TUESDAY
okay i call this post poets gone wild or even better poetic justice
naw, i prefer poets gone wild
btw: 11:15 am and already i got 6 pages - i feel a zone coming on
when the work flowing like rainwater and you dont want to eat, sleep, nothing but work - this what i live for - the zone - now where was i - right, the real world
okay, seems dereck walcott was up for the prestigious oxford poetry chair
suddenly old sexual harassment charges were dredged up, mostly a 1982 class in which he asked a student to consider a poetic exercise:
"imagine me making love to you, what would i do?"
(it take a poet to consider that an effective pickup line)
then anon packets sent out to 100 judges w/copies from a book recounting a 1996 allegation - in neither case were his attempts successful but we got to assume it worked once or twice
ruth padel, walcotts rival for the post say she shocked i say shocked anybody could stoop so low, as to smear her respected colleague, she say this reflects badly on poetry
walcot, 79, drops out after complaining about lowblow character assassination, this becomes news
one wag, one michael deacon got in the game by channeling the dorian gray dude, wrote that unlike great novelists, great poets are by nature reprobates:
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Imagine if Dylan Thomas, for example, were around to apply for the Oxford post today. Thomas drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends, fought with his wife in public, had affairs, and on at least one delightful occasion is said to have defecated on a host’s floor.
TS Eliot: another unsuitable candidate. Plough through his collected works and you’ll find, eventually, lines that could be construed as racist, and others as anti-semitic.
Then again, Eliot was as nothing next to Philip Larkin, who in private letters to friends and his mother wrote all manner of racist and sexist things. In one letter, he complained about the noise made by black spectators at a cricket match he’d attended at Lord’s, and expressed his regret that there hadn’t been any heavily armed South African police present. (For more, much more, see Anthony Thwaite’s excellent Selected Letters of Philip Larkin.) A few years ago, Channel 4 broadcast a tape Larkin had recorded of himself drunkenly singing, at home, a ditty he’d written urging the expulsion of immigrants, and prison sentences for workers who went on strike. Loved pornography, too. Oh, and he cheated on his girlfriends.
Byron: womaniser. Coleridge: drug fiend. Pound: fascist sympathiser. Yeats: snob. Crane: alcoholic. Keats: smackhead. Kipling: imperialist. Hughes: another womaniser. Poe: married a 13 year-old. Verlaine: jailed for shooting one of his friends. Lawrence: pervert. Betjeman: had a bit of a temper on him, apparently. And don’t let’s get started on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The booze, the sexually transmitted diseases, the mistresses, the page boys...
All of these men, our anonymous epistolary guardians might grudgingly concede, knew a thing or two about putting words together, chopping them into lines and all that carry-on. But not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post; they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.
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all men, what he trying to say
so okay, padel is chosen, 1st woman oxford poetry person, right after 1st woman poet laureate appointed, so far so good, padel says its a shame her friend and 'revered colleague' dereck got knee capped
then the telegraph publishes emails from padel to journalists
(emails? from her computer? with her name
on them? did she not realize she was leaving a digital trail? - poets)
not only did she rat him out she called his age into question, suggest that he actually lives in the
caribbean not britain, and whatever else she
thought appropriate
after continued denials amid increasing calls from the british literati to resign she did so
i have to say listening to her statement i felt bad for both of them
i remember when i realized i was the real thing as a young cub and that my personal business
was going to be in the streets for folk to assess and disect and write about and almost decided that maybe i didnt
want to be a writer after all - then i decide it is a small price to pay to be historically significant
well she did make history didnt she, raised her literary profile too - its all good
both of them will get a good poem or two out of it, thats all we ask
god i love the literary life
rdoc
MONDAY
so he did it, there was some question, as to if obama would send a wreath to the confederate
soldiers memorial, the consensus is that he would do so rather than open that issue, and compensate
by sending a wreath to the african american union soldiers memorial and thats exactly what he did,
i started to comment on that a couple of days ago, wish i had, then i would have been prescient and i like being prescient in my commentary, feels ...well...so... prophetic
utimately decided it wasnt significant enuf to waste posting time but i
while following confederate memorial links i found a lot of interesting articles/websites on slavery and southern mythwork that it wasnt that bad
including those talked about the mammy on the southern soldiers memorial
i think me and boy obama going to have to respectfully disagree on this one, not a deal breaker but i would have played it different
forget the diehards, let them choke - was reading a comment in the times week in review said that the defeated
south maintained defacto slavery through reconstruction et al iuntil, the article said, the election of obama
that statement was open to commentary on so many levels
ran across this washpost bit that started: A disturbing new study debunks the idea that slave-owners cared about the men and women who worked for them. While no one would suggest that slave-owners were generally motivated by feelings of affection, one line of thinking has asserted that slaves were not only the personal property of their owners but figures that slave-masters cared about paternalistically and even lovingly -- a narrative exemplified in books such as "Gone With The Wind."
