my very first blog attempt.

I guess mostly I am wondering what I am doing here, and what I shall say.
time will tell.

I have been reading Mr. Silliman's blog. Nothing I don't reckon could be anymore better than that. One thing I shall be doing is making like an embedded reporter and stealing his stuff.

Could any greater thing have been invented for a writer? This is just great, despite the paucity of my thoughts, or my verses. Oh, Yeh! I am a writer too, but these days ain't everyone? I been writing probably bout as long as Mr. Silliman, tho not with his success, if you can count all that struggling he has done success...at least his views, are, in some circles shall we say admired? Mine alas are not. Not that I am so subtle! Nary a single thought comes to my mind that has not wafted somewhere else in the meantime. Room for everyone, I suppose. I don't really know how to express my thoughts on Mr. Silliman's theories of poesy, and it would be like trying to hit a moving target anyways, and I always seem to fire low and to the left anyways, my dad said I always jerked on the trigger...

an exoskeleton comes to mind perhaps, the bare bones, still connected of course, tenuously by frayed dry tendons, and perhaps here & there by a bit of string and hope.

a strangulation of emotion, of language, narration. The result being the Poem outside of itself. What I mean by that? Damned if I know, other than the poem seems self conscious rather than embarrassed. Which I don't suppose would worry Mr. Bloom at all, being as he is constantly embarrassed--the equation in his view seeming to include a mysticism to the purpose of the poet, which I do not find with mr. Silliman. More reading of Mr. Silliman will probably disabuse me of this view, as I cannot accept that anyone would adhere to this career choice without a fundamental hint of the divine calling.

Then we have the problem of craft vs Art.

That word Art is a very jumbled word these day, fraught with connotations, most of which would fall short of a definition...and well, craft is craft, the mastery of technique, an endless endeavor for the artist, and a matter of some pride for the artisan.

Art in the twentieth century is ego based, symbols are internalised, personal,
"I" driven, the various techniques employed arise from the personal need to express,
the external pressures of emulation are secondary--it is perhaps that not so many aspire to a purity, an incandescence, being content with a position, or an observation. The distillation of the subject is not the object, rather it is the juxtaposition of objects, the shotgun at fifty yards which fires a pattern, rather than a painters stroke which fires an emotion.