Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Getting Ready

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.

...

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.
...
I have lost track of the number of footsteps it took me to remember that.

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