First I want to give a congrats to my friend--and rare blog reader--Owen who not only landed on his feet jobs-wise recently but also went out and got himself engaged.
And now, on to business...
I've become more interested in the ecology of culture, if you will. One of my frustrations with the nature poetry side of ecopoetry is the insistence on realism. You find this critique in Dana Phillips and Gilcrest, for example, who note that humans have developed fiction and trope and that these things help us get to different levels of understanding both our lives and the world around those lives. While I consider post-modernism to be mostly the last gasp of the high academic humanism, I think it would be the height of absurdity to insist that our writing be about the non-human world. So I'm interested in how writing can become an ecotone between culture (in a long, deep sense), nature, and the human experience. Which, like it or not, is the dominant experience on the planet. We might talk more about what it means to have this kind of power. Go google "anthropocene" if you wish to quibble. The stuff of culture as itself remains a little less interesting on its own merits. That is, the ceaseless intertextuality and infinite play of signs continues to feel like a shell game. But incorporating these aspects back into the larger whole... that starts to feel a bit more interesting. Though I still despair of ever caring too deeply about the politics of poetry. I wish I could get more excited about criticism.
Last item. And this is political only inasmuch as there's voting. We're thinking about how to spell Wendy's full name, once she's here. We had thought about Wendolynne. But then we saw Wendeline (which is...OK). And we've moved to Wendelynne. What do you think?
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