Today I am finishing up the final edits on a chapbook of poems I am entering in a contest later on this month, and I am having a metrical nightmare. I am up to my eyeballs in iambs.I wish I knew how I got into this poetry writing habit. It is very annoying--an illness of the ear--to borrow a phrase from Auden. I think my own particular malady may have had something to do with my mother reading me Dr. Seuss. Or Riki-tikki-tavi. Or Wilfred Owen. No, I think I read Wilfred Owen on my own.
No, I think that the whole poetry obsession is a result of spending 10 years walking to work in and around Boston, first to Boston University, then to MIT, listening to my footsteps, counting Smoots, trying to remember incidental things I never wanted to forget.
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Incidentally, it usually took me 47 minutes to walk from my apartment on Peterborough Street, in the Fenway, to my desk in Cambridge, at MIT, on a typical summer day. That is, if I did not stop on the MIT bridge to watch the rowers dipping their oars in the Charles.
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Incidentally, it usually took me 47 minutes to walk from my apartment on Peterborough Street, in the Fenway, to my desk in Cambridge, at MIT, on a typical summer day. That is, if I did not stop on the MIT bridge to watch the rowers dipping their oars in the Charles.
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I have lost track of the number of footsteps it took me to remember that.
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