Now I realise that I've left this blog lying fallow for a little while, so I have no idea if it will do any good to post this info, but my book is apparently in shops in Australia now. Selected shops. The independent ones that usually have poetry books. I imagine. I don't really know anything.

I've been told it's pretty, so that's nice. I know at least 2 copies have sold. That's also nice. That said, I looked at a handful of the poems the other night and wanted to edit them. It's hard to let go...

So. There. I'm proud of it, even as I'm aware of my little book's shortcomings. Fire Season is out in the world.

A year ago the idea of leaving Australia again was really difficult—this year it’s not as hard. Which is not to say that this hasn’t been a wonderful trip home, or that it hasn’t reinforced once again for me just how Australian I am. I guess I feel like I have made something like a family for myself in DC, and I plan to enjoy this last six or so months there, since I probably won’t live there again. The fact that I will go from calling it home to being just a visitor—it’s a strange feeling. I haven’t quite got my head around it all yet.

So—Friday I fly out again. I’ve talked my friend B into picking me up (very little talking-into involved… he’s very kind) and then the weekend—and then—class on Monday. Is that all?

Being home is such a shock. It’s lovely to be with my family—but I’m a little bit shell-shocked with the idea of catching up with people.

I feel like this is going to be a good year. Something in the sky.

I went through old files the other day—throwing some things out (I’m going to try to throw out when I get back to DC too…) and was amazed to find a lot of old essays and drafts I had been working on. Filed carefully. That I was determined to apprentice myself that way, so seriously.


*

On a frivolous—not to mention shamefaced—note, I’ve become addicted to a bad television show. I used to occasionally watch it when I left the television on after watching something that was… marginally better. And its contrivances drove me crazy. And now, I find the contrivances, the blandnesses, the banter that’s not funny oddly endearing. Oh, the show is NCIS. There, I’ve outed myself.

I think it might be a little bit less of a blog-fueled year. I’ve been discovering the pleasures of pen(cil) and paper again. But I’m going to try to stop in when I can.

So, flying today. Have apparently misplaced my paper ticket. Yes, that’s right. There are still people who ISSUE paper tickets. Rang United, who it was all booked with. Their response? “We have no record of you.” They said—you’ve lost your ticket? Well you’ll have to buy a new one and fill out an application. Then if there are no problems we’ll reimburse you. Seriously? So I rang Lufthansa, and they were great. Confirmed that, yes, as far as airlines are concerned I exist. Also, that with a handy six digit reference code I could go to a ticket counter and they would sort me out. And no mention of “oh, and buy your ticket all over again.” I hope I never have reason to call United again.

*

Rant over, I can’t believe I lost the ticket. It was all together, and I have the folder it was in. I remember the ticket, and am sure that when I pulled it out to give my ticket number to my travel agent to confirm my final flights that I would have put it back in the folder. Apparently not. Demonstrating once more that I apparently will be the sort of person who ends up keeping her tax information in the fruit bowl. Though I suppose if it’s all in the same fruit bowl that won’t be too much of a problem.

*

I anticipate a week of reading—being in places where I don’t know the language always leads to deep reading—and, hopefully, a little writing. Though I find writing hard during the period I am actually on the hoof. Notebook writing.

*

Reading Sontag’s diaries. Reading other bits. Books in the bag for over the break? Desnos. Darwish. Carson (of course). Perhaps I should add John Clare. A few novels. Am going to read Kafka’s diaries when I get home—they’re calling to me.

End of semester—exhaustion. Finished my final paper, and it wasn’t what it should be. But then, I always think those final papers at the point I hand them in are really a starting point, and not an end point. So, perhaps I have the start of something.

*

I’ve been sad since my mother sent me the news that Dorothy Porter is gone—too soon. I have a number of friends who knew her much better than I, but she is someone that I admired, and wanted more of.

*

Leave tomorrow for Frankfurt, then Bulgaria. I guess there’ll be a lot of sleep on the place.

*

Anticipating lying on Australian ground, trying to figure out what Anne Carson is doing with error, and exactly makes it different from how other poets might choose error.

*

Packing, now. Triage: must take, can take, don’t need to take.

The past weeks and the next few days are incredibly busy—such that I haven’t really had a chance to write. (Or update the Independence Day Project… a lapse I am ashamed of, though the project will be finished, when I am able to finish it.)

