My Latest Big Project

Been (re)reading a bit of the Good Book: the first stretch of Genesis (Creation thru Abram), Amos, Judith (you go, girl!). And what I'm told is a very Evil book, Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. And feeling, in the face of greybeards with Big Projects and young people with boundless energy, very middle-aged, fat, & lazy, like a cat in the Florida sun. Can't even write what I've already promised to write, much less plot out enough volumes of poetry for the rest of my life.

John's got it right about those life-plans:

I love how the lingo of twentieth-century big science, all a-doozy amongst the earnestines, comes to invade the poetry circles. Everybody’s got they “project.” They “next” project. Manhattan Project, “lifework” project, same dish. (Wait for the next plausible monicker to out, the avant-garde taking its military nod seriously in the grim “age of hits”: the “operation.” Not as in “chance operation,” no—“Operation Big Chance,” or “Operation Fueled by Flowers,” or “Operation Wrong’d Narcissist.” “I’m in the midst of “Operation Blank Cartridge,” the going’s rough, though I should end up with a chapbook.”)

Methinks he's revised the post, & I liked the earlier one, about how High Modernist monumentality sneaks into the post-avant woodpile: Bruce Andrews rewriting Dante, Ron S. trying to outdo Ez, WCW, Olson, & LZ all at once. Gosh I admire the energy: now who's our Michael Drayton, & who's our Charles Montagu Doughty? (Worthies both, but did they need to write so much?)