Thursday, February 26, 2009

So the time posted feature is messed up and is not in my actual time zone (and I can't figure out how to fix it. Bit new to blogger), but for posterity's sake, it is, in fact, nearly 2:30 in the morning at the time of writing this. I have been in bed, with the lights off, eyes closed, for about two hours now and I am no closer to sleep than I was when I started.

Part of it is the fact that my knee is really hurting and bothering me (why? Who the fuck knows. Stupid temperamental knee), but most of it is the fact that this is what my body wants to do these days. No matter what time I get up in the morning, for the past couple of weeks I haven't been able to go to sleep before about 3 a.m. This leads to either sleeping through my morning classes or taking long long naps in the afternoon that leave me incredibly groggy and nonproductive.

I don't even know. It's not so much that my insomnia has returned as that my body now apparently thinks I'm better off being nocturnal. My body and I part ways on that particular point, leading to a bitter stalemate of psychological war.

See how awake I am? A person should NOT be this wide awake after lying in a warm comfy bed with soothing white noise with their eyes closed for two hours. Wat. (The illustrious title of my blog, right there. Isn't it just delightfully descriptive?)

So in taking my English Literary Tradition class I learned that I am completely useless when it comes to poetry written before 1900 or so. Even with Keats, even though I totally have it bad for him. (Death-obsessed, prodigiously talented poet who died young of TB = hot in Overly Romantic College Girl World.)  Seriously, fucking useless. I was reading Tennyson's In Memoriam, which has absolutely stunning language AND is about death AND has romantic homoerotic subtext and I STILL wanted to kill myself while reading it and didn't get a damn thing out of it. I don't get it. (Okay, so I guess Poe is an exception. <3 Poe.)

I am not this way about modernist poetry, however. Oh no. It's still way more of a struggle for me than prose, but I really want to figure it out. Check it:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

It's one of those poems that makes a lot of people who hate poetry want to kill themselves, but I love it. William Carlos Williams is awesome.

That poem was included in some things we read for Modern American Writing, though we didn't talk about that particular poem. I guess Thurston figured it had been done to death. There's another section in there that we read called "Songs of a Girl" that I absolutely fucking loved, but I can't remember the poet's name. I'll definitely write something more about it after I dig around in my room for it, but I don't really want to right now (nor do I want to turn on lights.)

Once again for posterity's sake, until I gain some blogger skillz, it is now 2:51 in the morning as I publish this. Fan-fucking-tastic.

2 comments:

  1. How do you get on with Gerard Manley Hopkins? For years after I first discovered him I thought he *was* post-1900.

    Re: the Rosettis I <3 everything Pre-Raphaelite, in words and paintings and even interior decoration by way of William Morris, but in recent years it has started to feel like a guilty pleasure. Appeals a little too easily to depressed 14-year-olds, therefore it's suspect. :-)

    WM's poetry in particular is mostly overblown romantic crap (like his wallpaper, but I guess they both appealed to the tastes of the period) but I still love it. I stubbornly maintain his twelve poems for the months of the year among my top favorite poems evar. I will send them to you if you're interested but gosh you must have that kind of stuff at the library. *envies your library*

    *stalkers you*

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  2. Yay for stalking! :D (I wish blogger had a bunny dance smiley...I would put it here for sure.)

    Yeah, our library is pretty bitchin. I don't use it nearly as much as I should, as is so often the case with these things. :( I also feel like as an English major I really need to get more into poetry and non-20th century writing in general - much as I love the modernist stuff, the foundation is still essential for all of that. I want to take a Romantic poetry course at some point even if it kills me! *Shakes fist*

    Yeah I think the pre-Raphaelite stuff is guilty pleasure for a lot of people since it tends to be so incredibly overblown and saturated, but I'm kind of loving it so far anyway. This art project reminded me of how much I want to take more art history courses (I took one last fall that was kind of a killer, because it was a Western survey course and waaaaaay too much to take in, so not nearly enough of the analysis I love so much.) And I want to learn more about photography and...ugh. There's just not enough time in college to study it all! *Is a huge nerd*

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