high

Reading essays written by poets makes me ridiculously happy. Especially the ones in which you sense the writer is reaching for something new, deforming or transforming language in the same way matter is deformed or transformed by heat, to say something that has never been said before. Even more exhilarating, when that linguistic alchemy brings together knowledge from different fields -- politics, economics, science, philosophy, art -- and in that juxtaposition, makes us see anew.
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Who needs cannabis when you can get high on reading.

[Edit: 29 Dec 2012.

Epiphany. This tells me that i want to be a poet. (One dares not say, i am a poet. At least, not until one has published a first poetry collection.) It's not essays in themselves that get to me. It's essays written by poets. It's language -- the use of metaphor, juxtaposition and resonance -- that gets to me. And that solves the dilemma of genre and country as far as the hoped-for-future is concerned. So now, to start reading poetry again. To once again immerse myself in it, this time with a sense of purpose that i didn't have before, no thanks to the lack of faith that wrestled with all that intense, irrational love. i need a reading programme.]


[Edit #2: 5 Jan 2013.

Now that the high of that initial epiphany has passed, Real Life is intruding as i always knew it would, and i'm chaffing against the necessity of drawing lines and boundaries so that Serious Real Life Things such as organising workshops and writing programmes can be smoothly facilitated. Yes yes of course i know that genre lines have to be drawn; i'm a teacher too, and i understand. But after D's casual comment over supper about how the literary world is so much more regimented than the art world, and after being given a glimpse of how, over in the art world, things are done so differently...
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Ok. Time to Stop Whining And Get A Move On. So if i want to work at the boundary between two genres, if i want everything at once and cannot just settle for the one usual thing, well, then i should just get on with it, do my own thing and pay whatever price needs to be paid. Either that, or just give up this mostly-untested vision i've been holding on to, buckle down and follow the rules, and pay the price that needs to be paid there too.

When i told D that i wished i could just be a single-genre, one-trick-pony kind of writer; she looked at me and went, "Yeah right. You'd be bored." She's right.]
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