We decided to create this blog for all those reasons, and many beyond it. Luke and I have been swapping writing, ideas and mutual inspirations and appreciation for the written and spoken word for years now. Separated by some mountains and a very large body of water and feeling the pressures and opportunities of the limitless Internet in a quickly evolving society, we decided to start up A Light in the Month, which is Luke's clever interpretation of the etymology of both our names.
Initially the idea was to collaborate on a chapbook of our poetry, so I think this blog is going to act as a nice catalyst for doing so when I return back to the States, as well as a space to post whatever the heck we want, within reason, of course. My hopes are for a meaningful collaboration between the both of us. Perhaps then a possible audience, possible feedback, possible critique, possibilities of exposure in general.
I have been writing poetry since I learned how to write, studying it since my Dad gave me a copy of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums when I was in 7th grade, opening me up to a magical and beautiful world of an American subculture and literary movement that really tipped my writing in the direction it's gone since then...pouring over Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Corso in favor of required reading in my first few years of high school.
My junior year I took an English class with an amazing teacher, thinker and writer by the name of James Cook. It was then that my love and fascination with observing and coming to terms the world outside me melded with his introduction of studying English literature and language in a way I had never been shown before: with careful attention, appreciation, intellectual sensitivity and creativity. Shakespeare, existential philosophy, Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School, Victorian classics, Vonnegut, John Darnielle, the Beats...worlds of ideas and perspectives opened up to me and opened up the way I viewed life and the way I wrote. (The two inescapably go hand in hand for me).
The year I graduated, I received a grant from a local art's council that covered the printing and publishing costs of my first book. It's a small series written over a few years called Collected Poems, and if you ever find yourself at The Bookstore on Main Street in Gloucester, you can pick up a copy. ( Ha...shameless self promotion). More than anything, I'm proud of myself for putting that little book together, even if it stands now as just more of a benchmark of how I was writing at a certain period of my (young) life, as opposed to a literary masterpiece. But you always have to start somewhere, I suppose.
After that came university, immersing myself (within reason) in the study of all things literary, from contemporary poets to untranslated Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. In my first semester of college, I took a class with Brieghan Gardner, and another "moment" happened for me, involving this time my relationship to my own writing. As a friend and mentor, she encouraged and challenged me to show my writing to an audience greater than the pages of my notebooks and the odd family member or friend. I have a few sending-out/publication projects/aspirations in the editing process at the moment, so we'll se how that goes. And in the meantime, I still sometimes forgo my required reading for the likes of some contemporary poetry, usually my favorite author of more recent years: Anne Carson. But more on her later.
I hesitate to use this forum for my own poetry; with the immateriality of a blog, the unknowns of copyright laws, the possible "cheapening" of very personal thoughts, perspectives, hours of visions and revisions. Again, I'll see how that goes.
Anyway, I'll finish my ramble with a thought from the brilliant Charles Olson that I feel applies directly to the life of the written word, and to life in its entirety.
"'Is' comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe. The English 'not' equals the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. 'Be' is from bhu, to grow."
Until another time,
July
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