she measured it and said,
it's not big, it's your hair.
(thereby alleviating years of self imposed bigheaddom. i didn't think my proportions so utterly out of whack, but if you've tried on as many hats as i have and had them fail to sit in their appointed position, you'd think you had a big head too)
which i'd neglected to pull back and was everywhere as my hair can be.
i got a helmet for my first lesson today on the rearing seventeen hand stallion. nicole wears a helmet, so i didn't feel odd getting one. but it looked like an overturned garbage can (i don't know why it had to be in silver), so i got a cover for it.
no velvet for me, i'm never planning on showing.
and if i can remember, belly dancing tonight. i keep forgetting to go when i have the day off, or i'm so tired i fall asleep before i can get there. the trick is, if i just keep moving, i can do just about anything. it's when i settle down into the comfort of my landing strip, i crash.
then, i wake around 11 and read 'til 2. it's a weird schedule, but it has afforded me the relative quiet to keep up with my 52 page per day quota. three books down, four to go. i'm reading this manual on prosody wondering if anyone really ever gets it, or if it is mildly confusing to everyone and no one ever really says anything contrary to this person's evaluation of a poem as having spondees and trochees, because no one is really certain what the hell is going on.
but i doubt that. somewhere, some poetry nerd is writing even now about the cadence of a line in a convincingly intimidating way, because he knows. and he is probably the only one who knows. though, there are a bunch of academics who also "know" and this is my dilemma.
how to have this kind of conversation with the academics without selling my soul. can it be done? those are words that often don't meet up in a sentence--academia and soul--at least for me, unless it's in the context of soul-sucking academia. oh, these many hindrances to my progress are perhaps just my hesitation to explore and fail.
i think that is the only way i can do this, take apart a poem, dismantle the beast like a greasy engine, and lay it all out plain as day for my prof. then let him tell me where i'm confubbled--as i surely won't know how to put humpty dumpty back together again.
academia is deconstructive.i read that somewhere, and i can't remember where. ah, yes. calvin martin luther's the way of the human being. an amazing read (if i'm remembering the source correctly, amazing even if that tidbit does not therein reside). that is an academic book with soul, which left me stunned in silence most of the time i was reading it.
but how to take the minutia of accents and syllables and make it remotely interesting (though interest is not high on the list of concerns for academia, no, rather make it pertinent).
that is my greatest trial: pertinence.
make something meaningful of something utterly irrelevant, like erecting a sistine chapel of popsicle sticks. can it be done, perhaps, but why? who cares? certainly not me.
i'm looking foward to getting to the farm today and forgetting all this. curiously, i'm trying to avert a splitting headache that woke me before i was ready today. meds to my rescue, i have to stop thinking, perhaps that is what i'm being told. but, i need to read 52 more pages about something i don't care about.
prosody.
what a bore. (i think i say bore when i mean, waste of time, not sure). it is boring to me because it does not matter. it cannot make me care, hence the boredom. the exhaustion of interest. so i ingest these dry feasts and hope they become something in my mind, in my psyche, because my congitive abilities where prosody is concerned are sadly lacking. i can't make up anything to fool this prof, nor would i want to. but i also can't generate an interest in something i don't care about. and that is the tough part. separating the prosodic goats from the poetic sheep.
this work exhausts me and in the end i wonder if i'll "pass" this semester. sure i'll read all the books and write all the essays, but in the end will i be any closer to my loft goal of effectively utilizing the tools of the poetic trade?
is academic evaluation justifiable use? or is it merely something people do? it is hard for me to believe these poems, the flat, lifeless, (though impeccably constructed), poems are worth the time and effort given them to evaluate them. but apparently they are.
i must stop spinning my mind over nothing on this. which is why the remedy of horses. so can get away from these soul-sucking intrigues. get away to something that matters. and it troubles me that this aspect of poetry doesn't matter one iota, not even becoming more familiar with it has made it matter.
in a way it just cements my position. and that can be troublesome. i'm so stubborn already (which is a word, contrary to my previous posting about it).
i have decided for me to give ground, you must give ground. but then this is not a surrendering, but an enlarging of territories, to where it becomes shared space, a common gound (or venn diagram, if you will), where two once at odds find they have something to share after all. i don't understand surrender in any way other than mutuality. surrender is a powerful action, not a weakness to be rooted out.
my head is aching. i must away.
and the poems, since my weekly foray into grief is over
have been as shy as deer in the forest.
but i am content to let them rest a while. i asked much. they gave much.
it is time for regenerative silence. curious that it should come now, mid semester, but considering the angle of these poetic intrigues, it is no surprise.
peace. out.
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