"Everything will be enobled and justified by age"
NB: I wrote this as a draft way back the day of the Mullen and Nabokov pieces and forgot to post it, so yeah.
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I thought that was a fantastic line. Is everything made noble and good just because it's old?
"How can I demonstrate to him that I have just glimpsed someone's future recollection?"
Likewise, the Mullen piece was INGENIOUS! I just loved all the wordplays she used. They were things I never would have thought of and it was just brimming with creativity. It felt like a puzzle, where you have to figure out the theme of each poem.
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Ok now onto today's pieces. I'd read Bishop's
Sestina back in the day when I was taking a writing/poetry class the summer between 4th and 5th grade. It wasn't so much the flow of the piece as the physical patterns and structure of the sestina. I was so fascinated by it that I tried to write my own about a horse that ran away. Needless to say, it wasn't nearly as good as Bishop's. Reading it again this year, I've decided that I love it for the fluidity of the language and how you don't even notice that she uses the same six words in a pattern for each stanza. The sestina is such a brilliant form of poetry.
As for class, I'm glad that we're focusing more on writing than on reading for the time being. Don't get me wrong, I love reading (not as much as ILRies, but we're getting there) but as this is a writing class, I want to just be able to write, let words spill out onto the page and hope that there's some coherence to it all. In the same vein, I have this phobia of people reading and critiquing my writing. I shouldn't be so sensitive to it, but I am. I'm hoping to get over it this semester, so we'll see what happens.
Saying you're new is an excuse for everything
Seeing as this is the very first for-class post, I've decided to take some liberties with the phrase "or anything else you find relevant to your creative writing practice." Just in case this isn't exactly what I'm supposed to be writing about, I shall claim newbie-ignorance. Besides, I think that delving into my writing past may shine some light on the kind of work that is to come. I think it's fair to say that my portfolio was most impressive in 7th grade, when I had a skating poem published in a book. I thought I was a writing mogul until I received the book and saw that 10,000 other kids were in the book too. So much for feeling special.
Ignoring pieces for class, my writing career began at the age of 13, when I decided it'd be "supercool" to write fanfiction. The plot wasn't horrible, but the writing itself was horrendous. No...I take that back. The plot was pretty bad too. It was far too complicated, not well developed, and completely unfulfilling. At the time of course, I thought I was brilliant, connecting all the mini-plotlines together, something like
Playing By Heart or
Love Actually except not quite as witty or sophisticated. Regardless, I continued to write fanfiction and I personally felt that I improved over the 3-4 years that I actually kept at it (considering it would be pathetic if I didn't improve at all). I never won awards or anything, but it made me happy to have one reader (aka my best friend) who always sent fanmail screaming "MORE MORE MORE" over the span of about 10-15 lines. I'm sure she copied and pasted each line, but it still gave me warm fuzzies to receive such encouraging feedback.
As in every sad writer's tale, school caught up with me and I no longer had time to complete all my assignments, maintain a social life and continue to write. The first two were more important to me at the time, so writing was written off (badum chhh - I love bad jokes). Since then, I've always wanted to get back into the penning game so I'm starting my season with this lovely class that assigns more writing in one semester than I've done over my last 2 years here at Cornell. Hence, here I am, and if you've made it this far through my tale of excitement turned woe, I congratulate you. Here's a gold star for participation.
testing
A post just to make sure this thing works.
Isn't this thrilling.
