(no subject)

[the_rck]

Hm. If I don’t like the first four or five pages of a poet’s collected works, is that enough to say I don’t like the poet’s work? This collection is a little odd because it has a play first, so I’m kind of thinking I need to skip to the end of that and see if I like anything beyond that, but I also don’t really want to bother because I very much am not enjoying the play. My main problem is that, as I read it, I keep going, "WTH? Who talks like that?" The words are pretty but not actually coherent in terms of conveying meaning or even image/emotion.

There’s something that I keep thinking I want to post about, but when I open my document to write, I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.

I’m still draggingly tired. The hard part is that I know that sleeping right now won’t help and that my instinct to eat all the food will lead to bad places without giving me any actual energy. But part of my mind remains convinced that, if I eat the right thing, I will magically feel better. It’s days like this when I really, really wish that Provigil had actually worked for me.

Comments

[kyrielle]

What alexseanchai said. Normally if I get a collected works, I try to see how it's organized (often by the books it was taken from, but not always). If it's by book, I usually pick an arbitrary poem from each book; otherwise I tend to start with something near, but not absolutely at, the back of the collection.

And some things just don't work for me. Marvin Bell is one of my favoritest poets. I think he's amazing. And I loathe his various Dead Man poems completely. I think they are tedious and pretentious and overly-constructed and just boring...but they're not all he wrote, and I love some of his other work.