50th Post!

It's my 50th post!

Fitting for New Year's Day, I think. This evening I am making black eyed peas and greens and cornbread-- it'll be the first time I have practiced that particular tradition.

The big news in my life is that I FINISHED MY SEMINAR PAPER YESTERDAY! It's been emailed and snail mailed away. Now I can have my thoughts back!

This 27-page seminar paper was the most difficult thing I've ever written. It was a paper exploring the uses of blank space in poetry and connecting blank space to Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely.

For most November, I wanted to throw myself off a cliff about the paper. Really. I really like Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and I liked the idea of writing about blank space. However, I truly have a love/hate relationship with academia, and sometimes writing academic arguments makes me wonder about the point of living, if one is going to spend one's time writing papers. I think it's partly because when I write about literature I get very overwhelmed at all the OTHER writing OTHER people have done, writing that I have not read, and I think there is no way I can ever read it all, and since I can't read it all ultimately my paper will be uninformed and pointless.

In general, I often feel very, very overwhelmed about all the things I have not read. All the poems, novels, essays, etc. It's a vicious cycle, because when I am overwhelmed about reading, as I was for most of the fall semester, I try to read everything very fast, which results in my not really digesting or comprehending the material. So then even what I supposedly "read" I don't really "get." And yet sometime I just can't calm down-- oh, I have to read this, and then this, and then this...

And the number of books I want to read never decreases.

Anyway, I have been trying, this fall, to add to my morning routine about half an hour of reading-- slow, relaxed reading-- a poem, part of an essay, a story. I am going to try to keep that up this winter and spring.

In any case, the paper is done, and in the end, I think I did learn a lot from writing it, even though it did result in about 20 books being added to my list of books I want to read. It made me think interesting things about feminism, feminist poetics, poetry, and even HOW one goes about constructing and composing an argument.

Still, as I finished the paper on Sunday, I felt like a weight was being lifted off my chest. I am so glad to have my mind back. Now I can think about my poems again! and start making my syllabus for the poetry workshop I get to teach this spring...

No more paper!