proximoception | (no subject)

I'm starting to forget things, bang into things, drop things. Not a lot, but these were things I never did until a couple years ago, and now do almost daily. I mean, I was absent-minded, but the Google Within never fed me blanks. Not sure how much of this is just me getting older and how much is my having gone to seed--(caused in turn by happy lovenest living? or by eye worries). I also feel very stupid, but I think I remember feeling that way in prior Septembers also, something about the transition from lazy summer hedonism to uneasy autumn intellection.

Are my poems any good? They're all composed straight onto the journal; inspiration turns to consternation fast with me, transforming in turn to that bizarre, vast self-disgust around the twentieth minute, where ideas curl up and words get terse and random. Looking back at one I tend to like it, remembering the idea I had and the reason that idea matters; but am ignorant of how much of these are in the words themselves, distinct from the memories of writing them.

You have some idea, some interesting mental phantom you want to share, but to get it to the next person-planet you need to hurl it through outer space, where, having insufficient physical integrity, it invariably slumps and twists and arrives frozen in some monstrous meaningless form you yourself wouldn't recognize.

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Also, have you chanced upon the new Anne Carson - I took a cursory glance but haven't really read any - a couple of weeks ago I sped through the rest of her works with my lady love, but still haven't read Economy of the Unlost as I have not read any Celan. I was a little disapointed with The Beauty of the Husband until my girlfriend pointed out some interesting pacing elements (we are still confused about why they are called tangos, any insights?) and Autobiography of Red took a bit for me to warm up to - definitely favor Glass, Irony, and God and Plainwater.

It's amazon-ing in with a couple textbooks. I haven't read the two essay works yet either, the Celan/Simonides (Semonides? I get them confused) one sounds like the kind of stretch only Carson could pull off. Beauty probably shouldn't be book-length, it's what, thirty pages of actual work; as presented it's tree-murdering and seems to promise a booklike completeness it isn't trying for. What I thought she was going for with the Tango conceit was two people coming out of the dark and joining, walking sideways for a while in half-painful ritualized movements, then going apart into darkness again. Lovelife as a series of collisions, at least for the unlucky.

We were wondering if there were any formal, rhythmic elements that were tango-like. But you make an excellent point.