My prospectus is done, and now it’s just a matter of finishing the final paper. Oh wait—is it really just a matter of that? Okay, perhaps a little more complicated.

I leave the US on Thursday—flying first to Frankfurt overnight, where I’ll have about half a day before I fly onward to Bulgaria. I’m visiting the lovely Carolyn Emigh! (I’m hoping, too, that there will be time for a side trip to Macedonia, to visit the poet Nikola Madzirov. It’s not certain that that’s going to happen.) Then I’ll be dashing home, via a night in Singapore, with an overnight in Frankfurt… and then… home.

So I have a few days to finish this paper—which is due the day I leave anyway. And it will be done. Having written and made notes for the full length of the paper, I now have a thesis. One which I can make work. So. That’s nice.

I am also applying to MFA programs… which I am hoping (determined…) to have finished before I leave as well. Madness.

Then there’s that whole packing/making sure I know where my stuff is/paying bills list of things to do.

Oh, and I spent the weekend getting stuff in order my advisor’s study (since I’m also the research assistant.) Making a list of where everything is. How to contact me in an emergency. Etc.

So. That’s the status report.

The past weeks have, again, accelerated. I know that I should have written all about election day, and the day after—but I didn’t. It’s been a busy time.

Belatedly, though, I will note that on election day I:

- first tutored at Duke Ellington (no students, but I got the crossword done…)
- had coffee at Baked and Wired, chatting with the Baked Girls. (Nathan falls into this category too… I don’t think I’ve told him that yet.)
- then C picked me up to go drive around North Virginia for a while. The idea? To find some polling places for him to photograph, and me to make whatever notes I felt like making. The method? Cross a bridge from DC to Rosslyn and get lost. The theory? After getting lost, something interesting will happen. The outcome? Didn’t find the polling places, but instead found an “Oriental Supermarket” that, among other things, sold Milo. So I’ve had a week of excellent chocolate milk… and now the Milo is all gone.
- Back to C’s place before heading toward Meg’s for the special election edition meeting of the Baked and Wired Knitting Society… except then Meg had to cancel at the last minute.
- Impromptu invitation (after assurances that I would not be intruding) to the house of one of C’s friends. Me, glued to CNN and MSNBC electoral maps for 4 hours.
- Obama! Obama!
- Joining the spontaneous crowd gathered outside the White House between midnight and 2.30am. Wow.

I slept in the next morning. You’re shocked.

Since then, there’s been more stuff to get done. I presented papers at two conferences last weekend. I feel like I am living in the aftermath of Friday, when I flew to New Hampshire and back on the same day, in order to present a paper at the Milton conference at the lovely St Anselm’s College. The day itself was a little hellish—I got up at 3am to get the shuttle to BWI airport and didn’t get back home until midnight. Still, I met some lovely people, including a Benedictine monk who was knitting a brightly coloured hat.

Oh, and knitting has been treating me very nicely. Such fun! Such madness! Let’s have a caucus race!

This week has been a bit of a marathon. I’m still going to work for another hour or so tonight… of that’s the plan. If sleep takes over, I won’t object…

As a form of training…it is important that the poet develop a strong bond with life, to be able to observe and able to choose his subject matter. …Afterwards, he can abstract things by abstracting coincidences, and symbolize them. This time of observation (for a poet) is an elementary process akin to learning reading and writing.

—Saadi Youssef

My wordle above comes care of wordle...

I’ve been doing a lot of alphabetisation, organising Carolyn’s university and home offices. And talking about definitions of “poetics,” which, as she points out, is being used in rather a vague manner. I was inspired after discussing this over lunch (there are some wonderful perks in helping organise the library…) to go home and check the OED on poetics and poesis…

The OED lists the noun uses of “poetic” (no entry for “poetics,” even though that is almost exclusively how I hear it used here…) as follows:

