been a long night last night. went to bed a bit earlier after working on my loops book. night before that it felt that everything i wrote, including an ancillary poem, was shit. i moaned in an email to a friend about it, who gave me the sage, and necessary, advice to either get the poem, or don't get it. don't bitch about it, don't complain, don't explain. so i tried that, a sort of seeking without striving, and last night was a bit better. holding off on my wood sonnets until i can get the loops chap to cohere.

if that makes any sense. writing is nearly always a pleasure. no agoniste here. but even so, pleasure sometimes turns to pain.

sometimes joel, you have to say what the fuck, as booger advised tom cruise to do in the movie risky business.


at any rate, my links at the right are my sort of crush list. i visit all of them at least once a day. should i give a writer of any age any advice it would be to start a blog, and post poems, essays, reviews, journals, rants, vispo, you name it. it is publishing, and if you want to get technical about it, sure, it's self-publishing. who cares as long as the work gets out there. and as for the often personal nature of poets' posts i'm all for it. long before the net i'd gobble up notebooks, letters, biographies and notebooks about, and from, writers. an all-time favorite is james schuyler's diary, a source of great pleasure, and a restorative to my own health as i was at the time of its publication suffering another series of minor breakdowns.

but i read a good number of blogs that i've not yet set up links. a lot of my daily poetry fix i now satisfy online. this is a half-ass way to say, if yr a poet, start publishing a blog!

let me conclude this ramble by pointing out two new zealand poets i've been reading lately. i've earlier pointed out richard taylor's eyelight. taylor hasn't updated it for a while. hope he keeps at it since i admire his wild ruminations, his thoughts of poetry as living thru praxis and theory, e.g. his notes in the comment field here.

the second poet is jen crawford whose blue acres i read thru in its entirety today at one sitting. that is not an indication that crawford's is breezy. not at all. it was such a source of pleasure, i couldn't stop reading. she has a spot-on clarity that is a wonder to behold.

and with that, i bid you a nighty night.