|
29 August 2004. Poetry is not my whole life. It is not the biggest thing in my life. Still, it's of enough importance in my life that I should be able to write a fresh paragraph or two about it just about any time I want to. I can't. I guess this one is sort of fresh, though, for I don't believe I've ever listed, in order, the most important things in my life. Luckily, I'm not married so I needn't bring a wife into it. No person, even my cat Shirley, could even be number one in my life. For me, making culture comes before anything else (though I love all the standard animal pleasures, and both participating in and watching sports, nor am I more than occasionally anti-social). Literary criticism is probably the area of culture-making I spend more of my time in than any other such area, but not because it's most important to me, only because there are more outlets for it . . . and because it's the easiest way of making culture I know of. I think I require it, too, as a kind of preliminary to working on things I value more. Not to suggest I don't value it highly.
I work on poetry in spurts, and it is certainly central to my known life. But I rank it below my playwriting, for me, and rank that below my theoretical psychology. On second thought, I rank the latter two about even. I'd love to be able to devote the rest of my life exclusively to any one of these things, but it looks like quotidian nulleries like marketing, earning a paycheck, and laundering will always take up much more of my time than all of them together.
|
|