Oh but hey there is a great little new Anne Carson poem today! An epithalamium, you might need to know, is a poem for a bride, sung before the wedding.... though there is this intriguing sentence on the Wikipedia: "Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song was sung by girls only, after the marriage guests had gone, and it contained much more of what modern attitudes would identify as obscene." Oooh.
Monday, August 17, 2009
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Here's an open-ended question: How does one become a poet now? Is it still the constant submission to assorted dwindling journals? Once the journals go online, and everything is democratized, how will we know who is poet and who is not?
I ask not for myself, as even my sighs? Blare like farts. My whimsies? Scarred with anger and heart-break. My merest constructions? Contrivances.
The present case is a special one. In this case, the trick is to become recognized within academia as an eccentric genius poet that classicists don't know what to make of because you are a poet, at the same time as you achieve recognition within the poebiz world as an eccentric genius academic that poets don't know what to make of because you are a classical scholar.
That approach is platform-independent. It even more venerable than the "have a trust fund and know everybody" approach.