Outside, a blizzard is beginning. It is the fourth night of Lent. I listen with half an ear to Prairie Home Companion on NPR. Garrison Keiller is gently mocking poets. While procrastinating finalizing my thesis, I go through old photos, scanned in last year. I find this one that I took in a town an hour from Sokoto, an old woman, relative of my professor, preparing for prayer.
3 comments:
i love this..there's just something about the picture.
Wonderful photo.
BTW, I don't think poets should be gently mocked. They should be mocked in the harshest terms possible, especially if they're writing the rubbish that most of them do.
@exschoolnerd and teju,
Thanks.
@teju
lol. oh, it's so good to find someone with my opinion of poetry. it's rather scandalous because i used to write so much of it, and I would like to start writing it again. There's something very wonderful and disciplined about writing a poem-- but i find myself very quickly bored by other people's poetry... My latest thinking is that poetry has been too "elitized"--that is poetry is still alive and well... in contemporary hip/hop, other popular music forms (in so many traditions poetry is sung). Perhaps the academic seperation of poetry from music and a popular audience is a mistake. That doesn't mean that I don't admire various recent poets (I have a whole shelf of fairly recent poetry and I do enjoy hearing poetry read), but that i'm becoming quite suspicious of MFA style poetry. This seems to be a trend in my thinking these days. I'm sure my current obsession with the so-called "low" art forms is a bit of a corrective reaction against my education as an English major, and one day I shall be perfectly balanced and reasonable. {-;
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