Ars Poetica
Presently, i'm listening to Donald Rumsfeld, one of our nation's greatest poets, at a D.O.D. press conference get agitated at a reporter's question about the humanitarian conditions in Iraq. I don't know about the rest of the country, but my information tells me that all the city of Nasiryah needs is one mic.
(I'm sorry. I am truly sorry.)
WBEZ had a contest to find a poet to recommend as the next poet laureate of Illinois. Considering that there have only been three Illinois poet laureates and that two of them were Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, I think having a public contest to find another is misguided. None of the contest offerings that i heard teribbly impressed me and maybe because of this i began to reminisce fondly on some of my own past scribblings. I have pages of verses i composed from around 1995 to 1998 scattered about; not in any particular order or even in one place. Some of them have probably been lost. I consider this to be no significant loss to the world of literature as the majority of them are so bad as to be unreadable and the readable ones are probably incomprehensible. Take a look at the staggering volume of awful, awful "poetry" that litters the electronic landscape. When i was writing, i was writing to get good. I certainly wasn't interested in subjecting the world at-large to these practice sessions. But, some point of discussion during that on-air contest caused me to consider the question: what was the best single line i ever wrote? and could it stand up to a line by one of these contestants? It was probably a line in poem a i wrote for class in college. I rummaged through some old academic documents, found a couple of poems from that class, an essay from another, a syllabus, some lecture notes on Kant, but not what i was looking for. I remembered a couple of other lines from the poem and thought i could improve them, but not unless i found it on paper. I found some others and tweaked them a bit, stayed up late into the night to fix a line here and there, but i never located that assembly of ten lines that became the night's obsession.
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