oh, i've been slacking. more than slacking. i've all but quit everything. i was coerced into joining Live Journal, and have since neglected this site, which i find more inviting anyway. i don't understand this newness that is always forced on website users. people have a site at certain web addresses for a reason. mostly because they're easy to use. by the time i'm into the groove of the whole thing (i.e. facebook, myspace, etc.) things change. buttons relocated, or become hidden altogether, layouts rotate, new options are added (but not explained), blah blah blah. but i guess things always need revised. profit scheme. adobe just came out with CS4. this may not mean a lot to the person who pastes their friend's heads onto llamas using the program, but it means a hell of a lot to people who use the program as the core of their job. i fall into the latter, and sometimes former, and this new edition means upgrades. expensive upgrades. business upgrades. for what? a new web interface that is so beyond human comprehension it will never be used? yes, probably. and people will fall for it. not printers, like me, but those that fall into the former group, who consider themselves "cutting edge," who can tell their other office-friends that they work on CS4. ugh. and the kinks that will need worked out? the printing snafus, the font defaults, yeah, that falls on me too since i'm the one printing it.
back to quitting. i forced out some poems yesterday. mainly because i haven't written a decent one in so long. i'm taking a craft of poetry class that focuses on forms. i have sonnets galore with recent revision dates, but no free verse, which is where my heart is. oh, those sonnets. they bring out the generic in me. vagueness from all corners. to follow that rhyme scheme AND iambic pentameter? i lose it. completely lose it. we've moved on to villanelles but i have my doubts about that one too.
i've quit doing homework, quit sleeping, quit stressing. this last one worries the hell out of me. i'm usually stressed to maximum stressness during the semester. i don't really like my grad school. the professors are either too lax or spread too thin to be at the attentiveness a writer-in-learning needs. i'm kind of stuck. i keep thinking about switching to a different school, but do i really want to stack that financial responsibility onto myself?
my light: i observed some classes at PITT Greensburg today. Gary Lutz and Judith Vollmer. in a business comp 3 class, Lutz studied the roots of "jargon" for 20 minutes of the 50 minute class. the man knows where details need to go. knows what needs the focus. the right side of his upper lip lags behind the other side when talking. that engaged me more than he'll ever know. and Vollmer, what can i say about her? i love her. she has this odd pull. very odd. she knows how to steer a class of poets. knows how to get them to say exactly what she's alluding to as if it was their genuine idea. and she knows the meaning and history of the most obscure references. Rumi makes a lot of ancient Green and Roman references, and she knows them all. she is who made me want to be a teacher then a poet, in that order.
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