CHASMS

After some 20-odd hours of work (actually it's very hard to estimate the length of time, what with my pacing around, general distractedness -- 14 hours? 25 hours?), the article I've written for the Rock Salt Plum Review, "Can Poetry Matter?": 15 Years Later, is just about done. It was much harder than I imagined, weaving the rough, weedy patches of four meandering blog posts into the smooth, rolled lawn of a continuous article. Just the act of pasting the four posts together in consecutive order -- with the first post at the top and the last at the bottom, rather than the reverse as they appear in this blog, lead to some glaring revelations about form -- just how Blogger format shapes the conventions by which we cobble our posts together, and just how tangential blogs inherently are. Although the entries seemed quite polished per se, suddenly, imagining them out of this personal context and under the masthead of that review, a good deal of my chattiness seemed impertinent, language lazy, and references unacceptably imprecise -- and yet I still wanted to preserve the wit, playfulness -- and at least some of the informality -- of the original.

Good news is, I think I've managed to do so. There may even be more wit in the article version. The title still seems a bit clunky. Maybe I'll come up with a better one. (If something strikes you, let me know...)

In a matter of hours, my server (Bell Sympatico, which has been rather Antipatico with me) will be disconnected; Videotron will be installed Monday morning, and I'll be without internet for almost two days. I expect I'll suffer nervous tremours, skittishness, hot fevers, the whole bit -- that at certain moments, I'll be looking and feeling rather like the Simpson girl below. Wish me luck as I cross the chasm of incommunicado.

PS. Hmm... "Can Poetry Matter?": 15 Years After That's catchier. At least, it rhymes. (Sally Potter would approve. So would Dr. Seuss....)