So I am sipping on a Bell’s Amber Ale (in what strange world do bottles of beer have cranes on the label?) and listening to Joan Osborne cover “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind”–oh, wait–ITunes, you Jukebox devil–I am actually listening to Cassandra Wilson cover “Love is Blindness.” I am still wearing one of my endless supply of fringed shawls, because the air on my walk home had that peculiar September crispness. (And–yes, now it’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” courtesy of Dusty Springfield herself, because no cover could ever compare.)

Following last night’s Lincoln tribute I have a hankering to go back to Walt Whitman, but I know I won’t find the time tonight, and that makes me a touch sad. Once upon a time I can remember looking at one of his hand-edited “Leaves of Grass” manuscripts in the rare book holdings at the University of Virginia. He had crossed out all of his pronouns to make them more neutral, less male, substituted “one” for “he.” Whitman was sure he would not join the canon if his works was viewed through the prism of being gay. I remember squinting through the glass, looking at those scribblings, and wondering if I would be trying to draw a line between (or through) the public and private. If my work would ever get far enough out there for anyone to care.

Why do we blog? Why do we read blogs? Everyone has their reasons, but for me it is these little snapshots: vulnerable, behind the scenes, human. I don’t go to blogs for the details and dates of poetry happenings, though many post as if a blog is an electronic bulletin board. I don’t go to blogs for criticism, theory or reviews, though they are aplenty.

That said, sometimes a casual space has generative power–whether it be your blog, your kitchen table, or your walk to work. On my way to the office this morning I found myself thinking about how many of the core dichotomies of poetry could be expressed in terms of the organic versus the structural. That’s not the perfect way to phrase it, I fear, but 1) blogs are not for the perfect, and 2) “organic versus the inorganic” has a whiff of judgment that doesn’t work any better. So, forgiving my admittedly flawed premise, I throw these questions out there for you to ask yourself:

-Are formal aspects the loom the text is woven across, or the skeleton upholding the flesh?

-Do you regard poems as gems to be polished and ultimately mounted, or plants to be cultivated and ultimately abandoned?

-Do you advance poetry along a ladder of promotion, or do you encourage poetry to replicate itself as if a genetic strain?

-Is your ultimate legacy as a poet measured in pages, or in faces?

Like all poets, I take any excuse to navel gaze, to consider in what crazy ways I could change my life. I was surprised by the ways my answers have changed since the student-me pondered Whitman-under-glass in Charlottesville. But I’m keeping my answers to myself. Until next time we meet, dear Reader…