It almost seems like there’s no reason to write blogs
anymore. Our brief prosaic ramblings, lyrical and strange, and holding back
little, seem to be a tad too much now, too extra. We have Facebook and Twitter
and all the ways of speaking into the unearned conch. We embrace our typos and
talk too much and say, Look! This
happened! in so many different ways that it seems like it’s time to
stop blogging all together.
Still, I’m attached, if only because after weeks of
the word output, the constant composing and the constant reading, the blog
still seems like a safe place to hang my head and hum to myself.
This summer, I read more books than I ever have in one
concentrated period of time. I told my dad that I thought I had earned, or should earn, a PhD.
Then, later I had a dream that I got a PhD and I was so happy about being in
school, except I didn’t do my math homework and my childhood friend, Sarah, had
to help me cheat before class. This is the way the brain works overloaded in
words. Every word is a trigger to tell more, or tell it again. Every ordinary
bug is a new reason to stare and dream and make things fly off.
I didn't earn a PhD, but I did learn something. A sort of cherishing. I’m not as scared as I once was of how the words come to me in
different ways. I used to worry if
what I thought was a poem, came out in prose or vice versa, but now as I get
older (and seemingly simultaneously easier and harder on myself), I find myself
just so pleased that they come at all. And come they did. As I was reading so many poems,
more poems came. And as I took a break for fiction, more fiction came. And
essays and tweets and tantrums.
After all of the deluge, the books and the dreams, I have a
new manuscript of poems. We shall give it a bit a of time to simmer and
see how the world unfolds, but for now I’ll just tell this secret place, this hidden old school whisper machine I call
my blog.
