so I’m going back to last December’s volume of Poetry to see what I can see and what I might have to say about it.
Actually, it’s been a fairly good year for making poems, a wonderful year for making music, and one of the happiest years of my adult life—it’s this blog that’s suffered, and I apologize to my few remaining readers for my sloth.
Though sloth's’s not really it.
I used to teach Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. I was dreadfully bad at it, and I think we all were, even the director (a fine novelist), at least when it came to teaching how to make poems. I couldn't have carried a meter if it were stapled to my palm. I did, at least, meet Lewis Turco there and buy his little Book of Forms, which isn’t so little these days—and frabjious day Lew’s got a blog! Years later, that book helped me begin to discover what meter could do for poems—for a poet—and part of the original impetus for the blog was to share my excitement.
I wrote a lot about meter here, and posted a lot of my poetry along with I hope illustrative examples from other poets, and argued with nearly everybody—I nearly named names there, but if you'’e interested the archives are available on the right. After 5 years it got old. Well, it didn't really take that long, but inertia is a dreadful thing
Now it seems to me that it’s better to concentrate on making my own poems and writing here about the poems and poets I think are doing exciting work. Since arbitrary challenges to myself are the way I get the most work out of me, I'm gonna get the ball rolling by doing a year and month of Poetry, one or two posts on things I like from each issue, along with a new poem somehow or other connected to something in the issue. And I’m not interested in discussing whether I should have picked some [cooler, more relevant, hipper, lively, whatever somebody thinks Poetry might be lacking] rag. Arbitrary, right? I've got a sub I need to catch up on before the New Year, and I'm just about a year behind.
9:27:42 PM 
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