Katie Bowler had an idea that I think is superior: she looked over every poem she worked on this semester and put an asterisk next to the ones that are worthy of further consideration. I am a huge fan of titles, and often feel that titling a poem is one of my worst weaknesses. So, here’s a list of what I worked on this semester, and what I plan to come back to soon:

A Compendium of Failed Birdmen*
A Letter to You From a Time When I Preferred a Different Font
A Night Spent Writing Love Letters
Another Sad Year*
Apophis*
Autobiography*
Creation
Dear Lost Love*
Dear Reader*
Elegy for the Bottled City of Kandor
Horror-Suspense*
If It’s In Print, It Must Be True
If We Could Bring a Man Forward in Time
It is Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away
Memetic*
Metrics*
My Life Has Passed Me By
Personality Test*
Pistachio*
Pojecked from Debra Gitterman
Rearranged*
Rebooting the Legion*
Returning to the Marlon Culpepper School
Selected Poems*
Settling an Argument*
State of Preparedness*
The Cartographers
The Crow
The Lake
This Modern World*
Water Under the Bridge*
Water, Like a Feeling*
When Durham is Coastfront Property*
You Were Here

Someone explain to me the “O,” and I’m not talking about the overly sexualized Overstock.com commercials in which the extraordinarily hot chick tries to tell you that saving a few bucks on some electronics will cause you to discover the “big O.” (If just once, those commercials would say, “We mean orgasm, orgasm!” I think I might lose my mind with glee.)

Nope, I’m talking about the exclamation of address, “O,” which has been hanging around poetry for quite some time, but which seems to have been lost to spoken English some time ago. Sure, we still use the sound, but poets, the fiction writers have beat us to the zeitgeist– it’s now spelled “Oh.”

No, not that Oh.

It’s been fashionable since Whitman wrote “O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;” to use the letter O as a form of address as well as an exclamation. I think Ginsberg was the last one to use it in any sort of useful way; in fact, I think he was the one who ruined it for the rest of us, and I wouldn’t have minded if the poetry police had hauled away the O-ffenders who’ve tried to use it since then.

Sure, “Oh,” is far less stilted and formal, and is more appropriate when you’re actually addressing someone. “O” is largely reserved now for addressing something more abstract– the weather, a scientific concept, a dead president. (Check it: 90% of all “O” in the last 25 years addresses a weather pattern. Seriously.) But fiction writers figured out a little while back that people don’t tend to address concepts much these days, so unless one of the characters in your story just happens to be Hercules or Thor, you fiction writers are getting it right and avoiding “O” altogether. We poets seem to have forgotten somewhere along the way that poetry is a spoken art as well as a written one, and it’s super-hack to pull the “O” card. It’s a lazy way to indicate that we’ve begun a direct address to a concept, and direct addresses to concepts are the weakest form of argument. Because, unless lightning strikes you dead just after you address it in a fit of cosmic irony, concepts don’t generally tend to argue back.

Blogging has taken a back seat to, well, everything else. I suppose I should be more diligent, because I’ve used the blog so much for reflection, but I’ve just been lazy. I think that’s all there is to it. Life has been busy, and when it’s not busy, I want to be lazy. Or married. I am spending a lot more time with Ladybug and I like it that way. We went to Atlanta this weekend and saw the Braves lose a ballgame to the Diamondbacks. We spent some time with her Aunt Kathy. We slept through our other plans, and we didn’t feel really bad about it. I thought she would go absolutely nuts that we didn’t accomplish every single travel goal, but in the end, we were happy just to be together. It was perhaps the nicest trip we’ve ever taken together.

She got the new job. This happened last week and I have been remiss in writing it down. Finally, she’ll be out of a work situation that was horrible for her. Well, at least I learned a ton about what kind of manager I don’t want to be by watching her manager bungle every damn thing.

Little Fury has been quiet recently, for a number of reasons which I’m not yet ready to reveal, but which should become apparent to anyone who’s watching over the next week and a half or so. Nothing magnificent, nothing earthshaking, but a project I’m hard at work on, and happy to be doing. And isn’t that enough in this life?

While I have been working on this project, I’ve also not been reading much of anything. This weekend I’ll start Donald Justice’s Collected Poems while the wife takes a turn driving the Civic to Hotlanta. I know next to nothing about Justice, only that he was a profound influence on someone I respect greatly. I have to assume, based on that influence, that I’m going to be reading some beautiful elegies.

Elegies are a fine paradox– intended to be mournful of loss, but ultimately, inescapably, celebrations of that which is not lost. One might argue that the absence of sadness is not happiness, but apathy; still, anyone capable of feeling great sadness can only do so with the full knowledge of happiness. Absence simply cannot provide a strong enough point of contrast for the emotion to be felt with any level of profundity. So elegies, to my mind, mourn the loss of a thing– be it a person, or a concept, or an actual thing– but do so in the context of the reader, who presumably can identify with the loss and, therefore, experience one of two reactions: great sadness or great joy. Great sadness, because the loss is a shared one, in which case we can celebrate that the reader was able to share in the joy that preceded loss, or great joy, because similar loss does not yet affect the reader, and from his vantage point, there is no comparable loss.

This is all clunky and unwieldy in the terms I’ve used to express it, and probably common sense to just about anyone looking in, but it’s worth talking about for me, for now. Perhaps because I feel a sense of great sadness predicated upon a loss, and yet a sense of great joy for having experienced all that I have, and perhaps I have an elegy in me, as well.