or any other poet. Well, we did do Dante's Inferno, but in our translation it read more like Dr. Seuss than something as impressive as it was built up to be (although Dr. Seuss isn't half bad, for all that. No disparagement intended!) Final irony: my professor of the Dante class? A poet.
I want to learn about poetry. I wanted to learn how to write it, and write it properly. However, as you might have noticed, I've had this book for a couple of years. At least one of them I've spent as an unemployed person, trying whatever I can to keep busy while I wait for employers to start needing people again. What am I waiting for? Or, to phrase that properly, For what am I waiting? An engraved invitation?
So to build accountability into my practice (and set myself up for public humiliation at the same time), I'm creating this blog as a workbook of sorts. Some of the exercises in the book are done actually in the book (meter marking exercises, I'm looking at you), but others are written out. I have notebooks aplenty and pencils all over, but I want somewhere to keep a digital track of myself and occasionally do an exercise--as I spend a portion of each day on the internet, and maybe my notebook is in my purse in another room or something, it seems a wise precaution.
I warn you, this blog will be dull, badly written and probably highly laughable. So if you get off on the 'so bad, it's almost good' sort of thing, this one's for you!
