the rix mix

Cold snap here, notable for duration rather than the temps. Sikenced the holdout crickets tucked away in warm crevices near houses, a few sluggishly sawing away as late as Saturday evening.

Robert Pinsky writes a kind of poetry I've never been able to write well; a compressed poetic poetry unmistakably American but which has small connection to the American language as we actually speak it (as I hear it). This causes me to dislike the poetry at the same time I envy it. Or he's too intellectual, sometimes. But I love many poets far more scholarly in their work than Robert Pinsky, poets who flaunt it; & poets with far more elaborate language, language that flies somewhere else; & poets with far more compression. Maybe he just isn't fun, or funny, enough. I've met & heard many fine poets, very funny in conversation or setting up poems in their readings, couldn't get audience chuckles out of lines designed to generate them. . Not punchy enough, poor timing, or requiring knowledge most people don't have; the latter happens when poets test out their new poems only on fellow academics. There's deinitely a prejudice against humorous poetry. But too many of my poems have punchlines. Early exposure to Bob Dylan is partly to blame; every verse on his Highway 61 Revisited album may end in a punchline. Robert Frost, too. He was a punchline poet in his most famous poems. "Good fences make good neighbors." What was I to do? What I didn't do - enroll in an academic writing program where they make you revise a poem 100 times & get rid of the punchline. & you still haven't actually studied poetry with Robert Pinsky.
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Strange to hear advertisements for Drew University on the radio. The Madison NJ school was always the kind of place prospective students had to find - it didn't try hard to find them. It's a brainy sort of campus, if not as smart as it once was, quietly snobby, & it costs a bundle to go there. About the same as Princeton. The part-time per-credit hour tuition would make you faint. Now, if one is shopping for an edjikayshun, one might ask, What do I get at Drew that I can't find elsewhere for less. The answer is, not much. Drew used to sell itself when you visited. I had a few friends there I loved visiting, not a prayer I would ever be a student. It was as close as you got in Jersey to an ivory tower campus atmosphere. The real world was as hypothetical as you desired. Pretty campus, small downtown a few blocks away, good pubs, train to Manhattan, & in one of the wealthiest areas of the United States. Div. III sports. Monmouth University in West Long Branch is a far better party school near the beach with Div 1 basketball. Centenary College in Hackettstown is more bucolic. Nearby Fairleigh Dickinson more geared to business careers. Then there are the state schools. No wonder Drew has to advertise.

Labels: about writing, potpourri