So I've been stuck in the autumnal cycle of self loathing lately. College (or as I've been ad nauseamly reminded "the best years of my life") is reaching it's almost-done point, and I frankly don't feel even close to half-baked. I've met amazing people with amazing intellects. I've seen the capacity for brilliance and its squander (usually Thursday nights...those are good squander nights). But what I haven't seen, or at least have been reluctant to see, is my own shiny light of smartness. I haven't really cornered the market on anything, and while that is a very liberating and renaissance achievement, it's left me a little more than dissatisfied. The couldahs are wafting in, and instead of actually, say, writing a thesis, or polishing a chapbook of poetry, I'm painting nice watercolors and vacuuming my carpet. I play the couldha game too much, and maybe that's why I'm a writer. Fantasizing about all those couldhas of all the possible personalities of my word is just plain addictive. Maybe that's my collegiate achievement--the ability to mess around in a highly imaginative environment. I'll probably miss college, but I'm going to exploit the hell out of it while I'm here.
This is all to say, of course, that a new poetry assignment is upon us: Write a poem with a voice a person's whose life and trajectory couldah been yours, but isn't. Try to draw outside the character box of your own selfhood. We're all genius genies--messing with what little magic we've got, but try to mess with someone else's mojo. Get into their box, become too familiar with that box, and then poetically explode it from within. I think I'll assume my biologist alter ego for this one. Let the life-play begin..
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2 comments:
i LOVE the new theme jesuschristitsawesome.
see here's the thing. don't worry, because leaving college is gonna suck. no matter what, it's gonna be a total let down unless you've got your future mapped out and down pat. and I hope you don't, because you should realize at some point that being without definite "market corner-ness" makes you a better poet than anyone else, because you're actually capable of voice variation. little, but hugely important.
yeah dude paint. painting's hella awesome. and the time for chapbooks and famousness will come, just work on absorbing all the people you're around while you can. you've got some massive resources in the student poets at cornell, tap 'em like a keg.
and i will ponder this assignment. indeed.
This may have been a jesuschristitsawesome new theme..but..I can't write it. I've tried.. and they suck. I'm going to give it one last go, post the remnants, and then call it a week. New assignment is in the boiling pot, and oh baby it'll be good.
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