B. n.
1. In sing. and pl.
a. The aspect of literary criticism that deals with poetry; the branch of knowledge that deals with the techniques of poetry. Also: a treatise on poetic art, spec. that written by Aristotle.
1656 T. STANLEY Hist. Philos. II. VI. 31 Philologick... Poeticks. 1702 Perfidious P 134, I believe you are the only Man that ever read Aristotle, that had the shadow of a Reason against any thing he has said in his Poeticks. 1776 C. BURNEY Gen. Hist. Music I. Pref. p. viii, It is imagined that Plutarch took it either from his [sc. Aristotle's] Treatise on Music, or the second book of his Poetics. 1807 BYRON Let. 30 June (1973) I. 123 Even the hero of my Cornelian (who is now sitting vis-a-vis, reading a volume of my poetics) passed me in Trinity walks. 1834 Penny Cycl. II. 335/2Aristotle's genuine extant works may be divided into three classes: 1. Those relating to the philosophy of the mind... To this head may be referred..his Rhetoric and Poetic: the last of which works is imperfect. 1879 M. PATTISON Milton xiii. 200 The principle of the Aristotelean Poetic. 1917 T. S. ELIOT Prufrock 38 With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute. 1990 Bull. Hispanic Stud. 67 331 In the past few years, the application of narratological and semiotic approaches has proved to be crucial for the development of a poetics of the romancero.
b. The creative principles informing any literary, social or cultural construction, or the theoretical study of these; a theory of form.
1927 Contemp. Rev. July 59 M. Valéry's poetics have been accused of hermetism and of preciousness. 1973 Word 1970 26 66 Jakobson avoids the term stylistics, preferring instead poetics. 1976 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 11/2 To subscribe to this poetic was to doubt the validity of art and the veracity of dreams. 1977 A. SHERIDAN tr. J. Lacan Écritsiii. 102 This notion must be approached through its resonances in what I shall call the poetics of the Freudian corpus.1990 Lit. & Ling. Computing 5 197/1 Now more than ever poetics aspires to integrate itself within the evolving larger field of the human sciences.
2. A writer of poetry, a poet. Obs. rare.
1687 J. PARRY To Cleveland in J. Cleveland Wks. 286 Where all Poeticks else may truckle under. 1687 J. PARRY Elegy on Cleveland in J. Cleveland Wks. 285 'Tis your Crime T'upbraid the State-Poeticks of this time.
3. In pl. Poetic composition; the writing of poems. Obs. rare.
1851 T. CARLYLE Life J. Sterling II. x. 285 Our valiant friend..was not to be repulsed from his Poetics either by the world's coldness or by mine.

Most people seem to have abandoned the original, Aristotelian use of the word. So 1b is the winner when it comes to the way the word is bandied around.

But then! Ah yes, but the… there is also poesis. It’s entry is as follows:

1. A poem; poems collectively, poetry, verse; poesy. Now rare.
1565 J. HALL Courte of Vertu (title) A poesis in forme of a uisyon. 1567 T. DRANT tr. Horace Arte of Poetrie sig. Aiiiv,Not lore enough in Poesis, let them be sweetlye fynde, And let them leade to where them liste the hearers plyante mynde. 1617 J. DAVIES Wits Bedlam sig. H3v, Poesie be..A speaking Picture..Then must a Picture needs be made, by this, A silent Poesis, subiect to the Eye. 1742 W. CLARKE & W. BOWYER tr. J. Trapp Lect. Poetry 22 We generally use the Words Poesis and Poetica, Poesy and Poetry, indiscriminately. 1894 Amer. Jrnl. Philol. 15 16 Before Lucilius's time a single play (poema) had been called satura, he gave this designation to his thirty books (poesis). 1899 J. E. SPINGARN Hist. Lit. Crit. 27 Poetica is the art of composing poetry, poesis, the poetry composed according to this art.1993 Faquery 1: who writes R.A.P.? in rec.arts.poems (Usenet newsgroup) 16 Apr., Discussions about the art of poetry and the science of poesis, including issues about use of language, poetical forms, and the work of various poets.

2. The process of making; production, creation; creativity, culture (cf. POIESIS n.).
1903 L. F. WARD Pure Sociol. II. v. 88 Poesis is a form of creative synthesis. 1939 S. CHUGERMAN Lester S. Ward 271Poesis is the creative, synthetic process of the intellect applied to all the sciences and practical arts. 1963 F. C. CREWSPooh Perplex (1979) 91 It is clear that the object of study here..falls essentially into the category of art, or broadly speaking, poesis. 1989 Requiem 9 I. 35 The first poem, the Original original one..was God's literal poesis of the world.2003 Chicago Rev. (Nexis) 49 31 Reading as poesisa materially based making of the text into something of use, positioning it phrase by phrase..in complex..relation to one's projects.

This second meaning seems to me to have been lumped into “poetics” these days. Yes? No? And I’m interesting that all the uses of poesis in this second sense fall after the start of the 20th century.