Tomorrow, I'm sure, will be an entirely different story.
By the way, I'm looking for advice: as a reader, how do you feel about books that mix genres--say, poems with essays with reviews? Is that interesting or annoying?
Monday, March 9, 2009
Today, amazingly, has been almost a perfectly productive day. I copied out some of Shelley's "Triumph of Life" and read some of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and some of Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. I wrote 13 lines of my fairy-tale poem. I did some revisions on my essays about reading, which I'm starting to accumulate into a book manuscript. I washed sheets and made sourdough buckwheat bread, and in a little while I'm going to make rose-scented pound cake to lift the spirits of Mono Boy, who went back to school today.
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2 comments:
My favorite book like this is A. S. Byatt's "Possession." It mixes fiction with poetry, in two distinct voices, which are reflective of each character.
Also, Dave Eggers "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", though a memoir, mixed internal and linear storytelling well, but was at times confusing.
In college, thought, the multi-genre essay is all the rage. One part memoir, one part non-fiction pieces like newspaper articles, advertisements, etc,. and one part analysis, it bends the mind around all words, blurring the distinction between fiction,poetry, and non-fiction. The essays are fun to write, but if you get easily distracted by a shift, not only in voice, but in tone and genre, then it can be quite frustrating to read.
I have been copying Meister Eckhardt's philospohy, btw. I'm getting kind of hooked on the copying thing, then writing a response. Kind of like "Physician,heal thyself" for English teachers.
Sorry about Mono Boy, that is a rough patch. I did my time with Mono Kids. They do sleep a lot. The rose-scented pound cake should do the trick.
I've always like Possession a lot; I've never read the Eggers so can't comment. I've also been thinking of Wordsworth and Coleridge's preface to the Lyrical Ballads--which is not what I want to do but is, I think, an exemplar of miscellany in that the preface is as vital to the project as the poems are.
Copying and response, copying and response. It is a generative pattern, isn't it?
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