Conrad “at home” |
I’ve recommended Conrad DiDiodato’s Word-Dreamer: poetics blog before, and as if his fine work there weren’t enough, he’s hit upon a fascinating project: the development of a “blogger poetics text,” drawing on blogging by writers he calls “blognoscenti”. (You can read all about the project here. Be sure to read from the bottom up!) Conrad has generously cited this blog as part of his project, but I would be following it anyway because he has an eye for pithy notions whose significance one can spend quite a pleasant while unpacking. And now that he’s separated the project into a separate blog (Word-Dreamer: blognoscenti sources), we’ll have the opportunity to watch the text, as a discrete text, develop. Based on the entries so far, it promises to be an illuminating ride.
Auden “at home” |
It’s almost as if we’re witnessing the creation of a poet’s commonplace book, akin (distantly, perhaps) to W. H. Auden’s wonderful but evidently out-of-print A Certain World. Auden, by the way, follows tradition by grouping his quotations and comments into conceptual categories, as Roget (bless him) did with his thesaurus. Thus under “Nature” we find quotations from Goethe, Whitehead, Santayana, Valéry, Novalis, Blake, Thoreau, Malcolm de Chazal, Dag Hammarskjöld and more. The interest is all in Auden’s selection and the cross-currents it generates. We already see that happening with Conrad’s
Sucha bitter little man with no sense or real understanding of what’s goin on around him/had his chance but blew it /now writes neurotic sentimental trash! Poor fellow is he. As Beckett would say ‘THAT poor THing ThaT POOR Thing!’
Joseph,<br /><br />thank you! How nice of you to mention my little 'blognoscenti' project. I'm just having fun.<br /><br />And perhaps also trying to prove a point about the importance of authorial intervention even when sources are randomly culled. Let's see where this all goes.