oetry is part of my life. That may be obvious, considering that I run a web site dedicated to poetry, but it was quite a revelation to me. It wasn't just that I read poetry, but that at some point poetry became a part of who I am, and wasn't just something that I was interested in, or a mere hobby. I've never believed that a personwas what they did for a living - and I still maintain that my life is not my job. Yours probably isn't either. Maybe I'd feel differently if I worked in a "poetry factory" and constructed poems for someone else all day - maybe I wouldn't want to pick up a book after work, or fire up the word processor late at night and begin working on a poem. I thought that I may share some of my ideas (and other people's plagiarized ideas) about poetry with you.
Getting down to business.
I wanted to start this series of articles with an introduction, so that I may tell you a little about why I am writing these articles. Mostly I just want to figure out for myself what it is that I want to accomplish as I continue writing this series.
What these are not.
These articles are not going to be formal in the least. I'll most likely not be using "big" words and my sentences will not be constructed according to the rules of grammar that was drilled into my head through many (does six count as "many"?) years of parochial (that's a big word for "Catholic") school. I hope to not have too many spelling mistakes, given the wonders of modern technology. A few may still creep in, as I'll be typing very quickly and not looking back. I tend to write in a fairly free-form way, although I'm a structuralist at heart. So hopefully I'll be able to strike a balance between clarity and whimsy. I also know that I overuse parenthetical asides (like this one) and over-emphasize every three words. Please forgive these little quirks and don't hold them against me too much. I hope to keep my quirks to a minimum.
Speaking of quirks and formality, I will not be addressing any fashionable critical perspectives - these articles will be written (this is starting to sound like a manifesto) with one perspective - my own. I know of no other and would be doing us all a disservice by shoehorning my thoughts on a particular subject into a particular critical view. I get distracted easily enough, and will never keep this up if I'm not enjoying myself, and not contributing anything new or necessary to the world, which brings me to my next point...
You're doing this... why?
Beginning this series was actually a bit of a struggle for me - I think I needed to justify (to myself, mostly) why these articles needed to be written. The Internet has made it very easy for just about anyone to self-publish, and so it seems that just about everyone has a web page that allows anyone in the world (provided they can access the Internet, granted) the ability to read something that they wrote. It's egalitarianism at its finest. No editors, no judges, just lots of text, mostly about people's pets and significant others.
The problem, of course, is that since anyone can make a web page, everyone does. Usually other people's opinions bore me.
It took a great deal of ego-pumping to convince myself that what I had to say about art, and poetry, in particular, was worth reading. You could be doing anything, or reading any number of other pages on the web, but you chose to read mine. I'll try not to forget you as I write these articles.
I don't want to pander, either. As entertaining as I'll try to make these articles I still have a job to do. My self-appointed task is not to educate you, not to entertain you, but ultimately to (and I already regret thinking of typing this next phrase since it sounds so "touchy-feely") engage in a dialogue with you (see?) about poetry.
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