I've gotta quit doing this!

Quote of the Day/Week/Millenium:

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor. ~Lord Byron

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

About me

Name: Sian
I paint, write, and dance. Also cook vegetarian food.

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Monday, 03 October 2005

I've gotta quit doing this!

Once again, I'm in the basement of the University's library, mailing in my distance learning stuff at the last possible moment. I actually paid some attention to word limits this time, and it wound up taking longer than I really expected. It's ten thirty, almost, and I'm way more tired than I ought to be. I think it has to do with trying to be diplomatic and positive, and cheerful all at the same time for too long.

I am not a social poet. I really don't particularly need or want massive quantities of feedback, and reading all the different things that people had said about my poem for their selective discussion this week exhausted me. Nothing left. Not that they said anything too horrible--actually, they didn't really say anything bad, at all. I almost never drag my poetry out into the light of day, unless someone I trust is bugging me to do something with it, or on the rare occasion that I feel like I ought to be a social poet. The feeling usually wears off, and then I usually wind up spending the rest of the semester regretting that I registered for the class in the first place.

If the mood ever strikes me again, please remind me that I'm not a social poet. I am an anti-social poet. I should be scribbling my heart out in small, easily concealed volumes, not posting them on class forum net. I should burn at least 90% of them, and then leave what's left to my stunned survivors, who had no clue that I was even literate, while I was alive. That's what an anti-social poet does.

Tonight, though, the class I'm really regretting registering for is the history class. It's one of those revisionist history, progressivist bull shit courses that we all have to suffer through from time to time. The professors questions are usually something along the line of "here's a point in history. If we had turned left instead of right at Poughkipsee, we'd be a whole lot closer to pacifism/communism/one-payer health care, wouldn't that be cool?" Today, we were writing about the very naughty Greeks who divided humanity from nature, thus leading directly to the atom bomb. (Yeah, I didn't get it either, but I'm really good at smiling and nodding.) I said that I'd be more than glad to die a horrible, fiery death, blinked into oblivion by the bomb in exchange for any single line of Dante. Do you think that's the wrong answer?

I considered the possibility of suggesting that if you consider Sylvia Plath to be poetic, artistic, or beautiful, you must consider the bomb to be even more so, the penultimate creation of a suicidal society, but I decided that probably was the wrong answer, all by my very own self.