excuse me: disturbing? debunks? what critical thinker believes in the southern mythwork of the paternal slave owner, (obviously many of the commenters to this article, many of whom respond w/the red herring of the african slave traders bit)
i thought toni laid that paternal slaverowner bit to rest with beloved, clearly there will be nuances of 'affection' for particular slaves but who cares
did a piece for oxford on nathan bedford forrest and the southern apologists who would make of him a hero
how i am trying to use mythwork to take down the devil, dont know how they will respond to it, might be a little controversial in southern literary circles cause i attack southern icons like shelby foote et al (and of cours NBF himself)
when i was following the confederate memorial links i ended up where i always do, fort pillow
something personal in fort pillow for me, youd think one of my ancestors died there or something
was reading that time mags toure review of whiteheads new novel sag harbor and he came out of this post race bag
that so often makes me wonder if im out of step with my times, guess that just have to be so
i try to be sophisticated and cosmopolitan with it, but ima live and die in the struggle
i look at my neglible readership, both here and my works, and wonder anew am i out of step
i suspect i do this blog more for me than you, my little platform to say things i want to say
kinda like my novel, im not writing it for you, im writing this for future generations
hoping i get more respect from them than i get in my own time - the prophets curse
or should we say the visionarys curse - a little less hubraic maybe
a luta continua
rdoc
btw: 4 pages today, got over a major hump, life is good
SUNDAY
hello world, feeling a little panicky, month almost gone and ive done about 20 pages
thats less than a page a day, that wont get me to the promised land, got to find me another gear
was reading this website walking folk thru the mfa application process
good info for anybody considering the mfa - im always encouraging my undergrads, then i pay when every spring semester 4, 5, 6 of them apply for syracuse behind all the encouragement i gave them to go for the mfa and the literary life
round about their junior year is when i start orienting those who have talent and an expressed interest in the literary life toward that mfa
start working on their submissions/applications
every spring semester i have to endure disappointing my undergrads, left up to me our entire incoming class would be syracuse undergrads i been nurturing,
instead i have to recluse myself from judging them
but im the one have to tell them no, you didnt make the cut - yeah i know, im the one said you had the potential of greatness in you
lets hope i also gave you the fortitude not to let no rejection stop the show, hopefully i prepared you better than that
proper literary response to all setbacks is i will show you
whats really rough is they still on campus, its an awkward semester, part of the process is shotgunning the best schools for them and hopefully somebody snatched them up, still it hurts to turn down folk i myself encouraged, and see that talent/potential get nurtured by somebody else
students have become so important to me in this my 50th decade that i want to work a mentor/student thread
into rest for the weary but it will have to be on the fly cause i cant stop the novel flow, its showtime - stictly closure now
this website also included a ranking of mfa programs, syracuse came in 11 on this ranking, 20 on old usnews listing
neither one of these are acceptable, we at least top 10, i got to finish my novel so i take some of the
pressure off george when it come to literary rep, dont want to be the weak link in the chain
wish either one of the marys, caponegro or gaitskill, had stayed, both of them raised the syracuse fiction faculty bar
was some interesting work on how to go about applying for mfa, may put process here when i get a moment
basically said the criteria is funding, faculty, structure, location - or something of that sort
nice to see the brother put forth to take over nasa, thats in keeping with my vision
of blackfolk as a star faring folk - those of you know me know i think space is the place
that i think one planet is not enuf to insure survival of the species, accidents happen
nukes, global warming, astroids, accidents happen - planets die
planets shrug and people die, the universe shrugs and planets die
got to spread out, enhance the chance of human survival, and i would like blackfolk to be
at the forefront of that, it is the geas of rickydoc - spaceranger supreme
1 month and 20 pages, god help me that wont do, 2 months left that will be 40 pages
instead of the 80 or so i need to be thru -
you got to double up rick, but then ima want some manuscript clean up time - you got to triple up rick
new gear rick - focus
rdoc
FRIDAY
two recent gallop polls with different reads, one says republican identification surging neck and neck
the other, equally recent, says that republicans losing ground in all political democragphics - go figure
are the repubs making a comeback already, thats a bummer
also a bummer to see those 'terrorist' arrested yesterday are 4 black men who converted in prison
a replay of the liberty 6, black men of limited understanding and blumbling plots, playing at jihad
set up by government informers, who make their foolishness manifest
some of the most dignified folk ive met are those islamic prison converts but then you got some folk whose idea of islam basically boils down to not eating pork.
james comities sister said, “right now, to me he’s, like, the dumbest person I ever came in contact with in my life,”
i probably wouldnt go that far but i dont find a have a lot of sympathy for these folk,
thats all we need, some misguided african american terrorists who actually do approach it w/some competence, instead of the losers they call 'aspirational terrorists,'
which i guess is a blessing, a pitiful little blessing but i take what i can get - kinda like clocking pages
really need to go over what i did yesterday one more time but im liable to keep pushing because i need the momentum, dont know that i can take another day of not moving forward
love getting up every day struggling with the page, but the frustration level is also high
when you struggle all day and move hardly at all and all you got to look forward to tomorrow
is more of the same, it gets tedious and boring, but god help me this is what i live for
before i go: an article in higher education about boyce watkins denial of tenure up at the cuse
sorry he didnt get tenure, i can feel his pain, but truth be told he fumbled the ball
i feel him though, that tenure process is real humbling, english dept probably more flexible than the finance dept and i had the support of my chair, my fellow traverler in that great fraternity, the mystic knights of the sea, bob gates, it makes a difference, even still at one point i was like
forget this, im not going to be treated like this, im walking - but i could not figure out how to explain
to bonnie that i had walked away from a good job cause they hurt my feelings, she wasnt going to
be cool with that - domesticated man have to abandon his free spirit principles - thats life
im out, its 6 am and already ive frittered away part of my writing day
all my love
rdoc
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