Looking Back, Looking Ahead

A post from Ann Bogle's blog, Ana Verse, caught my eye this morning. The post, dated October 2, 2008, features what look to me like journal entries from 1994. Some of the journal entries refer to the journalist's writings from 1985. Here is an excerpt:

January 28, 1994
Ideas are unspeakable only if they are seen to impinge on the fantasies of others. Meaning is in the making, but we also make meaning a habit. I am not thinking here of commonplace meaning: a car equals a car. I am thinking of what happens when language ropes a life. We attribute metaphor to language, yet among writers, some writers, life is lived by the book. A representational word (car, wind, drink) gets carried away into life. It refers to you, your mother, your mania, your sex. In its broader manifestations, meaning leads to a dangerous wholeness that some writers check with fragmentation and polity. The writer may want to protect or change the world but is confined to an acquiescent resistance to fascism. Resisting fascism, the whole of it, requires acknowledging that part that is in us.

Read the full entry at Ann's blog.
Ann's post is titled "Conditions of a Narrator" and takes up consideration of life as it is lived and life as it is imagined in writing. It may seem like an elaborate intellectual exercise, but the post returns again and again to the notions of assertiveness, self, aggression, violence, possibility and community. These are notions any reader may benefit from (including readers of poetry) and that is why I wanted to share this here.

Flying, Imagination and Writing

Earlier this month, Sue Williams wrote in her blog about flying, imagination and writing poetry. It's a delightful ten-minute lovely addition to anyone's day. Here is an excerpt:

I'm sure, at one point or another, we've all read about fliers.
Flight can be associated with childhood imagination, or superpowers, or other liberations. The birth of the aeroplane came from a human obsession with flight, and angels, fairies and other enlightened beings have access to higher worlds. As for poor old Icarus, he gets a bad press. Many of us, as writers, know what it's like to aim too high, but it's when we depend on the outcome that [means] we need to think again. It's hard to try for the high place and then get burnt or melted; but as long as we can pick ourselves up, I reckon it makes us stronger.

Birthdays of Poets: Focused on the landing, who can think of flying?

Read the full article at Sue's blog, Wet Ink.