Back to Kansas, feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much work I have been avoiding. So, of course, I will avoid work for another few minutes. What could it hurt?

I looked at "Making Your Own Days" over the break. Kind of a "Rose, Where Did You Get That Red" for adult poesiphobes. Poetics language moves between two poles, the heightened, special language of poetry (as in "Ode to the West Wind") and a more colloquial language ("A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island"). In both cases, however, the communicative situation itself is over-the-top. We don't usually have conversations with the sun, or address the wind directly. (Or, as in Queen Elizabeth I's poem, have a personal meeting with the god of love.) Herbert's "Prayer" is a paratactic list poem. Prayer, of course, is also a form of speech that shares this over the top, heightened, or unreal quality. If we imagine a strange speech act, one outside of the normal range, then a different sort of language can be justified. Or we might take an ordinary act of communication, like an apology for eating the plums in the icebox, and invest it with some higher purpose. I find it refreshing that Koch defines poetry first by its language, secondly by its music, and thirdly (as I read him) by the special circumstances surrounding the act of communication itself. Apostrophe thus becomes a key trope, even though it does not enjoy a high reputation in contemporary poetry. The "poetry base" is also a low-key and non-threatening way of describing the poet's historical sense of him or her self. We understand that O'Hara needed to have read Mayakovsky (as well as Shelley) to write his poem. Of course, I'm not the intended audience for such a book. I read it more to understand Kenneth Koch, in which this tension between heightened and more "ordinary" language is a constant.

I need to find a way of using this book in the class I have just taken over for my ill colleague. The students still see poetry as intellectually beyond them. With the added handicap of having to read poetry in a foreign language. Now I have to see whether I still have my "blindfold test" somewhere in my computer or whether I'll have to recreate it from scratch.