confrontation with the Sublime

[lotesse]

When I was little, I was the sort of girl who would keep sitting in the mud puddle that I'd fallen into until my mum noticed me. I've been trying very hard for a long time to separate myself from this kind of melodrama, and have been fairly successful. But one of the outcomes of this is that my tolerance thresholds for drama are very, very low. I can't stand the stuff.

As a kid, the Romantic poets were my favorites. Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti--long narratives about fair maids and fairies and ruined castles. But with the drama-meter as sensitive as it has been, I abandoned them completely and eloped with modern poetry.

The love affair with the modern continues, but I've felt a bit bad about running out on the Romantics as I did. So I took a class in Romantic Literature for this term. I had no idea.

My god, people. I ended up crying in class today. We were working on Blake and the Book of Thel, and I felt like I was going to burst. I went off-the-wall transcendent right there in my bloody little desk-chair-thingy. The openness and the explosion of normality and the wonderful layers of distorted allusion and image and irony and contradiction and storytelling. I don't even know how to put in to words what it did to me.

I had forgotten that poetry could be like this.

Comments

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

This, this is why I value you on my FL. because you can say this, and it's true, and so then I am moved to look at poetry (to which I've never had a formal introduction, really, I'm more the girl who hangs around the theatre looking for piecework mending of costumes just to hear them speak) as a place, as someone to get to know, as a lover. And sometimes it takes a little time, and sometimes I read or hear or see something and I understand why there's poetry in the world. Blessings on your head.

[lotesse]

..and then you say it too, and I'm all quiet and squeeful and excited because you take my images and literalize them and make them altogether more sexy?

Yeah. Right back at you.

[egyptgirl42.livejournal.com]

Sam came and picked up the box of your stuff. My room seems smaller now, hehe. I assume he sent it off. I hope you get it okay. Take it easy

[lotesse]

Thanks so much, love. You take it easy too.

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

Hi. Total Stranger here. :) Would you mind terribly if I friended you? I found my way here via the swiftlytilting community (I'm a long-time lover of L'Engle's writing) and I've been sifting through some of your recent entries. You seem like an intelligent, interesting person - and you can hardly ever go wrong with people who cry at Blake's poetry. :) (I find it hard to imagine anyone could read it and not.)

[lotesse]

By all means, friend!

...the Blake love has become quite mighty and passionate in these parts.