High-five me! Finally finished the first all-out terrible assignment I’ve been given in my MFA program: reading and writing an essay on Wordsworth’s Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads and Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. I had to keep punching myself to stay awake, much less make sense of these two essays. Maybe I’ve been away from academia too long to do this stuff anymore. I literally got angry at these two “fathers” of Romantic American literature as I wrote. What’s up with all Whitman’s “Lo’s!” and all those exclamation points? And could Wordsworth BE any more pompous? Anyway, I spat out as much summary and examination as I could and now I don’t have to do it anymore. I think I just don’t like people who are Transcendentalists. No offense meant, of course, to any transcendentalist readers.

On the plus side, I find I’ve been reading several members of my blog roll lately – I’ve just finished Suzanne Frickshorn’s Red Paper Flower, Paul Guest’s Resurrection of the Body and the Ruination of the World, and Rebecca Loudon’s Tarantella. All three were so much better and more enjoyable than so many other books that I’ve bought and read – Red Paper Flower was both lovely and punch-in-the-gut moving – Guests’ poems had the perfect combination of wit and sobriety, of pathos and merriment, and Tarantella was brilliantly fierce, lyricism with fangs. So, way to go, blogger/poets. It just goes to show that if you enjoy people’s blogs, you should definitely buy their books. Also, if I were the one handing out book prizes, these three collections would all be big winners.

Haven’t managed to write any new poetry since I’ve been home (almost a whole week now! Snert! Snick! and other sounds of anxiety) but I’ve sent out some batches. I received the standard rejection from Poetry in the mail today, which, for some reason, disappointed me more than it should have. I mean, we expect rejections from Poetry, don’t we? Now onto more homework assignments, all hopefully less painful that this first one.